This is the first inside account of the Duvaliers, father and son, and their legacy, which includes the recent election day massacre, followed by a five-month experiment in ‘democracy,’ and then the coup d'état that restored a military junta to power. In 1803 the enslaved people of Haiti vanquished their French masters after a bloody war which left tens of thousands dead. In 1986 Haitians celebrated another victory, as Baby Doc Duvalier fled to France, ending three de- cades of brutal dictatorship. The Duvalier regime slaughtered at least 50,000 people, many in the infamous Fort Dimanche. Duvalierism drove a million Haitians into exile, cowed the six million who remained, and tortured hundreds of thousands, often in the Palace where Papa Doc lived and raised his son. The Duvalier dynasty, begun by Papa Doc Duvalier and continued by his son, Baby Doc, has left a grim legacy. Today Haiti is synonymous with poverty, voodoo, murder, and dictators. AIDS ravages its people. Water and food are scarce. Soil erosion and creeping desertification threaten to extinguish life altogether. Yet while the masses suffer, the elite live and play in an opulent world of tennis courts and swimming pools, with staffs of servants to tend their needs. Corruption is rampant, and increasingly Haiti has become a transit point in the international cocaine trade. This is the legacy of the repressive dictatorship known as Duvalierism. The story of the Duvalier years is one of degradation and repression, of orgies and drug-taking, and shocking life-and-death struggles for power and riches. This book tells the shocking story of Haiti under the Duvaliers from the vantage point of Haitians from every level: a former Tonton Macoute, political prisoners, a pig farmer, a voodoo priest, powerful cabinet ministers, even Papa Doc's general chief of staff. Their recollections are woven into this astonishing account of the political, economic, religious, and social forces that shaped the turbulent Duvalier era. Here is an extraordinarily vivid story that brings the reader up to date with tie recent re- installation of Lieutenant General Henri Namphy and his military junta in June of 1988.
Elizabeth Abbott (born 1942) is a Canadian writer and historian. She has a doctorate in 19th-century history from McGill University. She has written numerous books, and has contributed to many publications, including Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, The Gazette (Montreal), Quill & Quire, Huffington Post and London Free Press. She is the former Dean of Women for St. Hilda's College at the University of Toronto and is currently a Senior Research Associate at Trinity College, University of Toronto.
When the seductive Monica returns to her village, she wants to make a new start. But Kristoff village, set in the heart of rural Jamaica, is about to become a whirlpool of emotion. Every encounter with Monica stirs up women’s dissatisfactions and men’s desires. When those emotions develop into hatred and jealousy, Monica is made to pay for what she has done. In this novel Opal Palmer Adisa brings to life a whole community and writes with understanding and compassion about the frailties of its inhabitants. Drawing on Jamaican folklore, she shows what is at the heart of village life, and how that life can be sustained.
Opal Palmer Adisa (born 1954) is a Jamaica-born award-winning poet, novelist, performance artist and educator. Anthologised in over 100 publications, she has been a regular performer of her work internationally. She was raised ten miles outside Kingston, Jamaica, and attended school in the capital. In 1970 she went to study at Hunter College, New York, and in 1979 moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue an MA in creative writing. As noted by David Katz, ‘Adisa’s work has been greatly informed by her childhood experience of life on a sugar estate in the Jamaican countryside, where her father worked as a chemist and her mother as a bookkeeper. It was in this setting that young Opal was introduced not only to the art of storytelling, but also, after her parents divorced, to the ceaseless oppression faced by women and the ongoing injustices heaped on the poor. Such formative experiences, coupled with her mother’s efforts to improve the lives of those around her, gave Adisa the desire to ‘give voice to the voiceless’ at an early age.’ Since 1993, Opal Palmer Adisa has taught literature and served as Chair of the Ethnic Studies/Cultural Diversity Program at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Dr. Adisa has two masters degrees from San Francisco State University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She has previously taught undergraduate and graduate courses at California College of the Arts, Stanford University, University of Berkeley, and San Francisco State University. In the spring of 2010, she became a member of the teaching staff at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), St Croix Campus, and also served as editor of The Caribbean Writer, UVI’s famous journal of Caribbean literature, for 2 years. An important element of her poetry is the use of nation language, about which she has said: ‘I have to credit [Louise] Bennett for granting me permission, so to speak, to write in Nation Language, because it was her usage that allowed me to see the beauty of our language. Moreover, there are just some things that don’t have the same sense of intimacy or color if not said in Nation language.... I use nation language when it is the only way and the best way to get my point across, to say what I mean from the center of my navel. But I also use it, to interrupt and disrupt standard English as s reminder to myself that I have another tongue, but also to jolt readers to listen and read more carefully, to glean from the language the Caribbean sensibilities that I am always pushing, sometimes subtly, other times more forcefully. Nation language allows me to infuse the poem with all of the smells and colors of home.’
Thirteen Caribbean poets share their memories, stories, and images of the islands, in a poetry anthology illustrated with robust collages and highlighted by brief essays describing each poet's roots.
John Agard (born 21 June 1949 in British Guiana) is an Afro-Guyanese playwright, poet and children's writer, now living in Britain. In 2012, he was selected for the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Agard grew up in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana). He loved to listen to cricket commentary on the radio and began making up his own, which led to a love of language. He went on to study English, French and Latin at A-level, writing his first poetry when he was in sixth-form, and left school in 1967. He taught the languages he had studied and worked in a local library. He was also a sub-editor and feature writer for the Guyana Sunday Chronicle, publishing two books while he was still in Guyana. His father settled in London and Agard moved to Britain with his partner Grace Nichols in 1977, settling in Ironbridge, Shropshire. He worked for the Commonwealth Institute and the BBC in London. His awards included the 1997 Paul Hamlyn Award for Poetry, the Cholmondeley Award in 2004 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2012. Agard was Poet-in-Residence at the National Maritime Museum in 2008. His poems Half Caste and Checking Out Me History has been featured in the AQA English GCSE anthology since 2002, meaning that many students (aged 14 – 16) have studied his work for their GCSE English qualification. He lives in Lewes, East Sussex, with his partner, the Guyanese poet Grace Nichols. Grace Nichols (born 1950) is a Guyanese poet, who moved to Britain in 1977. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Grace Nichols was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and lived in a small village on the country's coast until her family moved to the city when she was eight years old. She took a Diploma in Communications from the University of Guyana, and subsequently worked as a teacher (1967–70), as a journalist and in government information services, before she immigrated to the UK in 1977. Much of her poetry is characterised by Caribbean rhythms and culture, and influenced by Guyanese and Amerindian folklore. Her first collection of poetry, I is a Long-Memoried Woman won the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has written several further books of poetry and a novel for adults, Whole of a Morning Sky, 1986. Her books for children include collections of short stories and poetry anthologies. Her latest work, of new and selected poems, is Startling the Flying Fish, 2006. Her poetry is featured in the AQA, WJEC (Welsh Joint Education Committee), and Edexcel English/English Literature GCSE anthologies - meaning that many GCSE students in the UK have studied her work. Her religion is Christianity after she was influenced by the UK's many religions and multi-cultural society.
Sparkling crystal waters and coral beaches, velvet- smooth dolphins ana flying fish; the can of the six o' clock bee and the chorus of frogs; the flavor of coconut water; pawpaw, and Johnnie Bake; whispered ghost stories about Duppy Dan and the Jumbie Man. Divided into five sections, each magnificently illustrated by major contemporary artist, this glorious collection of poetry conjures the sights and sounds, tastes and tales of the Caribbean: the experience of living there — and of leaving for other lands. UNDER THE M00N AND OVER THE SEA contains more than fifty poems, many of them previously unpublished, by more than thirty poets, including John Agara, Grace Nichols, James Berry, Valerie Bloom, and Benjamin Zephaniah. It is a volume truly to be savored.
John Agard (born 21 June 1949 in British Guiana) is an Afro-Guyanese playwright, poet and children's writer, now living in Britain. In 2012, he was selected for the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Agard grew up in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana). He loved to listen to cricket commentary on the radio and began making up his own, which led to a love of language. He went on to study English, French and Latin at A-level, writing his first poetry when he was in sixth-form, and left school in 1967. He taught the languages he had studied and worked in a local library. He was also a sub-editor and feature writer for the Guyana Sunday Chronicle, publishing two books while he was still in Guyana. His father settled in London and Agard moved to Britain with his partner Grace Nichols in 1977, settling in Ironbridge, Shropshire. He worked for the Commonwealth Institute and the BBC in London. His awards included the 1997 Paul Hamlyn Award for Poetry, the Cholmondeley Award in 2004 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2012. Agard was Poet-in-Residence at the National Maritime Museum in 2008. His poems Half Caste and Checking Out Me History has been featured in the AQA English GCSE anthology since 2002, meaning that many students (aged 14 – 16) have studied his work for their GCSE English qualification. He lives in Lewes, East Sussex, with his partner, the Guyanese poet Grace Nichols. Grace Nichols (born 1950) is a Guyanese poet, who moved to Britain in 1977. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Grace Nichols was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and lived in a small village on the country's coast until her family moved to the city when she was eight years old. She took a Diploma in Communications from the University of Guyana, and subsequently worked as a teacher (1967–70), as a journalist and in government information services, before she immigrated to the UK in 1977. Much of her poetry is characterised by Caribbean rhythms and culture, and influenced by Guyanese and Amerindian folklore. Her first collection of poetry, I is a Long-Memoried Woman won the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has written several further books of poetry and a novel for adults, Whole of a Morning Sky, 1986. Her books for children include collections of short stories and poetry anthologies. Her latest work, of new and selected poems, is Startling the Flying Fish, 2006. Her poetry is featured in the AQA, WJEC (Welsh Joint Education Committee), and Edexcel English/English Literature GCSE anthologies - meaning that many GCSE students in the UK have studied her work. Her religion is Christianity after she was influenced by the UK's many religions and multi-cultural society.
Set in Petrolia, a Southern Ontario town close to the U.S. border, in the 1950s and 1960s and in Ottawa in the years that follow, the story is narrated by Thomas MacMillan. Through his clear-eyed vision and his unsentimental ordering of events, we meet a cast of characters. Among them are Edna MacMillan, Thomas's volatile, unpredictable Trinidadian grandmother, and Katarina, the mother who left Thomas at birth and then, ten years later, in the company of the sinister Mr. Mataf, swoops him up and takes him from Petrolia. Soon after, we meet the unforgettable Henry Wing, a Black man with Chinese blood, a gentle conjurer who lives in faded Victorian splendor and whose life's work as a self-styled scientist is collecting esoteric facts of the natural world. Childhood is an intricately textured chronicle of a life in which a man's quest for what is lost discloses the ambiguous nature of the past and leads him closer to the truth about himself.
André Alexis (born 15 January 1957 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Canadian writer who grew up in Ottawa and currently lives in Toronto, Ontario. His debut novel, Childhood (1997), won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and was a co-winner of the Trillium Award. In addition to his writing, he is a member of the editorial board of This Magazine.
A haunting story collection from the award-winning author of CHILDHOOD. Following on the heels of his award-winning first novel, CHILDHOOD, André Alexis’s story collection, DESPAIR, offers further proof of his brilliance and showcases his talent for spinning disturbing but elegant tales. Emerging from the landscapes and folklores of Trinidad and Canada, DESPAIR reveals a world both recognizable and shockingly strange. A failed artist with beautiful hands is driven by a fetish for injuries in ‘The Third Terrace.’ While on an excursion to a bakery, a man wrestles with his capacity for evil deeds in ‘The Metaphysics of Morals.’ In ‘The Night Piece,’ a boy is haunted by a story about a soucouyant, a vampire in the guise of an old woman. In these eight beautifully crafted stories, shimmering with malevolence and longing, Alexis has fashioned an underworld and limned it with light.
André Alexis (born 15 January 1957 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Canadian writer who grew up in Ottawa and currently lives in Toronto, Ontario. His debut novel, Childhood (1997), won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and was a co-winner of the Trillium Award. In addition to his writing, he is a member of the editorial board of This Magazine.
A haunting story collection from the award-winning author of CHILDHOOD. Following on the heels of his award-winning first novel, CHILDHOOD, André Alexis’s story collection, DESPAIR, offers further proof of his brilliance and showcases his talent for spinning disturbing but elegant tales. Emerging from the landscapes and folklores of Trinidad and Canada, DESPAIR reveals a world both recognizable and shockingly strange. A failed artist with beautiful hands is driven by a fetish for injuries in ‘The Third Terrace.’ While on an excursion to a bakery, a man wrestles with his capacity for evil deeds in ‘The Metaphysics of Morals.’ In ‘The Night Piece,’ a boy is haunted by a story about a soucouyant, a vampire in the guise of an old woman. In these eight beautifully crafted stories, shimmering with malevolence and longing, Alexis has fashioned an underworld and limned it with light.
André Alexis (born 15 January 1957 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Canadian writer who grew up in Ottawa and currently lives in Toronto, Ontario. His debut novel, Childhood (1997), won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and was a co-winner of the Trillium Award. In addition to his writing, he is a member of the editorial board of This Magazine.
The first novel of the Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, General Sun, My Brother appears here for the first time in English. Its depiction of the nightmarish journey of the unskilled laborer Hilarion and his wife from the slums of Port-au-Prince to the cane fields of the Dominican Republic has brought comparisons to the work of Emile Zola, André Malraux, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway. Alexis, whose mother was a descendant of the Revolutionary General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, was already a mature thinker when he published General Sun, My Brother (Compère Général Soleil) in France in 1955. A militant Marxist himself, Alexis championed a form of the ‘marvelous realism’ developed by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, who called for a vision of historical reality from the standpoint of slaves for whom the supernatural was as much a part of everyday experience as were social and other existential realities. General Sun, My Brother opens as Hilarion is arrested for stealing a wallet and imprisoned with an activist named Pierre Roumel-a fictional double for the novelist Jacques Roumain-who schools him in the Marxist view of history. On his release, Hilarion meets Claire-Heureuse and they settle down together. Hilarion labors in sisal processing and mahogany polishing while his partner sets up a small grocery store. After losing everything in a criminally set fire, the couple joins the desperate emigration to the Dominican Republic. Hilarion finds work as a sugarcane cutter, but the workers soon become embroiled in a strike that ends in the ‘Dominican Vespers,’ the 1937 massacre pf Haitian workers by the Dominican army. The novel personifies the sun as the ally, brother, and leader of the peasants. Mortally wounded in crossing the Massacre River back into Haiti, Hilarion urges Claire-Heureuse to remarry and to continue to work for a Haiti where people can live in dignity and peace.
Jacques Stephen Alexis (Gonaïves, Haiti, 22 April 1922–Mole St-Nicolas, Haiti, c. 22 April 1961) was a Haitian Communist novelist. He is best known for his novels Compère Général Soleil (1955), Les Arbres Musiciens (1957), and L'Espace d'un Cillement (1959), and for his collection of short stories, Romancero aux Etoiles (1960). Alexis was born in Gonaïves, the son of novelist and diplomat Stephen Alexis. After completing medical school in Paris, he traveled throughout Europe and lived for a few years in Cuba. Writer, poet, activist - A descendent of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Alexis was born on 22 April 1922, in Gonaïves. His father was a journalist, historian and diplomat, and Alexis grew up in a family in which literary and political discussions were the norm. At the age of 18, he made what was regarded as remarkable literary debut with an essay about the Haitian poet, Hamilton Garoute. He collaborated on a number of literary reviews, before founding La Ruche, a group dedicated to creating a literary and social spring in Haiti in the early 1940s. In 1955, his novel Compère Général Soleil, was published by Gallimard in Paris. The novel has been translated into English as General Sun, My Brother, and is a must-read for all those with an interest in understanding Haiti. He followed up with ‘Les Arbres Musiciens’ (1957), L'Espace d'un Cillement (1959), and ‘Romanceros aux Etoiles’ (1960). More than just an intellectual, Jacques Stephen Alexis was also an active participant in the social and political debates of his time. In 1959, he formed the People's Consensus Party (Parti pour l'Entente Nationale-PEP), a left-wing political party, but he was forced into exile by the Duvalier dictatorship. In August 1960, he attended a Moscow meeting of representatives of 81 communist parties from all over the world, and signed a common accord document called ‘The Declaration of the 81’ in the name of Haitian communists. In April 1961, he returned to Haiti, but soon after landing at Mole St Nicholas he was captured by Tontons Macoutes. He was taken to the town's main square where he was tortured and then put on a boat to Port-au-Prince he was never seen again. Later his death was confirmed by an obscure notice in the government newspaper buried on page 14.
In his third novel, IN THE FLICKER OF AN EYELID, Jacques Stephen Alexis brings his characteristically vivid scenes, political consciousness, and powerful characters to the dramatic age-old question of whether a prostitute can leave ‘the life’ to find her own identity and true love. The racism of the U.S. military, the selfish and profit-oriented machinations of Haitian politicians, the oppression of workers by the Cuban dictator Batista, the exploitation of women, and the particularly noteworthy links between Haiti and Cuba all form the figurative backdrop for a novel driven by unforgettable characters. . The Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis (1922-1961) had already gained international recognition for his four works of fiction when he returned to Haiti from Cuba in 1961 as part of a small invasion force. He disappeared and presumably died at the hands of Duvalier’s Tontons Macoutes.
Jacques Stephen Alexis (Gonaïves, Haiti, 22 April 1922–Mole St-Nicolas, Haiti, c. 22 April 1961) was a Haitian Communist novelist. He is best known for his novels Compère Général Soleil (1955), Les Arbres Musiciens (1957), and L'Espace d'un Cillement (1959), and for his collection of short stories, Romancero aux Etoiles (1960). Alexis was born in Gonaïves, the son of novelist and diplomat Stephen Alexis. After completing medical school in Paris, he traveled throughout Europe and lived for a few years in Cuba. Writer, poet, activist - A descendent of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Alexis was born on 22 April 1922, in Gonaïves. His father was a journalist, historian and diplomat, and Alexis grew up in a family in which literary and political discussions were the norm. At the age of 18, he made what was regarded as remarkable literary debut with an essay about the Haitian poet, Hamilton Garoute. He collaborated on a number of literary reviews, before founding La Ruche, a group dedicated to creating a literary and social spring in Haiti in the early 1940s. In 1955, his novel Compère Général Soleil, was published by Gallimard in Paris. The novel has been translated into English as General Sun, My Brother, and is a must-read for all those with an interest in understanding Haiti. He followed up with ‘Les Arbres Musiciens’ (1957), L'Espace d'un Cillement (1959), and ‘Romanceros aux Etoiles’ (1960). More than just an intellectual, Jacques Stephen Alexis was also an active participant in the social and political debates of his time. In 1959, he formed the People's Consensus Party (Parti pour l'Entente Nationale-PEP), a left-wing political party, but he was forced into exile by the Duvalier dictatorship. In August 1960, he attended a Moscow meeting of representatives of 81 communist parties from all over the world, and signed a common accord document called ‘The Declaration of the 81’ in the name of Haitian communists. In April 1961, he returned to Haiti, but soon after landing at Mole St Nicholas he was captured by Tontons Macoutes. He was taken to the town's main square where he was tortured and then put on a boat to Port-au-Prince he was never seen again. Later his death was confirmed by an obscure notice in the government newspaper buried on page 14. Carrot F. Coates, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, State University of New York, has translated many works of francophone literature, among them Alexis’s GENERAL SUN, MY BROTHER (Virginia). Edwidge Danticat won the American Book Award for The Farming of Bones and was a National Book Award nominee for Krik? Krak
Launched by the summer 2004 award-winning, best-seller BROOKLYN NOIR, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. The Caribbean provides no shelter from the delicious terror of the Akashic Noir Series Brand-new stories by: Robert Antoni, Elizabeth Nunez, Lawrence Scott, Ramabai Espinet, Shani Mootoo, Kevin Baldeosingh, Vahni Capildeo, Willi Chen, Lisa Allen-Agostini, Rian Marie Extavour, Keith Jardim, Jaime Lee Loy, Darby Maloney, Reena Andrea Manickchand, Judith Theodore, Tiphanie Yanique, and others. Trinidad Noir delivers all the crime a reader expects from Akashic’s Noir Series: murder, kidnapping, rape, drugs, prostitution, theft, extortion, and more. Yet in fictionalizing crime in the real crime setting of Trinidad, acclaimed authors Lawrence Scott, Robert Antoni, Elizabeth Nunez, Ramabai Espinet, Keith Jardim, Tiphanie Yanique, Willi Chen, and others have created a decidedly literary noir collection. These authors’ quality characterizations, plots, and styles concurrently reveal the country’s darkness and its appeal with an unexpected and gratifying result: In their captivating and occasionally humorous stories, the Trinidad that emerges is as intriguing and contradictory as the island and its people. TRINIDAD NOIR is as much a delightful crime romp as it is an expose of the seedy side of life.
Lisa Allen-Agostini is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer from Trinidad and Tobago. She is the author of a children's novel, The Chalice Project. An award-winning journalist, she is the Internet editor and a columnist with the Trinidad Guardian. Jeanne Mason is a freelance editor who also writes short stories and poetry. She has lived in Paris, France, where she edited medical articles for U.S. and U.K. journals. She currently resides in Trinidad and Tobago.
The Jamaica-born African American writer's 15 stories offer numerous vignettes of African American life in the US. Anderson was born in Panama of Jamaican parents, was schooled in Kingston, NYC at Columbia, and Paris at the Sorbonne. His three WWII years in an all-Black battalion give some of the material here.
Alston Anderson was an African American of Jamaican birth who wrote one other book, the novel All God's Children (1965), after which he slipped into obscurity. He died in poverty in 2008.
The Jamaica-born African American writer's 15 stories offer numerous vignettes of African American life in the US. Anderson was born in Panama of Jamaican parents, was schooled in Kingston, NYC at Columbia, and Paris at the Sorbonne. His three WWII years in an all-Black battalion give some of the material here. MEET SUSIE Q... a purely lovin' woman who can tire a man clear down to his toe and land him on the chain gang because of every warm brown meltin' inch of her. MEET' LIL ONE ... the nice-to-the-bone boy impaled on the hurting sword of adolescence, having a high old time in boarding school just like any other kid his age – except that he's black and the world that counts is white. MEET MISS FLORENCE... the prim, prissy, straight-backed schoolteacher living alone in a town where the men ain't wolves. Jackson – them is werewolves, hongry as, they is for women". MEET ALSTON ANDERSON… the brilliant young teller of these tales who writes, with eloquence and economy, of women and men, of tragedy and laughter, of poignant tenderness and ribald lust. 'One of the finest collections of short stories to be published recently. - NEW YORK POST.
Alston Anderson was an African American of Jamaican birth who wrote one other book, the novel All God's Children (1965), after which he slipped into obscurity. He died in poverty in 2008.
SUDDEN GLORY, published here for the first time, is a rich and absorbing novel in the finest tradition of Latin American writing. Set in Guatemala, it tells of a team of archaeologists who come to study Mayan ruins. Enveloped in the forest, they confront an unfamiliar, violent world, which cuts them off from civilization and brings them face to face with a terrible and profound crisis. With frightening inevitability the mask of the Totonacs, a psychologist's encounter with insanity, and Karen Farr's prescription of 'sudden glory' insidiously take over, and in the search for a kind of truth, their world begins to split apart. Anderson handles a large and diverse cast of characters and skillfully weaves together myth, reality and folklore to create a haunting, magical study of the human condition that has been compared with the great works of Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Vernon F. Anderson was born in Jamaica in 1900. After displaying an early aptitude and interest in medicine, he was sent to London to train as a doctor, and studied at Kings College, University of London and Westminster Hospital Medical School. In 1928, he applied for a post in the British Colonial Civil Service and was sent as a medical officer to British Honduras, where he went on to head the medical division. To diversify, he also studied public health and tropical medicine, and spent time in Greece and Albania, examining how the respective governments coped with malaria. In 1946, Dr Anderson represented the Belize government in his home country, helping to plan the University of the West Indies. On retirement from government services in Belize, he was awarded an OBE in recognition of his work. He returned to Jamaica and set up a private practice, in which he continued working until 1971. SUDDEN GLORY is his only novel, inspired by his work in medicine, his growing interest in the literature signifying the ‘coming of age’ of Jamaica, and a quote by the seventeenth century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, ‘Laughter is a passion without name, it is a Sudden Glory.’
Who has stolen the glittering gold chain? Michael Anthony again returns to Trinidad and to a world of growing up which has enchanted so many in his novels such as THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO. ‘. . . ends up cunningly undoing the traditional detective story . . .’ - The Observer. ‘. . . . a wistfully evocative tale. . .’ - The Times. ‘. . . . much to delight in and much that lingers in the memory.’ - British Book News. ‘The richness of the story springs from the boy’s gradually changing perception of the adults around him.’ - The Financial Times.
MICHAEL ANTHONY has an exceptional talent for evoking childhood. THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO (CWS 1) is an outstanding example but the other titles are equally sensitive portrayals of growing up in Trinidad. THE GAMES WERE COMING (CWS 17). GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER (CWS 9) and CRICKET IN THE ROAD (CWS 16) all appear in the Caribbean Writers Series. He has also published STREETS OF CONFLICT, a novel set in Brazil. Michael Anthony was born in Mayaro in 1932. He worked as a moulder in an iron foundry at Pointe ‘a Pierre, Trinidad, before he went to England in 1955, where he worked in factories, for the railways and as a telegraphist. He then went to Brazil and since returning to Trinidad has written books about the history of Port of Spain and Trinidad.
Indian, African and Chinese characters mingle against a brilliant Trinidadian background in these stories. In ‘Sandra Street’ we see a child’s growing awareness of the beauty around him; in the title story a child’s unhappiness looms large and is suddenly dispersed. The solidarity of the community is felt in ‘The Village Shop’ when Ma Moon Peng’s demand for ‘cash today’ brings about a boycott and she is forced to yield to the local tradition of giving credit. ‘The Captain of the Fleet’ is an exciting tale set in the eighteenth century, with great appeal to the romantic imagination. All the stories are remarkable for their truth to life, their humour and their sympathy. Describing one of Michael Anthony’s novels in a talk on the BBC, Fielden Hughes said that it was ‘more than merely full of sensuous love for the moods and colours of nature; it is suffused with a small boy’s vision of them, and this great quality makes the book both real and luminous with beauty’; and Julian Moynihan, writing in The Observer, said ‘no writer since Gertrude Stein has deployed fewer words and dispensed with more elaboration of syntax to greater effect.’ This purity of style and luminosity of vision are beautifully exemplified in his new book: a collection of stories which will be enjoyed by adults and young readers alike.
MICHAEL ANTHONY was born in Mayaro, Trinidad, where his mother still lives. The small boy in THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO who was sent off to work as a servant was Michael Anthony himse1f, and the descriptions of both village and town are marvels of exactness. His wife Yvette comes from a neighbouring village, though they first met in London. His education at San Fernando’s Junior Technical School ended when he was fifteen. From ’47 to ’54 he worked as a moulder in an iron foundry at Pointe a Pierre. Then he came to England where he worked in several factories, as a parcels clerk at St Pancras Station, and in the GPO telegraph service. He became a journalist after joining Reuters as a teleprinter operator. After two years in Brazil, the Anthony family (they have four children) returned to Trinidad and settled in Chaguanas. Michael Anthony was employed by the National Cultural Council and worked on the production of educational books for children. He began his writing career in 1951, contributing stories and poems to the Trinidad Guardian. Later he had many stories published in BIM, the well-known West Indian literary magazine published in Barbados. We published his first novel, THE GAMES WERE COMING, in 1963; THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO in 1965; and GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER in 1967.
Shellie is a young boy on the island of Trinidad. This is his story as, growing up, he discovers the tenderness of love and its complexities, the difficulties of the world and its threatening bitterness. As the book opens, Shellie's family has just moved to a new village where his father is ill and cannot work. So the boy makes friends with a neighbor, Mr. Gidharee, and soon starts working for him at his small cocoa plantation beside the nearby river. He also meets Mr. Gidharee's lovely daughter, Rosalie, and experiences for the first time a romantic love. With skilled simplicity and ease, the author traces the half-shy, half-bold teasing and rivalry this love engenders and the fluidity and tenderness of the young people's feelings. Soon, however, Shellie's new emotions take another direction, when he meets the cheerful and more accessible Joan. To the confusion of this double attraction there is soon added the danger of Mr. Gidharee's anger. Facing his problems, Shellie grows up and the reader becomes completely involved in this uncommonly sensitive and honest story
Michael Anthony, one of the most distinguished writers from the West Indies, lives in London with his wife and two children where he is an editor for Reuters news agency. He was born in Mayaro, a small village in Trinidad, and had only a little schooling. For some years he made his living in England by working on the railways, for the post office, and, in other haphazard jobs, like any other immigrant with no special training. Then he qualified as a teleprinter operator — it was in that capacity that he was first employed by Reuters. Meanwhile, he was writing. He started before he came to England by having light verse published from time to time in a newspaper in Trinidad, and an occasional story in the magazine BIM. Slowly and patiently he taught himself his craft, though he never had to teach himself the marvelous exactness with which he describes things — that he was born with. He is a deeply impressive example of- self-made writer, a man whose natural sensitivity, judgment and perceptiveness have prevailed in circumstances where encouragement was often meager. Mr. Anthony's previous novels are THE GAMES WERE COMING and THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO, both of which received enthusiastic reviews. GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER is his first book to be published in the United States.
THE GAMES WERE COMING and THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO have established Michael Anthony as one of the most distinguished novelists to come from the West Indies. Now he tells the story of Shellie, a Trinidadian boy who moves with his parents to a new village and there meets two girls. He is instantly charmed by Rosalie Ghidaree, an Indian girl, and is flattered by the friendship of her father who lets Shellie help him work his land down by the river, but while being tacitly accepted as a potential husband for Rosalie, he is also attracted to the cheerful and more accessible Joan. He discovers, in fact, that it is possible to be drawn to two girls at once - and gets into a serious muddle. Meanwhile his father becomes very ill. The crisis in Shellie’s private life coincides with an abrupt confrontation with adult responsibilities. Michael Anthony never comments. He relates with a lucid simplicity what happens, what is said, and what is felt, and in this he is so sensitively accurate that his novel conveys more about character, relationships and social conditions than the work of many a more pretentious writer.
Michael Anthony (born 10 February 1932) is an eminent Caribbean author and historian, who has been named one of the ‘50 most influential people in Trinidad and Tobago‘. Born in Mayaro, Trinidad, on 10 February 1932 to Nathaniel Anthony and Eva Jones Lazarus. Anthony was educated at Mayaro Roman Catholic School and Junior Technical College, San Fernando, Trinidad. He subsequently took a job as a foundry worker in Pointe-à-Pierre for five years but had ambitions to become a journalist, and poems of his were published by the Trinidad Guardian in 1953. Yet it was not enough for him to secure a new job locally and Anthony decided to further his career in the United Kingdom. His voyage there on board the Hildebrandt took place in December 1954. In England he held several jobs including as a sub-editor at Reuters news agency (1964-8), while developing his career as a writer, writing short stories for the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices. In 1958 he married Yvette Phillip (a poet) and they had four children — Jennifer, Keith, Carlos and Sandra. Four years later, Anthony published his first book, The Games Were Coming, a cycling story inspired by real events. He followed up its success with The Year in San Fernando and Green Days by the River. He eventually returned to Trinidad in 1970 (after spending two years as part of the Trinidadian diplomatic corps in Brazil, where his novel King of the Masquerade is set) and worked variously as an editor, a researcher for the Ministry of Culture, and as a radio broadcaster of historical programmes. In 1992, he spent time at the University of Richmond in Virginia teaching creative writing. In his five-decade career, Anthony has had over 30 titles published, including novels, collections of short fiction, books for younger readers, travelogues and histories. He has also been a contributor to many anthologies and journals, including Caribbean Prose, Island Voices - Stories from the Caribbean, Response, The Sun's Eyes, West Indian Narrative, The Bajan, and BIM magazine. In 1979 he was awarded the Hummingbird Medal (Gold) for his contributions to Literature, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies (UWI) in 2003.
GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER is a more complex and ambitious book than THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO. With equal sensitivity it traces the response of Shell, its fifteen-year-old hero, to the transitional world between childhood and maturity. Like the twelve-year-old Francis in THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO, Shell is adjusting to a new and strange environment. When his parents move to a new village he meets new girls. He is charmed by an Indian girl Rosalie Ghidaree, and is flattered by the friendship of her father, who tacitly accepts him as a potential son- in-law. At the same time there is Joan who is more cheerful and accessible. Michael Anthony catches the confusion of a teenager growing to maturity. As the result of his personal crisis Shell grows a little closer to establishing a set of values which will make sense of the adult world.
Michael Anthony (born 10 February 1932) is an eminent Caribbean author and historian, who has been named one of the ‘50 most influential people in Trinidad and Tobago‘. Born in Mayaro, Trinidad, on 10 February 1932 to Nathaniel Anthony and Eva Jones Lazarus. Anthony was educated at Mayaro Roman Catholic School and Junior Technical College, San Fernando, Trinidad. He subsequently took a job as a foundry worker in Pointe-à-Pierre for five years but had ambitions to become a journalist, and poems of his were published by the Trinidad Guardian in 1953. Yet it was not enough for him to secure a new job locally and Anthony decided to further his career in the United Kingdom. His voyage there on board the Hildebrandt took place in December 1954. In England he held several jobs including as a sub-editor at Reuters news agency (1964-8), while developing his career as a writer, writing short stories for the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices. In 1958 he married Yvette Phillip (a poet) and they had four children — Jennifer, Keith, Carlos and Sandra. Four years later, Anthony published his first book, The Games Were Coming, a cycling story inspired by real events. He followed up its success with The Year in San Fernando and Green Days by the River. He eventually returned to Trinidad in 1970 (after spending two years as part of the Trinidadian diplomatic corps in Brazil, where his novel King of the Masquerade is set) and worked variously as an editor, a researcher for the Ministry of Culture, and as a radio broadcaster of historical programmes. In 1992, he spent time at the University of Richmond in Virginia teaching creative writing. In his five-decade career, Anthony has had over 30 titles published, including novels, collections of short fiction, books for younger readers, travelogues and histories. He has also been a contributor to many anthologies and journals, including Caribbean Prose, Island Voices - Stories from the Caribbean, Response, The Sun's Eyes, West Indian Narrative, The Bajan, and BIM magazine. In 1979 he was awarded the Hummingbird Medal (Gold) for his contributions to Literature, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies (UWI) in 2003.
‘But you know something? We’ll win, you know. We bound to win in the end. But I don’t know when the end is.’ It is 1903 in Trinidad. Eva’s rage at her people’s treatment under colonial rule is growing. With just a few days to go before the government passes oppressive new legislation, the people start to voice their opposition. Eva embarks on a desperate plan. . . Michael Anthony’s story of love, revenge and racial tension brings to life a tragic episode in Trinidad’s history. Michael Anthony is from Trinidad. He is the author of many novels, as well as books about the history of the Caribbean.
Michael Anthony (born 10 February 1932) is an eminent Caribbean author and historian, who has been named one of the ‘50 most influential people in Trinidad and Tobago‘. Born in Mayaro, Trinidad, on 10 February 1932 to Nathaniel Anthony and Eva Jones Lazarus. Anthony was educated at Mayaro Roman Catholic School and Junior Technical College, San Fernando, Trinidad. He subsequently took a job as a foundry worker in Pointe-à-Pierre for five years but had ambitions to become a journalist, and poems of his were published by the Trinidad Guardian in 1953. Yet it was not enough for him to secure a new job locally and Anthony decided to further his career in the United Kingdom. His voyage there on board the Hildebrandt took place in December 1954. In England he held several jobs including as a sub-editor at Reuters news agency (1964-8), while developing his career as a writer, writing short stories for the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices. In 1958 he married Yvette Phillip (a poet) and they had four children — Jennifer, Keith, Carlos and Sandra. Four years later, Anthony published his first book, The Games Were Coming, a cycling story inspired by real events. He followed up its success with The Year in San Fernando and Green Days by the River. He eventually returned to Trinidad in 1970 (after spending two years as part of the Trinidadian diplomatic corps in Brazil, where his novel King of the Masquerade is set) and worked variously as an editor, a researcher for the Ministry of Culture, and as a radio broadcaster of historical programmes. In 1992, he spent time at the University of Richmond in Virginia teaching creative writing. In his five-decade career, Anthony has had over 30 titles published, including novels, collections of short fiction, books for younger readers, travelogues and histories. He has also been a contributor to many anthologies and journals, including Caribbean Prose, Island Voices - Stories from the Caribbean, Response, The Sun's Eyes, West Indian Narrative, The Bajan, and BIM magazine. In 1979 he was awarded the Hummingbird Medal (Gold) for his contributions to Literature, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies (UWI) in 2003.
Michael Anthony has set his new novel in Rio de Janeiro, at a time when a wave of student riots hit the city. At the centre of the story is Marisa, who teaches at a language school run by a Trinidadian called Mac. Through Marisa two young Trinidadian visitors to Rio are drawn into awareness of the city’s life. Craig, who has come to see his lonely old uncle, falls in love with her at once, but he is too young to handle love, and a new country, successfully. Alvin has a better understanding of life and allows his relationship with Marisa to develop more slowly and naturally. Instead of meeting as ‘interesting foreigners’, they are two people with much in common, and it is as such that they live through the turbulent events which are to come. The city holds a different kind of fate in store for Mac, who espouses the students’ cause. Through their friendship with him, Marisa and Alvin are taken near the centre of the whirlpool; but secure in their own love and hopes they are not carried away. Left with an uneasily poignant memory of a friend who attempted to live on a larger scale, they can be sure that their own quiet adherence to private values represents the saner way.
MICHAEL ANTHONY was born in Mayaro, Trinidad, where his mother still lives. The small boy in THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO who was sent off to work as a servant was Michael Anthony himse1f, and the descriptions of both village and town are marvels of exactness. His wife Yvette comes from a neighbouring village, though they first met in London. His education at San Fernando’s Junior Technical School ended when he was fifteen. From ’47 to ’54 he worked as a moulder in an iron foundry at Pointe a Pierre. Then he came to England where he worked in several factories, as a parcels clerk at St Pancras Station, and in the GPO telegraph service. He became a journalist after joining Reuters as a teleprinter operator. After two years in Brazil, the Anthony family (they have four children) returned to Trinidad and settled in Chaguanas. Michael Anthony was employed by the National Cultural Council and worked on the production of educational books for children. He began his writing career in 1951, contributing stories and poems to the Trinidad Guardian. Later he had many stories published in BIM, the well-known West Indian literary magazine published in Barbados. We published his first novel, THE GAMES WERE COMING, in 1963; THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO in 1965; and GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER in 1967.
Set in the author’s native Trinidad like his previously published GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER, this novel has the same appealing freshness. The story unfolds during the weeks preceding the annual Carnival and the Southern Games, a time of mounting excitement for the whole island. Leon has already won some modest bicycle races and is in training for this greatest of all. He is so obsessed by his ambition to be the Champion that he has dismissed everything else from his life, especially his girl friend Sylvia. The life of his whole family revolves around his training. Home from work each night, his father first checks out Leon’s body with an appraising glance, then turns his detailed attention to the Wasp, a cycle light as cork, which must be oiled and cleaned, its handle kept dead straight, its nuts tight. Dolphus, the little brother, can hardly bear the excitement, torn between the preparation for the race and the steel bands already practicing in secret session for the competition at Carnival. Leon’s mother is wise and light-hearted and amused. But Sylvia is not amused! She is Leon’s girl and he thinks she is the kind of girl he can spend his years with. But keeping fit rules out women and now all his surplus energies are wrung out in sweat at the track. Lonely and hurt, Sylvia drifts toward another man and finally is forced into a situation where she must use real feminine guile to save herself. Under its simple surface this story contains many things, the fevers of love and ambition, the excitement of Carnival, the tensions of the games. It is written with beautiful simplicity and exactness and is a lyric evocation of West Indian youth.
Michael Anthony, an eminent Caribbean author and historian, was born in Mayaro, Trinidad and Tobago on February 10, 1932. After an unsatisfying job as a young foundry worker in Pointe-à-Pierre for five years, he sought to become a journalist, and then a poet. In 1963, Anthony published his first book, THE GAMES WERE COMING, a cycling story inspired by real events. Some time later, he followed up this success with THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO and GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER. In all, Anthony has written over 20 titles in his four-decade career.
‘Sparkling clarity, gentleness and irony’ were the qualities admired by a Sunday Times reviewer in Michael Anthony’s first novel, THE GAMES WERE COMING. They appear again in the present book, combined with an extraordinary immediacy. THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO is so deeply experienced and so accurately evoked that we ourselves live it. Twelve-year-old Francis is the son of a widowed mother, very poor, who is struggling to raise her family in Mayaro, a remote Trinidadian village. The boy gets the chance to go to San Fernando to work as servant-companion to old Mrs Chandles who lives with her grand and frightening son. His mother considers it a splendid opportunity for him, but he is scared: he has never seen a town or a house with pictures on the walls, and never been away from the warmth of his family. San Fernando might be Timbuctoo, and Mrs Chandles and her son might be ogres. But Francis has the courage and trust bred of being loved, and (without knowing it) an artist’s perceptions. In the ensuing year he learns the truth about the Chandles and the city, he learns about endurance and hope, love and death. By the end of this beautiful book, when he goes back to his village, the boy is on the way to becoming a wise, strong and compassionate man. Michael Anthony was himself born in Mayaro, in 1932. He went to school there, and later to the Junior Technical School, San Fernando. He worked as a moulder in an iron foundry at Pointe a Pierre, Trinidad, until he came to England in 1955. Since then he has worked in factories, for British Railways, and as a telegraphist. Before the publication of his first novel in 1963 he was already known as a contributor of stories to the West Indian literary magazine, BIM.
Michael Anthony (born 10 February 1932) is an eminent Caribbean author and historian, who has been named one of the ‘50 most influential people in Trinidad and Tobago‘. Born in Mayaro, Trinidad, on 10 February 1932 to Nathaniel Anthony and Eva Jones Lazarus. Anthony was educated at Mayaro Roman Catholic School and Junior Technical College, San Fernando, Trinidad. He subsequently took a job as a foundry worker in Pointe-à-Pierre for five years but had ambitions to become a journalist, and poems of his were published by the Trinidad Guardian in 1953. Yet it was not enough for him to secure a new job locally and Anthony decided to further his career in the United Kingdom. His voyage there on board the Hildebrandt took place in December 1954. In England he held several jobs including as a sub-editor at Reuters news agency (1964-8), while developing his career as a writer, writing short stories for the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices. In 1958 he married Yvette Phillip (a poet) and they had four children — Jennifer, Keith, Carlos and Sandra. Four years later, Anthony published his first book, The Games Were Coming, a cycling story inspired by real events. He followed up its success with The Year in San Fernando and Green Days by the River. He eventually returned to Trinidad in 1970 (after spending two years as part of the Trinidadian diplomatic corps in Brazil, where his novel King of the Masquerade is set) and worked variously as an editor, a researcher for the Ministry of Culture, and as a radio broadcaster of historical programmes. In 1992, he spent time at the University of Richmond in Virginia teaching creative writing. In his five-decade career, Anthony has had over 30 titles published, including novels, collections of short fiction, books for younger readers, travelogues and histories. He has also been a contributor to many anthologies and journals, including Caribbean Prose, Island Voices - Stories from the Caribbean, Response, The Sun's Eyes, West Indian Narrative, The Bajan, and BIM magazine. In 1979 he was awarded the Hummingbird Medal (Gold) for his contributions to Literature, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies (UWI) in 2003.
‘ ‘Sparkling clarity, gentleness and irony’ were the qualities admired by a Sunday Times reviewer in Michael Anthony’s first novel. They appear again in THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO. It is so deeply experienced and so accurately evoked that we ourselves live it. Twelve-year-old Francis is the son of a widowed mother, very poor, who is struggling to raise her family in Mayaro, a Trinidadian village. The boy gets the chance to go for a year to San Fernando to work as servant-companion to old Mrs. Chandles who lives with her grand and frightening son. His mother considers it a splendid opportunity for him, but he is scared: he has never seen a town, or a house with pictures on the walls and never been away from the warmth of his family.
MICHAEL ANTHONY has an exceptional talent for evoking childhood. THE YEAR IN SAN FERNANDO (CWS 1) is an outstanding example but the other titles are equally sensitive portrayals of growing up in Trinidad. THE GAMES WERE COMING (CWS 17). GREEN DAYS BY THE RIVER (CWS 9) and CRICKET IN THE ROAD (CWS 16) all appear in the Caribbean Writers Series. He has also published STREETS OF CONFLICT, a novel set in Brazil. Michael Anthony was born in Mayaro in 1932. He worked as a moulder in an iron foundry at Pointe ‘a Pierre, Trinidad, before he went to England in 1955, where he worked in factories, for the railways and as a telegraphist. He then went to Brazil and since returning to Trinidad has written books about the history of Port of Spain and Trinidad.
In this landmark anthology, writers from three generations who have often been associated with the Caribbean are brought together for the first time. Contributors include Nobel Laureates Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Derek Walcott, along with Julia Alvarez, Kamau Brathwaite, Senel Paz, Cristina Garcia, Fred D'Aguiar, Wilson Harris, Nilo Cruz, Bob Shacochis, Edwidge Danticat, Madison Smartt Bell, Olive Senior, Rosario Ferre, Port-au-Prince mayor Manno Charlemagne, and many others.
Robert Antoni (born 1958) is a West Indian writer who was awarded the 1999 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by The Paris Review for My Grandmother's Tale of How Crab-o Lost His Head. He is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2010 for his work on the historical novel As Flies to Whatless Boys. Robert Antoni was born in the United States of Trinidadian parents and grew up largely in the Bahamas, where his father practised medicine. He says his "fictional world" is "Corpus Christi", the invented island (based on Trinidad) that he introduced in his first novel, Divina Trace (1991). Antoni studied at Duke University and in the creative writing programme at Johns Hopkins University, before joining the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he began working on Divina Trace. He has said that he spent a total of ten years completing the novel, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first novel in 1992.Antoni lived for a time in Barcelona and taught at the University of Miami from 1992 to 2001. In 2004, he began teaching at Barnard College, Columbia University and The New School. In 2010, he was a Guggenheim Fellow. His novel As Flies to Whatless Boys was the overall winner of the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. At the award ceremony on 26 April, Antoni pledged to share the US$10,000 prize money with the other finalists, Lorna Goodison (winner of the poetry category for Oracabessa) and Kei Miller (winner of the literary non-fiction category for Writing Down the Vision: Essays and Prophecies). Antoni currently resides in New York City. Bradford Morrow (born April 8, 1951, Baltimore, MD) is an American novelist, editor, essayist, poet, and children's book writer. Professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College, he is the founding editor of Conjunctions literary magazine. Wikipedia
Lilla is the white mistress of a once grand but now now rotting colonial mansion and Vel, her black servant. The two West Indian women, both 33 years of age, have lived in the same house for 10 years, but it is not until Lilla rescues Vel from a near-fatal abortion attempt, that the two really get to know each other. Young Trinidadian author Robert Antoni weaves a brightly colored tapestry of life in the Caribbean, a remarkable tale of family, myth, religion and language.
Robert Antoni (born 1958) is a West Indian writer who was awarded the 1999 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by The Paris Review for My Grandmother's Tale of How Crab-o Lost His Head. He is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2010 for his work on the historical novel As Flies to Whatless Boys. Robert Antoni was born in the United States of Trinidadian parents and grew up largely in the Bahamas, where his father practised medicine. He says his "fictional world" is "Corpus Christi", the invented island (based on Trinidad) that he introduced in his first novel, Divina Trace (1991). Antoni studied at Duke University and in the creative writing programme at Johns Hopkins University, before joining the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he began working on Divina Trace. He has said that he spent a total of ten years completing the novel, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first novel in 1992.Antoni lived for a time in Barcelona and taught at the University of Miami from 1992 to 2001. In 2004, he began teaching at Barnard College, Columbia University and The New School. In 2010, he was a Guggenheim Fellow. His novel As Flies to Whatless Boys was the overall winner of the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. At the award ceremony on 26 April, Antoni pledged to share the US$10,000 prize money with the other finalists, Lorna Goodison (winner of the poetry category for Oracabessa) and Kei Miller (winner of the literary non-fiction category for Writing Down the Vision: Essays and Prophecies). Antoni currently resides in New York City.
William Fletcher is an aspiring novelist who has come to New York to escape his affluent West Indian roots. A chance meeting in a Greenwich Village bar reunites him with two of his childhood companions: Laurence, who left the poverty of his village to become an Oxford scholar and poet, and the vivacious Rachel, William’s second cousin and first love. Together the three make a liquor-soaked pledge to return ‘home’ to Trinidad for carnival. As the festival’s ecstasy slides into a fog of ganja, alcohol, and the endless calypso beat, Rachel casts her eyes on Eddoes, a member of the isolated, Rastafarian-like Earth People - and the year’s young and scandalous carnival king. Eddoes has escaped his sequestered life in the mysterious Hell Valley for a few days of excitement, and it is to this remote place that the group goes to cool down after the festival. In the rain forest the group hopes for a secret paradise from which to begin anew. But even here the demons of history, prejudice, and hatred violently intrude, as the novel’s startling conclusion forces all to face the power - and impotence - of human resilience and human love. .
Robert Antoni (born 1958) is a West Indian writer who was awarded the 1999 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by The Paris Review for My Grandmother's Tale of How Crab-o Lost His Head. He is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2010 for his work on the historical novel As Flies to Whatless Boys.
A mysterious child, half-human, half-frog, is born on the island of Corpus Christi in the West Indies. Its mother becomes Magdalena Divina, the black madonna, patron saint of the island, and the frogchild becomes the focus of an evolving legend as Johnny Domingo hears numerous versions of this remarkable story and tries, impossibly, to piece it together into one coherent and true account.
Robert Antoni (born 1958) is a West Indian writer who was awarded the 1999 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction by The Paris Review for My Grandmother's Tale of How Crab-o Lost His Head. He is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2010 for his work on the historical novel As Flies to Whatless Boys. Robert Antoni was born in the United States of Trinidadian parents and grew up largely in the Bahamas, where his father practised medicine. He says his "fictional world" is "Corpus Christi", the invented island (based on Trinidad) that he introduced in his first novel, Divina Trace (1991). Antoni studied at Duke University and in the creative writing programme at Johns Hopkins University, before joining the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he began working on Divina Trace. He has said that he spent a total of ten years completing the novel, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first novel in 1992.Antoni lived for a time in Barcelona and taught at the University of Miami from 1992 to 2001. In 2004, he began teaching at Barnard College, Columbia University and The New School. In 2010, he was a Guggenheim Fellow. His novel As Flies to Whatless Boys was the overall winner of the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. At the award ceremony on 26 April, Antoni pledged to share the US$10,000 prize money with the other finalists, Lorna Goodison (winner of the poetry category for Oracabessa) and Kei Miller (winner of the literary non-fiction category for Writing Down the Vision: Essays and Prophecies). Antoni currently resides in New York City.
James Arnold here presents in its political and culture context the work of the greatest visionary poet writing in French since the Romantic period. Aime Cesaire's surrealism is seen as subverting, in the name of black experience, the very European high modernism he assimilated and employed. Mr. Arnold considers Cesaire in relation to the Afro-Caribbean movement of the 1920s and 1930s, the Harlem Renaissance poets, and African writers, especially Leopold Senghor. He analyzes the black Martinican’s language, imagery, and meters. His reading of the poet reveals a tragic vision; the hero of Cesairean negritude is shown to be an Overman, suffering for the future of his people. This is the first full-scale critical study of Cesaire in English. It is written with force and style.
A. James Arnold is Professor of French and Director of Graduate Studies, New World Studie, at the University of Virginia. His other books include Paul Valery and His Critics; "Les Mots" de Sartre: Genese et critique d'une autobiographie; and Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aime Cesaire.
This is the story of three generations of a family. It begins with the legend of the folk-hero O’O, the black corsair who frees slaves from the slave ships and flays the slavers, making breeches from their skin. From legend we move to history, but a history into which fantasy and poetry flow naturally. Among the corsair’s descendents there are twins in each generation, and they express the paradoxical nature of the changing black experience on the island of Guadeloupe and FRENCH Caribbean generally. The history of the O’O clan is one of marriages, of racial mixture and development. What remains is the island, its contours, its flora and fauna, and the sea that washes it, things which change in meaning but not in character with each generation. The social miracle at the heart of the story, the union of the black corsair’s descendant to the last descendant of the white corsair, is marked by nature when the red flame-tree under which the marriage is solemnized miraculously turns blue. The tree remains throughout an emblem of possibility and of the deep complicity between nature and these people. Many passions are engaged in THE BLUE FLAME-TREE: political, sexual, cultural, religious. It is about race and about language, about possession of things and people, about the subjection of women and the egotism of success. But most of all it is the story of particular people in a particular place, wonderful and terrible, to which we come as strangers but which we leave with a sense of having been changed.
Jean-Louis Baghio'o (21 December 1910 – 20 December 1994) is the pseudonym of the French writer who was born as Victor Jean-Louis on 21 December 1910 at Fort-de-France (Martinique) to a family settled at Sainte-Anne (Guadeloupe), and who died in Paris on 20 December 1994.
‘I was never one to follow the crowd - unless they were looking at a fatal accident.’ Set in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Kevin Baldeosingh’s hilarious satire presents the inimitable Paras P. Discover the undiluted truth about the self-declared anti-revolutionary of the order of Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi, the Founder of the Centre for Correctness. With a little help from a tape recorder, Paras P. reveals all we need to know about politics, religion, the media, marriage and sexual norms. This witty commentary on the hypocrisies of modern life demonstrates the truth that ‘Against the assault of laughter, nothing will stand’ (Mark Twain). Born in Trinidad, Kevin Baldeosingh is a journalist working on the Trinidad Guardian. This is his first novel.
Kevin Baldeosingh (born 1963) is a Trinidadian newspaper columnist, author and Humanist, who has been involved in many controversial social issues. He now works with the Trinidad and Tobago Express as a writer on a freelance basis. In twenty years as a professional writer he has written over 2,000 newspaper articles, over 30 periodical articles and papers, 20-plus short stories, and three novels.
This first novel by a young Jamaican now living in Africa was written seven years ago and was published then in Great Britain. Critics there hailed it as ‘a primitive masterpiece,’ ‘a blood-chilling tragedy’ with ‘a sort of lingering power which will make it difficult to forget.’ Larry Neal, a contemporary American critic, hails SONG FOR MUMU as a classic. The novel tells of the death and loves of Mumu, and of a people, in a lyrical manner. Filled with folklore and legend, it is set in a Caribbean countryside whose life (innocence) has been violated by slavery, and in the city, a place without love. This book is structured as a song; the primary characters can be viewed as soloists while the ancient river women in the novel act as a chorus.
Carlton Lindsay Barrett, also known as Eseoghene (born 15 September 1941), is a Jamaican-born poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist and photographer who since 1966 has lived in Nigeria, of which country he became a citizen in the mid-1980s. He initially drew critical attention for his debut novel, Song for Mumu, which on publication in 1967 was favourably noticed by such reviewers as Edward Baugh and Marina Maxwell (who respectively described it as "remarkable" and "significant"); more recently it has been commended for its "pervading passion, intensity, and energy", referred to as a classic, and features on "must-read" lists of Jamaican books. Particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, Barrett was well known as an experimental and progressive essayist, his work being concerned with issues of black identity and dispossession, the African Diaspora, and the survival of descendants of black Africans, now dispersed around the world. One of his sons is the Nigerian writer A. Igoni Barrett, with whom he has also worked professionally
From the earliest colonial slave trade and sugar-molasses-rum triangle, through US Marines occupations, CIA coups, AID, and the IMF, up to the recent Caribbean Basin Initiative and the US invasion of Grenada, this book details a close alliance between foreign investment and politics. Providing a comprehensive overview of international corporate investment in the Caribbean, the authors document its profound impact on the politics and economics of the region. They have assembled a wide variety of information on the top corporations at work - Castle & Cooke, R.J. Reynolds, Tate & Lyle, Grace Kennedy, Geest Industries, Gulf+Western, and scores of others - to show how these corporations and their affiliates have penetrated virtually every sector of the Caribbean economy. In separate chapters on agriculture, tourism, manufacturing, banking, and trade, the authors demonstrate how most of this rich region of abundant resources and exquisite natural beauty has come to experience high unemployment, scarcity of food and basic necessities, low living standards, and ecological endangerment. In addition, chapters are devoted to profiles of each of the Caribbean islands plus Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana.
Tom Barry, Beth Wood, and Deb Preusch are the authors of Dollars and Dictators: A Guide to Central America, and the founders and directors of The Resource Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, an independent research organization that produces educational materials on important issues of our time.
In these original stories, these deft weavings from many islands, there are mysterious yet decisive influences. Often they are first glimpsed on the very periphery of Paulé Bartón’s vision, whittling toward him through air which is thick with chaos and mirage and laughter and market-gab. But suddenly, or slowly, all these seemingly disparate elements come together to form the very center of his life.
PAULE BARTON was born in Haiti in 1916. Throughout his life he lived mainly as a goatherd. After surviving a prison term under the repressive Duvalier regime, he moved with his family, over several years, across the Caribbean, finally settling in Costa Rica, where he died in 1974. It was mainly in Jamaica and Trinidad that Bartón collaborated with Howard A. Norman on the translation of these original stories, using his native Creole spiced with Dahomey cadences and bits of English. HOWARD A. NORMAN has done migratory bird studies in the Caribbean, worked for Amnesty International, been a philologist at Harvard University and taught at Princeton and UCLA. His prose, translations from several languages and radio plays have appeared in many publications. His translation of Swampy Cree oral narratives, THE WISHING BONE CYCLE, received the Harold Morton Landon Award for Translation from the Academy of American Poets. He was awarded a fellowship by the Guggenheim Foundation. NORMAN LALIBERTE is internationally recognized for his strongly individual art as represented in paintings, banners and graphic design. Among numerous commissions, he has made banners for the Chicago Lyric Opera and the Vatican Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair.
In 1959, the year Queen Elizabeth visited the country newspapers in British Guiana reported a manhunt taking place deep within the forest. APATA is an imaginative reconstruction of the life of the man at its centre, a charismatic young Guianese whose hopes of a brilliant future are frustrated by the colour of his skin. Despite his obvious abilities, he cannot complete his education, and is forced instead to take up ignominious work for Glenn, a white homosexual trader. Trapped by a system of prejudices, and deeply humiliated, Apata is pushed into a cycle of crime that leads to the life of a fugitive, and a grisly demise. Harold Bascom’s APATA is the story of victims and outcasts everywhere, a gripping adventure that confronts a confusing and hurtful period when different cultures collided.
HAROLD A. BASCOM was born in Vergenoegen, Guyana, in 1951, and began writing poetry in his teens. He made his first break as a writer of prose in 1977, when some of his short stories were read on national radio. He also began writing children’s books and finished his first film script, a story based on a manhunt for the desperado Clement Cuffy, which took place in British Guiana in 1959, and which gave rise to a full length novel - APATA. Harold A. Bascom works as a graphic artist and book illustrator and lives in Georgetown, Guyana.
Because the institution of slavery has exerted such momentous force in shaping the socioeconomic and political history of the Caribbean, much of the region's historical writing has focused on slavery. Caribbean Slave Society and Economy brings together into one volume the main themes of the recent research on slavery, and explores the patterns and forms of socioeconomic life and activity that molded the region's heterogeneous slave societies.
Hilary Beckles is Pro-Vice Chancellor and Principal of the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. He is the author of more than ten books and is on the editorial board of several academic journals, including the Journal of Caribbean History. Verene Albertha Shepherd (née Lazarus; born 1951) is a Jamaican academic who is a professor of social history at the University of the West Indies in Mona. She is the director of the university's Institute for Gender and Development Studies, and specialises in Jamaican social history and diaspora studies.
The eighteenth century is drawing to a close. The Caribbean is a pawn in the power games of European empires, and long-neglected Trinidad gains a new importance. Racial and political conflicts intensify, and violence is in the very air. Yet, against the encroaching evil there is love - of family, of friends and, for Elena, of a restless, reckless young English nobleman, seeking his destiny in exile. But their union is threatened by prejudice of colour and of class. Valerie Belgrave has vividly recreated a crucial time in Caribbean and world history - where the old order is changing and the struggle echoes down to the present day. With the epic sweep of GONE WITH THE WIND this enthralling, many-layered novel ranges from a West Indies in turmoil to an England of elegance and depravity and involves us in the fate of settler and slave, republican and aristocrat and the perfection of human love.
Valerie Begrave (1949-2016) grew up in Trinidad and studied at Sir George Williams (Concordia) University in Canada, obtaining a BA in Painting and Literature. She lived in Trinidad, where she worked as an artist and fabric designer specializing in batik. Belgrave was also a social activist and was among hundreds of students who staged a sit-in at the computer lab on the ninth floor of the Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1969 to protest against a professor who was accused of racism.
In 1791, Saint Domingue was both the richest and cruelest colony in the Western Hemisphere; more than a third of African slaves died within a few years of their arrival there. Thirteen years later, Haitian rebels declared independence from France after the first—and only—successful slave revolution in history. Much of the success of this uprising can be credited to one man, Toussaint Louverture—a figure about whom surprisingly little is known. In this fascinating biography, the first about Toussaint to appear in English in more than fifty years, Madison Smartt Bell combines a novelist’s passion for his subject with a deep knowledge of the historical milieu that produced the man. Toussaint has been known either as a martyr of the revolution or as the instigator of one of history’s most savagely violent events. Bell shatters this binary perception, producing a clear-eyed picture of a complicated figure. Toussaint, born a slave, became a slaveholder himself, with associates among the white planter class. Bell demonstrates how his privileged position served as both an asset and a liability, enabling him to gain the love of blacks and mulattoes as ‘Papa Toussaint’ but also sowing mistrust in their minds. Another of Bell’s brilliant achievements is demonstrating how Toussaint’s often surprising actions, such as his support for the king of France even as the French Revolution promised an end to slavery and his betrayal of a planned slave revolt in Jamaica, can be explained by his desire to achieve liberation for the blacks of Saint Domingue. This masterly biography is a revelation of one of the most fascinating and important figures in New World history.
Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957 Nashville, Tennessee) is an American novelist. He is known for his trilogy of novels about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, published 1995–2004. Raised in Nashville, Bell lived in New York, and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward Mathis Prize and the Francis Leymoyne Page award, and Hollins University, where he won the Andrew James Purdy fiction award. Bell has taught in various creative writing programs, including the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. Bell is married to the poet Elizabeth Spires and is a professor at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. In addition, he has written essays and reviews for Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice. His papers are held at Princeton.
Nenna and Man-Man keep their father's rifle and guard the plantation when he goes to market in Kingston. Big-Walk is out of prison and living in the bush. He says he wasn't there the dark night Man-Man wounded a coconut thief. So whose blood was that on the tracks? Fanso's note said, "I have a father. Yet I have no father. I have to find my father, mam." Granny-Flo knew there would be trouble when Ossie Blackwell got off the city bus after thirteen years and asked to see his son. She'd sent him packing quick, but now Fanso was gone, too. It was just like any other Sunday. Everyone from the village was down at the shore for the Sunday Animal Sea Bath. Then Puppa's new horse, Misschief, started swimming out to sea - with Young Buddy on her back. ‘a magical collection of stories by the Jamaican poet, James Berry. In sensuous prose that captures the cadences of local speech, Berry makes one hear, see, feel, and smell Jamaica. - Times Literary Supplement.
James Berry (28 September 1924 – 20 June 2017) was a Jamaican poet who settled in England in the 1940s. His poetry is notable for using a mixture of standard English and Jamaican Patois. Berry's writing often ‘explores the relationship between black and white communities and in particular, the excitement and tensions in the evolving relationship of the Caribbean immigrants with Britain and British society from the 1940s onwards’. As the editor of two seminal anthologies, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (1984), he was in the forefront of championing West Indian/British writing.
Set against a Caribbean background, a poem by the award-winning author of Ajeemah and His Son resonates with the cadences of the West Indies as it creates an intimate portrait of Mary and Jesus as Mother and Child.
James Berry (28 September 1924 – 20 June 2017) was a Jamaican poet who settled in England in the 1940s. His poetry is notable for using a mixture of standard English and Jamaican Patois. Berry's writing often ‘explores the relationship between black and white communities and in particular, the excitement and tensions in the evolving relationship of the Caribbean immigrants with Britain and British society from the 1940s onwards’. As the editor of two seminal anthologies, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (1984), he was in the forefront of championing West Indian/British writing.
Rhythmic language and stunning illustrations highlight this original Anancy Spiderman story The wily trickster Anancy Spiderman tries to bribe Sun, Water, Earth, and Air Spirits into creating the world's first palm trees so he can claim the king's reward. He promises to split the prize with the Spirits, offering each fantastic gifts for creating the trees independently. But the Spirits insist they need to work together. Reluctantly Anancy agrees to a partnership with all four Spirits, confident in his ability to trick them and collect the whole reward himself. However, the Spirits' philosophy of cooperation wins out. When the palm trees appear, they are everywhere; the king declares that since the trees are clearly meant for everyone, everyone should share his reward and he hosts a feast for all the villagers. Only later does Anancy get proper credit for helping to bring palm trees to the world.
James Berry (28 September 1924 – 20 June 2017) was a Jamaican poet who settled in England in the 1940s. His poetry is notable for using a mixture of standard English and Jamaican Patois. Berry's writing often ‘explores the relationship between black and white communities and in particular, the excitement and tensions in the evolving relationship of the Caribbean immigrants with Britain and British society from the 1940s onwards’. As the editor of two seminal anthologies, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (1984), he was in the forefront of championing West Indian/British writing.
This masterful collection from Coretta Scott King Award Honor-winning author James Berry fully demonstrates his power and versatility as a storyteller. All six stories emerge vividly from their Jamaican settings to bring a textured portrait of life in the West Indies to young readers. In these varied tales, homesick- ness, tenacity, and inhumanity are explored; a young girl meets up with some picnicking ghosts; a sister worries that the magic she's used on her pesky brother has made him invisible; and the future-telling lady reveals the important position of healers in Jamaican society as she uses her gifts to help troubled families.
James Berry (28 September 1924 – 20 June 2017) was a Jamaican poet who settled in England in the 1940s. His poetry is notable for using a mixture of standard English and Jamaican Patois. Berry's writing often ‘explores the relationship between black and white communities and in particular, the excitement and tensions in the evolving relationship of the Caribbean immigrants with Britain and British society from the 1940s onwards’. As the editor of two seminal anthologies, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (1984), he was in the forefront of championing West Indian/British writing.
A collection of fifty-nine poems for young adults celebrating life in inner-city Britain and in the rural Caribbean.
James Berry (28 September 1924 – 20 June 2017) was a Jamaican poet who settled in England in the 1940s. His poetry is notable for using a mixture of standard English and Jamaican Patois. Berry's writing often ‘explores the relationship between black and white communities and in particular, the excitement and tensions in the evolving relationship of the Caribbean immigrants with Britain and British society from the 1940s onwards’. As the editor of two seminal anthologies, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (1984), he was in the forefront of championing West Indian/British writing.
A Casual Brutality is a powerful, dark novel about the failure of a decent man to come to terms with the moral disintegration of the Caribbean island of his birth. Casaquemada is a fragile West Indian republic divided by racial antagonism, lured into a spurious nationalism by impotent rulers, awash in a mindless consumerism fostered by easy money and a lust for an imported version of the good life. Raj Ramsingh is a Toronto doctor who returns to his native island only to leave it again, having paid a tragic price for his unwillingness to recognize the cruel imperatives of the men who will determine Casaquemada's fate.
Neil Devindra Bissoondath (born April 19, 1955 in Arima, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Canadian author who lives in Ste-Foy, Quebec. He is a noted writer of fiction, and also an outspoken critic of Canada's system of multiculturalism. He is the nephew of authors V.S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul. Bissoondath attended St. Mary's College in Trinidad and Tobago. Although he was from a Hindu tradition, he was able to adapt to a Catholic high school. Bissoondath describes himself as not very religious and distrustful of dogma. In the early Seventies, political upheaval and economic collapse had created a climate of chaos and violence in the island nation. In 1973, at the age of eighteen, Bissoondath left Trinidad and settled in Ontario, where he studied at York University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in French in 1977. He then taught English and French at the Inlingua School of Languages and the Toronto Language Workshop. He won the McClelland and Stewart award and the National Magazine award, both in 1986, for the short story ‘Dancing.’ In 2010 he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre national du Québec.
This dazzling collection of short stories, originally published in 1985, marks the brilliant debut of Neil Bissoondath, a major voice in Canadian fiction. Focusing on contemporary themes of cultural dislocation, revolution, and the shifting politics of the Third World, the stories resonate with Bissoondath's compassion for people threatened by circumstances beyond their control.
Neil Devindra Bissoondath (born April 19, 1955 in Arima, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Canadian author who lives in Ste-Foy, Quebec. He is a noted writer of fiction, and also an outspoken critic of Canada's system of multiculturalism. He is the nephew of authors V.S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul. Bissoondath attended St. Mary's College in Trinidad and Tobago. Although he was from a Hindu tradition, he was able to adapt to a Catholic high school. Bissoondath describes himself as not very religious and distrustful of dogma. In the early Seventies, political upheaval and economic collapse had created a climate of chaos and violence in the island nation. In 1973, at the age of eighteen, Bissoondath left Trinidad and settled in Ontario, where he studied at York University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in French in 1977. He then taught English and French at the Inlingua School of Languages and the Toronto Language Workshop. He won the McClelland and Stewart award and the National Magazine award, both in 1986, for the short story ‘Dancing.’ In 2010 he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre national du Québec.
This dazzling collection of short stories, originally published in 1985, marks the brilliant debut of Neil Bissoondath, a major voice in Canadian fiction. Focusing on contemporary themes of cultural dislocation, revolution, and the shifting politics of the Third World, the stories resonate with Bissoondath's compassion for people threatened by circumstances beyond their control.
Neil Devindra Bissoondath (born April 19, 1955 in Arima, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Canadian author who lives in Ste-Foy, Quebec. He is a noted writer of fiction, and also an outspoken critic of Canada's system of multiculturalism. He is the nephew of authors V.S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul. Bissoondath attended St. Mary's College in Trinidad and Tobago. Although he was from a Hindu tradition, he was able to adapt to a Catholic high school. Bissoondath describes himself as not very religious and distrustful of dogma. In the early Seventies, political upheaval and economic collapse had created a climate of chaos and violence in the island nation. In 1973, at the age of eighteen, Bissoondath left Trinidad and settled in Ontario, where he studied at York University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in French in 1977. He then taught English and French at the Inlingua School of Languages and the Toronto Language Workshop. He won the McClelland and Stewart award and the National Magazine award, both in 1986, for the short story ‘Dancing.’ In 2010 he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre national du Québec.
This dazzling collection of short stories, originally published in 1985, marks the brilliant debut of Neil Bissoondath, a major voice in Canadian fiction. Focusing on contemporary themes of cultural dislocation, revolution, and the shifting politics of the Third World, the stories resonate with Bissoondath's compassion for people threatened by circumstances beyond their control.
Neil Devindra Bissoondath (born April 19, 1955 in Arima, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Canadian author who lives in Ste-Foy, Quebec. He is a noted writer of fiction, and also an outspoken critic of Canada's system of multiculturalism. He is the nephew of authors V.S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul. Bissoondath attended St. Mary's College in Trinidad and Tobago. Although he was from a Hindu tradition, he was able to adapt to a Catholic high school. Bissoondath describes himself as not very religious and distrustful of dogma. In the early Seventies, political upheaval and economic collapse had created a climate of chaos and violence in the island nation. In 1973, at the age of eighteen, Bissoondath left Trinidad and settled in Ontario, where he studied at York University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in French in 1977. He then taught English and French at the Inlingua School of Languages and the Toronto Language Workshop. He won the McClelland and Stewart award and the National Magazine award, both in 1986, for the short story ‘Dancing.’ In 2010 he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre national du Québec.
A collection of short stories told with comic detail and compassion about people's hopes, fears, dreams, and needs.
Neil Devindra Bissoondath (born April 19, 1955 in Arima, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Canadian author who lives in Ste-Foy, Quebec. He is a noted writer of fiction, and also an outspoken critic of Canada's system of multiculturalism. He is the nephew of authors V.S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul. Bissoondath attended St. Mary's College in Trinidad and Tobago. Although he was from a Hindu tradition, he was able to adapt to a Catholic high school. Bissoondath describes himself as not very religious and distrustful of dogma. In the early Seventies, political upheaval and economic collapse had created a climate of chaos and violence in the island nation. In 1973, at the age of eighteen, Bissoondath left Trinidad and settled in Ontario, where he studied at York University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in French in 1977. He then taught English and French at the Inlingua School of Languages and the Toronto Language Workshop. He won the McClelland and Stewart award and the National Magazine award, both in 1986, for the short story ‘Dancing.’ In 2010 he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre national du Québec.
‘Rich in scope and audacious in its critical vision, Creole Renegades incisively advances debates about fundamental aspects of our postcolonial and globalized experiences such as the enigmas of racial passing, creoleness, and returning and leaving 'home.'‘--Anny Dominique Curtius, author of Symbiosis of a Memory. ‘An important book that tackles the phenomenon of exiled Caribbean authors from a new perspective, underscoring their contentious relationship with the home island. Boisseron continues the work of 'decentering' Caribbean studies, moving the locus of analysis from the Antilles or Europe to North America.’--Richard Watts, author of Packaging Post/Coloniality. ‘This insightful approach illuminates important shifts in Caribbean literature and enables Boisseron to make new, essential contributions into the articulation of subjectivities in twenty-first century literary criticism.’--Frieda Ekotto, author of Race and Sex across the French Atlantic. In Creole Renegades, Bénédicte Boisseron looks at exiled Caribbean authors--Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Maryse Condé, Dany Laferriére, and more--whose works have been well received in their adopted North American countries but who are often viewed by their home islands as sell-outs, opportunists, or traitors. These expatriate and second-generation authors refuse to be simple bearers of Caribbean culture, often dramatically distancing themselves from the postcolonial archipelago. Their writing is frequently infused with an enticing sense of cultural, sexual, or racial emancipation, but their deviance is not defiant. Underscoring the typically ignored contentious relationship between modern diaspora authors and the Caribbean, Boisseron ultimately argues that displacement and creative autonomy are often manifest in guilt and betrayal, central themes that emerge again and again in the work of these writers.
Bénédicte Boisseron is associate professor of French and Francophone studies at the University of Montana. She is the coeditor of Voix du monde: Nouvelles francophones..
Presently, two white blossoms floated down, touching her hair, and childish fantasies seized him. Snow - something he. had seen only in the movies - fell from blue clouds like confetti, touching her head and shoulders, falling at her feet. At that moment, Danny's love was sealed. Danny is black. Lily is Indian. They are young and in love, but the cruel realities of life intervene. This is a tender love story set in a Caribbean country at a time of crucial change.
James Bradner is the pseudonym of a Guyanese writer living in London. Widely travelled, he has been writing since the age of 12.
A KIND OF HOMECOMING is both an illuminating portrayal of contemporary Africa and an enthralling account of an experience universal in its appeal-the return to one’s roots. The author is a Negro, born in British Guiana in northeastern South America and educated in New York City and England, who had never seen Africa before visiting Ghana, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. The first three are newly-independent nations while the latter is the world’s oldest Negro republic. Braithwaite talked to government leaders, teachers, tribesmen, old-time colonials, Africans of every station and degree of development . . . as he made his way from the coastal cities to the remote hinterland. As a Negro he associated with the Africans as one of themselves, and yet as a non-African, he was able to view the current African scene objectively and report on it in incisive, human terms. Running through the whole narrative are the reactions of a sensitive, perceptive human being as he probes the lives of people who are shouldering new responsibilities. Here is a close-up, intimate view of the African-groping, building, learning and experimenting-as he searches for a better kind of society and a better way of life in the future. To Braithwaite, the new sights and sounds that he heard in the ancient lands of his ancestors seemed strangely familiar to him and his journey proved to be a special KIND OF HOMECOMING. . E. R. Braithwaite was an air crewman with the R.A.F. during World War II, and later taught white teenagers in London’s cockney East Side. His first book, TO SIR, WITH LOVE, based on his experiences as an English schoolteacher, won the Anisfield-Wolf award in 1961 as an important work on racial relations. Mr. Braithwaite now works for the World Veteran’s Organization in Paris.
Edward Ricardo Braithwaite (born June 27, 1920; some sources state 1912 or 1922) is a Guyanese novelist, writer, teacher, and diplomat, best known for his stories of social conditions and racial discrimination against black people. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana. Braithwaite had a privileged beginning in life: both of his parents went to Oxford University and he describes growing up with education, achievement, and parental pride surrounding him. He attended Queen's College, Guyana and then the City College of New York (1940). During World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot – he would later describe this experience as one where he had felt no discrimination based on his skin colour or ethnicity. He went on to attend the University of Cambridge (1949), from which he earned a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in physics. After the war, like many other ethnic minorities, despite his extensive training, Braithwaite could not find work in his field and, disillusioned, reluctantly took up a job as a schoolteacher in the East End of London. The book To Sir, With Love (1959) was based on his experiences there. While writing his book about the school, Braithwaite turned to social work and it became his job to find foster homes for non-white children for the London County Council. His experiences resulted in his second novel Paid Servant (1962). Braithwaite's numerous writings have primarily dealt with the difficulties of being an educated black man, a black social worker, a black teacher, and simply a human being in inhumane circumstances. His best known book, To Sir, With Love, was made into a 1967 film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier, and adapted for Radio 4 in 2007 starring Kwame Kwei-Armah. Paid Servant was dramatised on Radio 4 the following year, again with Kwei-Armah in the lead role. His 1965 novel Choice of Straws was dramatised in Radio 4's Saturday Play slot in September 2009. In 1973, the South African ban on Braithwaite's books was lifted and he reluctantly applied to visit the country. He was granted a visa and the status 'Honorary White' which gave him significantly more freedom and privileges than the indigenous black population, but less than the whites. He recorded the experiences and horror he witnessed during the six weeks he spent in South Africa in Honorary White (London: The Bodley Head, 1975). Braithwaite continued to write novels and short stories throughout his long international career as an educational consultant and lecturer for UNESCO, permanent representative to the United Nations for Guyana, Guyana's ambassador to Venezuela, and academic. He taught English studies at New York University; in 2002, was writer-in-residence at Howard University, Washington, D.C.; associated himself with Manchester Community College, Connecticut, during the 2005-06 academic year as visiting professor, also serving as commencement speaker and receiving an honorary degree.
In London, racial hatred leads to a mugging, a murder, and a mystery in a powerful novel of intolerance, loss, and self-discovery by the bestselling author ofTo Sir, With Love Identical twins Jack and Dave Bennett enjoy nothing better than a rowdy night out in London—listening to hot jazz, hoisting a few pints, flirting with girls . . . and then finishing off the evening by roughing up a stranger. But one night they ambush the wrong victim, a young black man who fights back. Suddenly bottles break and a knife is drawn, and when it’s over, Jack stumbles home alone—only to awaken the next morning to discover his brother’s bed empty and policemen at the door. The police are investigating a fatal car accident that left two people dead, their bodies burned beyond recognition. One of the dead was apparently the car’s owner, a young black doctor, but the only clue to the second corpse’s identity is a knife engraved with Dave Bennett’s name and address. And no words are spoken of a man found slain in an alley on the other side of town. With his life brutally upended, Jack finds that his search for answers is drawing him closer to the dead doctor’s beautiful sister, Michelle, and causing him to question everything he’s ever believed about race, justice, family, and the violent urban world around him.
Edward Ricardo Braithwaite (born June 27, 1920; some sources state 1912 or 1922) is a Guyanese novelist, writer, teacher, and diplomat, best known for his stories of social conditions and racial discrimination against black people. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana. Braithwaite had a privileged beginning in life: both of his parents went to Oxford University and he describes growing up with education, achievement, and parental pride surrounding him. He attended Queen's College, Guyana and then the City College of New York (1940). During World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot – he would later describe this experience as one where he had felt no discrimination based on his skin colour or ethnicity. He went on to attend the University of Cambridge (1949), from which he earned a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in physics. After the war, like many other ethnic minorities, despite his extensive training, Braithwaite could not find work in his field and, disillusioned, reluctantly took up a job as a schoolteacher in the East End of London. The book To Sir, With Love (1959) was based on his experiences there. While writing his book about the school, Braithwaite turned to social work and it became his job to find foster homes for non-white children for the London County Council. His experiences resulted in his second novel Paid Servant (1962). Braithwaite's numerous writings have primarily dealt with the difficulties of being an educated black man, a black social worker, a black teacher, and simply a human being in inhumane circumstances. His best known book, To Sir, With Love, was made into a 1967 film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier, and adapted for Radio 4 in 2007 starring Kwame Kwei-Armah. Paid Servant was dramatised on Radio 4 the following year, again with Kwei-Armah in the lead role. His 1965 novel Choice of Straws was dramatised in Radio 4's Saturday Play slot in September 2009. In 1973, the South African ban on Braithwaite's books was lifted and he reluctantly applied to visit the country. He was granted a visa and the status 'Honorary White' which gave him significantly more freedom and privileges than the indigenous black population, but less than the whites. He recorded the experiences and horror he witnessed during the six weeks he spent in South Africa in Honorary White (London: The Bodley Head, 1975). Braithwaite continued to write novels and short stories throughout his long international career as an educational consultant and lecturer for UNESCO, permanent representative to the United Nations for Guyana, Guyana's ambassador to Venezuela, and academic. He taught English studies at New York University; in 2002, was writer-in-residence at Howard University, Washington, D.C.; associated himself with Manchester Community College, Connecticut, during the 2005-06 academic year as visiting professor, also serving as commencement speaker and receiving an honorary degree.
E. R. Braithwaite chronicles the brutality, oppression, and courage he witnessed as a black man granted "Honorary White" status during a six-week visit to apartheid South Africa As a black man living in a white-dominated world, author E. R. Braithwaite was painfully aware of the multitude of injustices suffered by people of color and he wrote powerfully and poignantly about racial discrimination in his acclaimed novels and nonfiction works. So it came as a complete surprise when, in 1973, the longstanding ban on his books was lifted by the South African government, a ruling body of minority whites that brutally oppressed the black majority through apartheid laws. Applying for a visa—and secretly hoping to be refused—he was granted the official status of "Honorary White" for the length of his stay. As such, Braithwaite would be afforded some of the freedoms that South Africa’s black population was denied, yet would nonetheless be considered inferior by the white establishment. With Honorary White, Braithwaite bears witness to a dark and troubling time, relating with grave honesty and power the shocking abuses, inequities, and horrors he observed and experienced firsthand during his six-week stay in a criminal nation. His book is a personal testament to the savagery of apartheid and to the courage of those who refused to be broken by it.
Edward Ricardo Braithwaite (born June 27, 1920; some sources state 1912 or 1922) is a Guyanese novelist, writer, teacher, and diplomat, best known for his stories of social conditions and racial discrimination against black people. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana. Braithwaite had a privileged beginning in life: both of his parents went to Oxford University and he describes growing up with education, achievement, and parental pride surrounding him. He attended Queen's College, Guyana and then the City College of New York (1940). During World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot – he would later describe this experience as one where he had felt no discrimination based on his skin colour or ethnicity. He went on to attend the University of Cambridge (1949), from which he earned a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in physics. After the war, like many other ethnic minorities, despite his extensive training, Braithwaite could not find work in his field and, disillusioned, reluctantly took up a job as a schoolteacher in the East End of London. The book To Sir, With Love (1959) was based on his experiences there. While writing his book about the school, Braithwaite turned to social work and it became his job to find foster homes for non-white children for the London County Council. His experiences resulted in his second novel Paid Servant (1962). Braithwaite's numerous writings have primarily dealt with the difficulties of being an educated black man, a black social worker, a black teacher, and simply a human being in inhumane circumstances. His best known book, To Sir, With Love, was made into a 1967 film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier, and adapted for Radio 4 in 2007 starring Kwame Kwei-Armah. Paid Servant was dramatised on Radio 4 the following year, again with Kwei-Armah in the lead role. His 1965 novel Choice of Straws was dramatised in Radio 4's Saturday Play slot in September 2009. In 1973, the South African ban on Braithwaite's books was lifted and he reluctantly applied to visit the country. He was granted a visa and the status 'Honorary White' which gave him significantly more freedom and privileges than the indigenous black population, but less than the whites. He recorded the experiences and horror he witnessed during the six weeks he spent in South Africa in Honorary White (London: The Bodley Head, 1975). Braithwaite continued to write novels and short stories throughout his long international career as an educational consultant and lecturer for UNESCO, permanent representative to the United Nations for Guyana, Guyana's ambassador to Venezuela, and academic. He taught English studies at New York University; in 2002, was writer-in-residence at Howard University, Washington, D.C.; associated himself with Manchester Community College, Connecticut, during the 2005-06 academic year as visiting professor, also serving as commencement speaker and receiving an honorary degree.
E. R. Braithwaite chronicles the brutality, oppression, and courage he witnessed as a black man granted "Honorary White" status during a six-week visit to apartheid South Africa As a black man living in a white-dominated world, author E. R. Braithwaite was painfully aware of the multitude of injustices suffered by people of color and he wrote powerfully and poignantly about racial discrimination in his acclaimed novels and nonfiction works. So it came as a complete surprise when, in 1973, the longstanding ban on his books was lifted by the South African government, a ruling body of minority whites that brutally oppressed the black majority through apartheid laws. Applying for a visa—and secretly hoping to be refused—he was granted the official status of "Honorary White" for the length of his stay. As such, Braithwaite would be afforded some of the freedoms that South Africa’s black population was denied, yet would nonetheless be considered inferior by the white establishment. With Honorary White, Braithwaite bears witness to a dark and troubling time, relating with grave honesty and power the shocking abuses, inequities, and horrors he observed and experienced firsthand during his six-week stay in a criminal nation. His book is a personal testament to the savagery of apartheid and to the courage of those who refused to be broken by it.
Edward Ricardo Braithwaite (born June 27, 1920; some sources state 1912 or 1922) is a Guyanese novelist, writer, teacher, and diplomat, best known for his stories of social conditions and racial discrimination against black people. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana. Braithwaite had a privileged beginning in life: both of his parents went to Oxford University and he describes growing up with education, achievement, and parental pride surrounding him. He attended Queen's College, Guyana and then the City College of New York (1940). During World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot – he would later describe this experience as one where he had felt no discrimination based on his skin colour or ethnicity. He went on to attend the University of Cambridge (1949), from which he earned a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in physics. After the war, like many other ethnic minorities, despite his extensive training, Braithwaite could not find work in his field and, disillusioned, reluctantly took up a job as a schoolteacher in the East End of London. The book To Sir, With Love (1959) was based on his experiences there. While writing his book about the school, Braithwaite turned to social work and it became his job to find foster homes for non-white children for the London County Council. His experiences resulted in his second novel Paid Servant (1962). Braithwaite's numerous writings have primarily dealt with the difficulties of being an educated black man, a black social worker, a black teacher, and simply a human being in inhumane circumstances. His best known book, To Sir, With Love, was made into a 1967 film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier, and adapted for Radio 4 in 2007 starring Kwame Kwei-Armah. Paid Servant was dramatised on Radio 4 the following year, again with Kwei-Armah in the lead role. His 1965 novel Choice of Straws was dramatised in Radio 4's Saturday Play slot in September 2009. In 1973, the South African ban on Braithwaite's books was lifted and he reluctantly applied to visit the country. He was granted a visa and the status 'Honorary White' which gave him significantly more freedom and privileges than the indigenous black population, but less than the whites. He recorded the experiences and horror he witnessed during the six weeks he spent in South Africa in Honorary White (London: The Bodley Head, 1975). Braithwaite continued to write novels and short stories throughout his long international career as an educational consultant and lecturer for UNESCO, permanent representative to the United Nations for Guyana, Guyana's ambassador to Venezuela, and academic. He taught English studies at New York University; in 2002, was writer-in-residence at Howard University, Washington, D.C.; associated himself with Manchester Community College, Connecticut, during the 2005-06 academic year as visiting professor, also serving as commencement speaker and receiving an honorary degree.
In Paid Servant, E. R. Braithwaite shares his experiences in London’s Department of Child Welfare, focusing on the case of his four-year-old client Roddy, a bright, handsome mulatto boy who was rejected for adoption by both black and white families because he was not their own kind. Everywhere he turned, Braithwaite encountered racial prejudice. But he was willing to fight for what he believed in, and he believed in Roddy. Writing with great power, warmth, and a deep belief in human dignity and worth, Braithwaite offers a heartbreaking yet hopeful look into a society’s attempt to care for its youngest, most vulnerable citizens.
Edward Ricardo Braithwaite (born June 27, 1920; some sources state 1912 or 1922) is a Guyanese novelist, writer, teacher, and diplomat, best known for his stories of social conditions and racial discrimination against black people. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana. Braithwaite had a privileged beginning in life: both of his parents went to Oxford University and he describes growing up with education, achievement, and parental pride surrounding him. He attended Queen's College, Guyana and then the City College of New York (1940). During World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot – he would later describe this experience as one where he had felt no discrimination based on his skin colour or ethnicity. He went on to attend the University of Cambridge (1949), from which he earned a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in physics. After the war, like many other ethnic minorities, despite his extensive training, Braithwaite could not find work in his field and, disillusioned, reluctantly took up a job as a schoolteacher in the East End of London. The book To Sir, With Love (1959) was based on his experiences there. While writing his book about the school, Braithwaite turned to social work and it became his job to find foster homes for non-white children for the London County Council. His experiences resulted in his second novel Paid Servant (1962). Braithwaite's numerous writings have primarily dealt with the difficulties of being an educated black man, a black social worker, a black teacher, and simply a human being in inhumane circumstances. His best known book, To Sir, With Love, was made into a 1967 film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier, and adapted for Radio 4 in 2007 starring Kwame Kwei-Armah. Paid Servant was dramatised on Radio 4 the following year, again with Kwei-Armah in the lead role. His 1965 novel Choice of Straws was dramatised in Radio 4's Saturday Play slot in September 2009. In 1973, the South African ban on Braithwaite's books was lifted and he reluctantly applied to visit the country. He was granted a visa and the status 'Honorary White' which gave him significantly more freedom and privileges than the indigenous black population, but less than the whites. He recorded the experiences and horror he witnessed during the six weeks he spent in South Africa in Honorary White (London: The Bodley Head, 1975). Braithwaite continued to write novels and short stories throughout his long international career as an educational consultant and lecturer for UNESCO, permanent representative to the United Nations for Guyana, Guyana's ambassador to Venezuela, and academic. He taught English studies at New York University; in 2002, was writer-in-residence at Howard University, Washington, D.C.; associated himself with Manchester Community College, Connecticut, during the 2005-06 academic year as visiting professor, also serving as commencement speaker and receiving an honorary degree.
In Paid Servant, E. R. Braithwaite shares his experiences in London’s Department of Child Welfare, focusing on the case of his four-year-old client Roddy, a bright, handsome mulatto boy who was rejected for adoption by both black and white families because he was not their own kind. Everywhere he turned, Braithwaite encountered racial prejudice. But he was willing to fight for what he believed in, and he believed in Roddy. Writing with great power, warmth, and a deep belief in human dignity and worth, Braithwaite offers a heartbreaking yet hopeful look into a society’s attempt to care for its youngest, most vulnerable citizens.
Edward Ricardo Braithwaite (born June 27, 1920; some sources state 1912 or 1922) is a Guyanese novelist, writer, teacher, and diplomat, best known for his stories of social conditions and racial discrimination against black people. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana. Braithwaite had a privileged beginning in life: both of his parents went to Oxford University and he describes growing up with education, achievement, and parental pride surrounding him. He attended Queen's College, Guyana and then the City College of New York (1940). During World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot – he would later describe this experience as one where he had felt no discrimination based on his skin colour or ethnicity. He went on to attend the University of Cambridge (1949), from which he earned a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in physics. After the war, like many other ethnic minorities, despite his extensive training, Braithwaite could not find work in his field and, disillusioned, reluctantly took up a job as a schoolteacher in the East End of London. The book To Sir, With Love (1959) was based on his experiences there. While writing his book about the school, Braithwaite turned to social work and it became his job to find foster homes for non-white children for the London County Council. His experiences resulted in his second novel Paid Servant (1962). Braithwaite's numerous writings have primarily dealt with the difficulties of being an educated black man, a black social worker, a black teacher, and simply a human being in inhumane circumstances. His best known book, To Sir, With Love, was made into a 1967 film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier, and adapted for Radio 4 in 2007 starring Kwame Kwei-Armah. Paid Servant was dramatised on Radio 4 the following year, again with Kwei-Armah in the lead role. His 1965 novel Choice of Straws was dramatised in Radio 4's Saturday Play slot in September 2009. In 1973, the South African ban on Braithwaite's books was lifted and he reluctantly applied to visit the country. He was granted a visa and the status 'Honorary White' which gave him significantly more freedom and privileges than the indigenous black population, but less than the whites. He recorded the experiences and horror he witnessed during the six weeks he spent in South Africa in Honorary White (London: The Bodley Head, 1975). Braithwaite continued to write novels and short stories throughout his long international career as an educational consultant and lecturer for UNESCO, permanent representative to the United Nations for Guyana, Guyana's ambassador to Venezuela, and academic. He taught English studies at New York University; in 2002, was writer-in-residence at Howard University, Washington, D.C.; associated himself with Manchester Community College, Connecticut, during the 2005-06 academic year as visiting professor, also serving as commencement speaker and receiving an honorary degree.
TO SIR, WITH LOVE is a 1959 autobiographical novel by E. R. Braithwaite set in the East End of London. The novel is based on true events concerned with Braithwaite taking up a teaching post in a school there. The novel was made into a film in 1967. The novel was adapted for radio and broadcast in two parts on BBC Radio 4 in 2007 starring Kwame Kwei-Armah. Ricardo 'Ricky' Braithwaite is a British Guiana-born engineer who has worked in the USA and an oil refinery in Aruba. Coming to Britain on the verge of World War Two, he joines the RAF as aircrew. Demobbed in 1945, he is unable to find work, despite his qualifications and experience, meeting overt anti-black attitudes. But after discussing his situation with a stranger whose name he never learns, he applies for a teaching position and is assigned to a secondary school in London's East End. Most of the pupils in his class are totally unmotivated to learn and largely semi-literate and semi-articulate. But he persists, despite finding that they are unresponsive to his approach. Braithwaite decides to try a new approach, and sets some ground rules. The students will be leaving school soon, and will enter an adult society, so he will treat them as adults, and allow them to decide what topics they wish to study. In return, he demands their respect as their teacher. This novel approach is initially rejected, but within a few weeks, the class is largely won over. He suggests out-of-school activities, including visits to museums, which the kids have never thought about before. A young teacher, Gillian Blanchard, volunteers to assist him on these trips. Some of the girls start to speculate whether a personal relationship is budding between Braithwaite and Gillian. The trip is a success and more are approved by the initially skeptical Head. The teachers and the Student Council openly discuss all matters affecting the school and what is being taught. The general feeling is that Braithwaite's approach is working, although some teachers still advocate a tougher approach to the kids. The mother of one of the girls comes to speak to Braithwaite, feeling that he has more influence than she has with her impressionable daughter, who is staying out late and might be getting into trouble. Even teacher Mr. Weston, who had disapproved of Braithwaite's attitude to his class, now openly admits that the latter is a gifted teacher, and should reconsider leaving for an engineering job. In the meantime, Braithwaite and Gillian are deeply in love and are discussing marriage. Her parents are openly disapproving of a 'mixed-race' marriage, but realize that they're serious and both intelligent people who know what they are doing. Braithwaite is offered an engineering position and rejects it to continue teaching.
Edward Ricardo Braithwaite (born June 27, 1920; some sources state 1912 or 1922) is a Guyanese novelist, writer, teacher, and diplomat, best known for his stories of social conditions and racial discrimination against black people. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana. Braithwaite had a privileged beginning in life: both of his parents went to Oxford University and he describes growing up with education, achievement, and parental pride surrounding him. He attended Queen's College, Guyana and then the City College of New York (1940). During World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force as a pilot – he would later describe this experience as one where he had felt no discrimination based on his skin colour or ethnicity. He went on to attend the University of Cambridge (1949), from which he earned a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in physics. After the war, like many other ethnic minorities, despite his extensive training, Braithwaite could not find work in his field and, disillusioned, reluctantly took up a job as a schoolteacher in the East End of London. The book To Sir, With Love (1959) was based on his experiences there. While writing his book about the school, Braithwaite turned to social work and it became his job to find foster homes for non-white children for the London County Council. His experiences resulted in his second novel Paid Servant (1962). Braithwaite's numerous writings have primarily dealt with the difficulties of being an educated black man, a black social worker, a black teacher, and simply a human being in inhumane circumstances. His best known book, To Sir, With Love, was made into a 1967 film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier, and adapted for Radio 4 in 2007 starring Kwame Kwei-Armah. Paid Servant was dramatised on Radio 4 the following year, again with Kwei-Armah in the lead role. His 1965 novel Choice of Straws was dramatised in Radio 4's Saturday Play slot in September 2009. In 1973, the South African ban on Braithwaite's books was lifted and he reluctantly applied to visit the country. He was granted a visa and the status 'Honorary White' which gave him significantly more freedom and privileges than the indigenous black population, but less than the whites. He recorded the experiences and horror he witnessed during the six weeks he spent in South Africa in Honorary White (London: The Bodley Head, 1975). Braithwaite continued to write novels and short stories throughout his long international career as an educational consultant and lecturer for UNESCO, permanent representative to the United Nations for Guyana, Guyana's ambassador to Venezuela, and academic. He taught English studies at New York University; in 2002, was writer-in-residence at Howard University, Washington, D.C.; associated himself with Manchester Community College, Connecticut, during the 2005-06 academic year as visiting professor, also serving as commencement speaker and receiving an honorary degree.
The third part of Edward Brathwaite’s trilogy of poems about the Negro’s encounter with the New World interweaves the past and present of his Caribbean homeland-its natural beauty, its violent history, the values that sustain its people-into a vigorous and distinctive poetic statement. The theme of Islands is given in the opening poem, with its ‘bridges of sound’ spanning the seas between Nairobi and New York, where the ‘dark men float ‘round and round in the bright bubbled bowl’ of the great city. Against this rootlessness the poet reasserts the faith and wisdom of his islanders, their folk-memory of Africa, which he feels to be the core of their existence. Using their dreams and vibrant images-the presence of their Afro-Caribbean gods Ogun, Lcgba, Ananse; and the streets, harbours, shacks, and tourist havens of their material world-he defines the predicament of the modern black man, torn between old and new. A native of Barbados, Edward Brathwaite spent over a decade in Europe, America, and Africa, returning home in 1962. The earlier books of his trilogy embodied his recognition Of the ex-slaves’ lack of hope in a world dominated by their former masters, and his exploration of his African inheritance. In Islands he mines the spiritual resources of this heritage. The five parts of the poem emphasize closely related aspects of the West Indian social, political, and religious consciousness. ‘New World’ portrays the fertile, waiting, Caribbean. ‘Limbo’ undertakes a simultaneous journey into the Caribbean soil and psyche, and seeks out the possibilities of rebirth or transformation. ‘Rebellion’ centres upon political reactions to the new freedom from ‘that fear, that hope, that protest that was our common ground’. The poem then moves surely towards the poet’s particular insights into the present as nexus of what has been and may be, as the old gods walk side by side with the islanders. Linking these themes and figures are recurrent drum rhythms and an intricate network of metaphor and symbol. ‘ From the reviews - RIGHTS OF PASSAGE . . . . a West Indian poet of great panache and exuberance . . . equally at home with experimental and traditional forms. The particular vitality of Rights of Passage is nearer to the American than to the English tradition, but different from either. It bears out the poet’s belief that the Caribbean literature exists now in its own right.’ Critical Quarterly . . . MASKS - ‘A sophisticated tough intelligence saturates the archetypal material. His technique dazzles, and through the handling of rhythm and image he makes the world his own, and ours.’ The Sunday Times. . Edward Brathwaite has been awarded a Poetry Bursary by the Arts Council of Great Britain and now teaches at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. Rights of Passage was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Masks, paper covers according to Poetry magazine, ‘captures the authenticity of primitive African rituals. The author is totally immersed both in the expressive resources of the English tongue and in the firsthand spiritual dynamics of primitive living-a rare combination of proficiencies. .
Edward Kamau Brathwaite (born 11 May 1930, Bridgetown, Barbados) is widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. A professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite is the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses. Brathwaite holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex (1968) and was the co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). He received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships in 1983, and is a winner of the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize for poetry, and the 1999 Charity Randall Citation for Performance and Written Poetry from the International Poetry Forum. Brathwaite is noted for his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970); The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens (1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984), the publication of which established him as the authority of note on nation language.
ANCESTORS startlingly reinvents one of the most important long poems of our hemisphere. Here in a single volume is Kamau Brathwaite’s long unavailable, landmark trilogy - Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self (1977, 1982, and 1987) - now completely revised and expanded by the author. With its ‘Video Sycorax’ typographic inventions and linguistic play, Ancestors liberates both the language and the new-Caliban vision of the poet. In its fresh and more experimental form the trilogy embodies the recapture (what the poet has called the ‘intercovety’) of Brathwaite’s African/Caribbean ancestry as a possession of power and renewal, even as it plumbs the deep tonalities of enslavement, oppression, and colonial dispossession. Born in Barbados in 1930, scholar, poet, and historian Kamau Brathwaite is the author of scores of books. He won the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and has twice received the Casa de las Americas Prize.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite (born 11 May 1930, Bridgetown, Barbados) is widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. A professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite is the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses. Brathwaite holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex (1968) and was the co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). He received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships in 1983, and is a winner of the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize for poetry, and the 1999 Charity Randall Citation for Performance and Written Poetry from the International Poetry Forum. Brathwaite is noted for his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970); The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens (1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984), the publication of which established him as the authority of note on nation language.
‘The printed word doesn’t rise much closer to singing than in the work of Barbadian troubadour Kamau Brathwalte . . . . Brathwaite’s voice is as fierce as it is musical. He charges words with unmistakable voltage, and brands them on our tongues. Perched as we are between an Old World Order and the New, this is just the kind of poetry Williams had in mind when he said that men die for the lack of what Is to be found there.’ - The Village Voice Literary Supplement. Kamau Brathwaite, who won the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, has revised his celebrated 1979 Casa de las Americas collection, Black + Blues, for its first edition by a U.S. publisher. A rich and beautiful collection, BLACK + BLUES is cast in three parts—‘Fragments,’ ‘Drought,’ and ‘Flowers.’ In Brathwaite’s voice, as The Beloit Poetry Journal noted, ‘the false distinctions between poetry and polemic, between tragic vision and comic insight, between anger and tenderness, here disappear. At last a major poet of our troubled history and troubling time is available to readers in this country.’ ‘His dazzling, inventive language, his tragic yet unquenchable vision,’ as Adrienne Rich declared, ‘make Kamau Brathwaite one of the most compelling of late 20th century poets.’
Edward Kamau Brathwaite (born 11 May 1930, Bridgetown, Barbados) is widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. A professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite is the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses. Brathwaite holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex (1968) and was the co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). He received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships in 1983, and is a winner of the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize for poetry, and the 1999 Charity Randall Citation for Performance and Written Poetry from the International Poetry Forum. Brathwaite is noted for his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970); The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens (1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984), the publication of which established him as the authority of note on nation language.
Middle Passages is an offshoot of the author's second trilogy, 'a splice of time and space', as he puts it, between his/father's world of Sun Poem and 'the magical irrealism' of X/Self. With his other 'shorter' collections Black + Blues and Third World Poems, Middle Passages creates a kind of chisel which may well lead us into a projected third trilogy. Here is a political angle to Brathwaite's Caribbean and New World quest, with new notes of protest and lament. It marks a Sisyphean stage of Third World history in which things fall apart and everyone's achievements come tumbling back down upon their heads and into their hearts, like the great stone which King Sisyphus was condemned to keep heaving back up the same hill in hell-a postmodernist implosion already signalled by Baldwin, Patterson, Soyinka and Achebe and more negatively by V.S. Naipaul; but given a new dimension here by Brathwaite's rhythmical and 'video' affirmations. And so Middle Passages includes poems for those modern heroes who are the pegs by which the mountain must be climbed again: Maroon resistance, the poets Nicolas Guillen, the Cuban revolutionary, and Mikey Smith, stoned to death on Stony Hill; the great musicians (Ellington, Bessie Smith); and Third World leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney and Nelson Mandela.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite (born 11 May 1930, Bridgetown, Barbados) is widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon.
‘When EKB came face to face with the unimaginable news on 26 May that his wife Doris Monica was terminally ill he started an ms diary which he kept helplessly & spasmodically until she died on her birthday 7 September after which to the day of her Tree Planting 12 October during what he calls The Time of Salt he wrote a series of Letters to Mary Morgan his sister. . .’ ‘[When Sheila stripped her down to sponge her & xamine her. her naked body stretched there on the bed was as beautiful & as desirable as ever. i cd have made love to her that Sunday morning felt that accustomed leap of love the golden warm & copper colour skin the plump & curves that I have so long known & loved my darling Mexican]’. . . ‘If she should die-go from me now-why why why why-I know I will not only lose my life my love my love-my very very very friend-and there are o too few of these-I may forever lose the light. . .’ - Kamau Brathwaite. . . ‘How important this personal view of the poet, the man, the philosopher, the romantic will be for the Brathwaite scholar! . . . Simply the most riveting, most poetic, most beautifully rendered autobiographical narrative that I’ve read in a long time. . . To read Zea is more than simply to peruse a manuscript-it is to participate in a ritual.’ - Daryl Cumber Dance, author of New World Adams: Conversations with Contemporary West Indian Writers. . . ‘It is a tragic irony that this tragedy that made you write this Diary should become your finest poem.’ - Gordon Rohler, author of Pathfinder: A Study of The Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite (born 11 May 1930, Bridgetown, Barbados) is widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. A professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite is the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses. Brathwaite holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex (1968) and was the co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). He received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships in 1983, and is a winner of the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize for poetry, and the 1999 Charity Randall Citation for Performance and Written Poetry from the International Poetry Forum. Brathwaite is noted for his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970); The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens (1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984), the publication of which established him as the authority of note on nation language.
Expanded from the original poem which appeared in Hambone 10 in 1991. "Typeset in Brathwaite's trademark Sycorax video-print style, TRENCH TOWN ROCK is a harrowing account of violence in modern-day Jamaica. TRENCH TOWN ROCK, Kamau Brathwaite's long documentarian song, affords insistent 'nansic spin—a splay of clips, massed facts and faces, rare synaesthetic call and cry rolled into brash typographic distraint."—Nathaniel Mackey.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite (born 11 May 1930, Bridgetown, Barbados) is widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. A professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite is the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses. Brathwaite holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex (1968) and was the co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). He received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships in 1983, and is a winner of the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize for poetry, and the 1999 Charity Randall Citation for Performance and Written Poetry from the International Poetry Forum. Brathwaite is noted for his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970); The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens (1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984), the publication of which established him as the authority of note on nation language.
In the beginning was the word; and the word was made flesh. But before the word, before sound, there was silence. The silence of dreams; the silence of memory, or ‘that awesome moment of wonder in which communion is made with the spiritual,’’ as Michael Dash would put it. The silence of Xângo before he rolls out his tongue of thunder to announce the rain. The cold silence of the anvil before Ogun pounds his hammer on it to mould iron into sword. No other Caribbean poet, living or dead, understands that silence, makes us participants in, and co-celebrants of the liturgy of the word, than Kamau Brathwaite. ‘What the poet seems to be doing is linking a fundamentally religious notion with the process of artistic creativity,’ writes Dash, in his critical appraisal of Brathwaite’s works. Indeed, Brathwaite in this his latest collection of poems, Words need love too, invites us, not just to witness that process of artistic creativity, but to be co-creators of a new cosmos, a new genesis on these ‘rolling stones of the sea that gather no moss.’ To enter this new world, to claim this new garden, we must return to the time and space before the word. In other words, we must recapture the silence that precedes and announces the word and is later made into the word itself. Here we are in the womb of memory where dreams are born; the darkest moment before dawn, before light is born. Herein lies the ‘secret power’ of the word, ‘the atomic core of language.’ Brathwaite, the poet, becomes a nuclear word-physicist, splitting the atom-words into neutrons, into neutrons of dreams, and from the fission he fashions a fusion that makes the inner power of the word-idea erupt like a volcano.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite (born 11 May 1930, Bridgetown, Barbados) is widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. A professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite is the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses. Brathwaite holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex (1968) and was the co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). He received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships in 1983, and is a winner of the 1994 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize for poetry, and the 1999 Charity Randall Citation for Performance and Written Poetry from the International Poetry Forum. Brathwaite is noted for his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970); The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (1971); Contradictory Omens (1974); Afternoon of the Status Crow (1982); and History of the Voice (1984), the publication of which established him as the authority of note on nation language.
'Theoretically sound and well researched. Braziel has written a compelling book on the literatures of post-Duvalier Haiti.'--Millery Polyné, New York University. 'A very original study, a tour-de-force that crisscrosses the disciplinary boundaries typically separating the social sciences and the humanities. It is richly researched, beautifully written, and will surely attract much critical attention and praise.'--Valerie Kaussen, University of Missouri. From a position of urgent political engagement, this provocative book offers novel and compelling interpretations of several well-known Haitian-born authors, particularly regarding U.S. intervention in their homeland. Drawing on the diasporic cultural texts of several authors, such as Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière, Jana Evans Braziel examines how writers participate in transnational movements for global social justice. In their fictional works they discuss the U.S.’s many interventionist methods in Haiti, including surveillance, foreign aid, and military assistance. Through their work, they reveal that the majority of Haitians do not welcome these intrusions and actively criticize U.S. treatment of Haitians in both countries. Braziel encourages us to analyze the instability and violence of small nations like Haiti within the larger frame of international financial and military institutions and forms of imperialism. She forcefully argues that by reading these works as anti-imperialist, much can be learned about why Haitians and Haitian exiles often have negative perceptions of the U.S.
Jana Evans Braziel is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Cincinnati. She has authored or edited several books, including Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader and Caribbean Genesis: Jamaica Kincaid and the Writing of New Worlds.
Edouard Glissant has written extensively in French about the colonial experience in the Caribbean. Since he is known primarily as a novelist and poet, his theoretical essays have so far remained largely unread by the English-language theorists in this field. This book situates Glissant within ongoing debates in postcolonial theory, making illuminating connections between his work and that of Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Focusing on language and subjectivity, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory moves between an analysis of Glissant's theoretical work and detailed readings of his novels to elucidate a network of related issues. Celia Britton addresses the major themes central to his writing?the reappropriation of history, standard and vernacular language, hybridity, subalternity, the problematizing of identity, and the colonial construction of the Other?and asks provocative questions relating to each. How does the colonized subject relate to a language initially imposed by the colonizer but subsequently, to some extent, subverted and reappropriated? How does this strategic use of language come to function as a crucial mode of cultural resistance? What role can fictional representation play in this process? This book represents the first presentation of Glissant's incisive theoretical work and analysis of his immensely powerful and subtle novels in the context of postcolonial studies. By juxtaposing them, Britton illuminates the significant contribution Glissant has made to this theoretical endeavor.
Celia Margaret Britton (born 20 March 1946) is a British scholar of French Caribbean literature and thought. She was Carnegie Professor of French at the University of Aberdeen from 1991 to 2002 and Professor of French at University College London from 2003 to 2011. She had previously lectured at King's College London and the University of Reading. Britton was born on 20 March 1946 to James Nimmo Britton and Jessie Muriel Britton. She studied modern and medieval languages at New Hall, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1969; as per tradition, her BA was later promoted to a Master of Arts (MA Cantab) degree. Remaining at New Hall, she studied for a postgraduate diploma in linguistics which she completed in 1970. She then moved to the University of Essex where she undertook postgraduate research in literary stylistics, and she completed her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1973. From 1972 to 1974, while still studying for her doctorate, Britton was a temporary lecturer in French at King's College London. From 1974 to 1991, she was a lecturer in French studies at the University of Reading. Then, from 1991 to 2002, she was Carnegie Professor of French at the University of Aberdeen. Her final position before retirement was a Professor of French at University College London, which she held between 2003 and 2011. In 2011, she retired from full-time academia and was appointed an Emeritus Professor. Britton's research focuses on French Caribbean literature and thought. She has published work on Édouard Glissant, a Martinican writer, Frantz Fanon, a Martinique-born philosopher and writer, and Maryse Condé, a Guadeloupean author. Britton has research interests in postcolonial theory, the Nouveau Roman, and ethnography. In 2000, Britton was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. In 2003, she was appointed a Chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government.
A taste of the energy, commitment and talent of a whole new wave of Caribbean writing is offered in this anthology. Acting as a forum for both up-and-coming and internationally acclaimed writers, Caribbean New Wave is compiled of stories grounded in the lived experience of the contemporary Caribbean. The authors represented here have built on the achievements of names such as V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon and Wilson Harris who all rode the first wave to break on the literary shores of Britain and America in the 1950s and 60s, finding that the medium of the short story provided them with the ideal ‘way of saying’ for their particular concerns and audience. Many of the writers in this collection were not even born when the first ‘wave’ broke, most were unknown ten years ago and even those who have made international reputations — James Berry, Jamaica Kincaid, Earl Lovelace, Olive Senior for example — have essentially done so in the last decade. Delving into aspects of adolescence as well as adulthood domesticity as well as social and cultural change, the authors all express particular concerns with a passion which can only evolve from true life experience and, as a result, each tale is easily accessible to a wide audience throughout modern society. New Wave offers a good ‘way in’ to Caribbean writing for people reading Caribbean literature for the first time, and, for serious students of Caribbean life and letters, it provides a unique insight into ‘life’ in the Caribbean today.
DR. STEWART BROWN studied Fine Art and Literature at Falmouth School of Art, Sussex University and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Between times he worked and travelled in the Caribbean and West Africa, lecturing for three years at Bayero University, Kano, in northern Nigeria. He is presently lecturer in African and Caribbean literature at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. He has published two collections of his own poetry, ZINDER (1986) and LUGARD’S BRIDGE (1989) (both from Seren Books) and edited two poetry anthologies, CARIBBEAN POETRY NOW (Hodder & Stoughton, 1984) and, with Mervyn Morris and Gordon Rohlehr, VOICEPRINT (Longman, 1989). He has also published many essays and reviews of African and Caribbean writing in English in literary and academic journals, and in 1989 produced an introductory guide to African writing: WRITERS FROM AFRICA, published by Book Trust.
Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean depicts the human drama in which enslaved Africans struggled against their enslavers and environment, and one another. The book reorients Atlantic slavery studies by revealing how social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies reflected an unrelenting fight to survive. Atlantic slave societies were notorious deathtraps. In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another. Grounded in the nineteenth-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave societies and the last frontier of slavery in the British Caribbean, Browne argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to resist or escape slavery but simply how to stay alive. Guided by the voices of hundreds of enslaved people preserved in an extraordinary set of legal records, Browne reveals a world of Caribbean slavery that is both brutal and breathtakingly intimate. Field laborers invoked abolitionist-inspired legal reforms to protest brutal floggings, spiritual healers conducted secretive nighttime rituals, anxious drivers weighed the competing pressures of managers and the condition of their fellow slaves in the fields, and women fought back against abusive masters and husbands. Browne shows that at the core of enslaved people's complicated relationships with their enslavers and one another was the struggle to live in a world of death. Provocative and unflinching, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean reorients the study of Atlantic slavery by revealing how differently enslaved people's social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies appear when seen in the light of their unrelenting struggle to survive.
Randy M. Browne teaches history at Xavier University.
The author fuses world history with family memoir in this fascinating novel about the experiences of the author's grandfather, a German pharmacist and botanist who emigrates to Haiti and marries a black woman.
Writer, literary critic, and journalist. Hans Christoph Buch was born on April 13, 1944 in Wetzlar. His grandfather was a diplomat in Haiti, which is how he came to develop a special interest in this country. He lived for some time in West Africa, Latin America, and Haiti and was a visiting professor at universities in Germany, the United States, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, and Cuba. Hans Christoph Buch is a member of the PEN. Hans Christoph Buch first drew attention to himself with his collection of stories Unerhörte Begebenheiten at a conference held by Gruppe 47. Additional important literary stages were the political satires from the years 1971-75, which, under the title Aus der neuen Welt, told stories and news from America. His novel Die Hochzeit von Port-au-Prince was published in 1984 and received a lot of attention. In the same year, he was named Officier de l'Ordre de l'Art et des Lettres by the French minister of education and the arts. In the mid-nineties, Buch traveled to Rwanda and Burundi to report on the war between the Hutus and Tutsis. He has traveled in various conflict areas including Bosnia, Chechnya, Haiti, Algeria, Zaire, Cambodia, East Timor, Pakistan, and Liberia. He regularly works as a correspondent for Die Zeit and the Spiegel. Numerous reportage collections have been published including Tropische Früchte. Afro-amerikanische Impressionen, Die neue Weltunordnung. Bosnien, Burundi, Haiti, Kuba, Liberia, Ruanda, Tschetschenien, and Blut im Schuh. Schlächter und Voyeure an den Fronten des Weltbürgerkrieges. His novel Kain und Abel in Afrika thematizes the massacre in Rwanda. His most recent publication was Wie Karl May Adolf Hitler traf und andere wahre Geschichten. Hans Christoph Buch lives in Berlin.
In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a 'new humanism,' one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.
Susan Buck-Morss is Jan Rock Zubrow '77 Chair of Social Sciences, and professor of political philosophy and social theory in the department of government at Cornell University. She is the author of Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute.
Over the last few decades Caribbean writers and performance artists have made a poetry revolution. Performance poets, dub and newspaper poets, singer-songwriters - Louise Bennett, Michael Smith or Bob Marley - have created a genuinely popular art form, a poetry heard by audiences all over the world. At the same time, even at its most literary, Caribbean poetry shares the vigour of the oral tradition. Established writers such as Edward Brathwaite and Derek Walcott, and many exciting new voices, are exploring ways of capturing the vitality of the spoken word on the page. The result is a lively communication of the Caribbean experience, as lived on both sides of the Atlantic. The richly interwoven oral and literary traditions of the Caribbean are both represented in this volume, which traces Caribbean verse from its roots to the present and is the first substantial anthology to appear for over a decade.
Paula Burnett was born in 1942 in Chelmsford, and was educated at Oxford University. From 1988 she worked as a journalist and since 1990 has been a lecturer in English at the West London Institute.
Saga-boy and Jasper prepare for a grand stick-fight, Big Joe will do anything to marry the girl he loves, all the men are determined to defeat Marie in the rum drinking competition, and PaJohn the Obeah Man is foiled by his own wicked spell. Timothy Callender's close-knit community is full of zany characters. Their dialect, the troubles they face, and the celebrations they share, are realistic and overflowing with great humor.
TIMOTHY CALLENDER (1946-1989) was born in Barbados where he became well known for his short stories during his student years at Combermere School. After graduating with special honours in English at thc University of the West Indies, he took a three year teaching post in St. Kitts during which time he continued research on ‘The Woman in the West Indian Novel’. In 1981, Callender was granted a Commonwealth Scholarship Award which enabled him to study for an MA in Art Design and Education at the University of London Institute of Education. He returned to Barbados in 1983, where he taught for many years at the University of the West Indies as well as at the St George Secondary School. In his later years, he taught Use of English, Creative Writing and Drama at the Barbados Community College. Callender cxpcrimented with many art forms and won awards for Short Stories, Playwriting and Art. He was an avid researcher of many diverse topics and themes, wrote numerous documentaries on art and art forms and held frequent art exhibitions. He also had a passion for music, studied the guitar and guitar music and was the author of many songs and poems. Like most West Indian authors, Callender’s first stories were published in the Barbados Literary Journal (BIM). IT SO HAPPEN (1975) was his first book of stories, and was followed by the books THE ELEMENTS OF ART (1977) and HOW MUSIC CAME TO THE AINCHAN PEOPLE (1979). Just before his untimely death, Callender was developing epic story poems, one of which was serialised over the local radio station and ran for about six months.
A vivid novel of the treacherous South American jungles where men risk their lives for the prize of diamonds and gold. This is the story of Shark, born in a native village, who acquires great wealth in the jungle, only to lose it all in a city which he can neither understand not conquer. Young Aaron Smart, an orphan, is nicknamed Shark because he has small white teeth and a shark grin. He grows up in a native village on the coast of British Guiana, dividing his time between work in a road-gang and wandering through the savannahs and swamps dreaming of the wonderful life his father led as a diamond prospector. Then one day a mysterious white man appears and decrees that he shall be educated. Education frees Shark from the village. Apprenticed to a doctor, he is seduced by his master’s daughter and learns the secret of his father’s death. This prompts him to run away and join the ‘pork-knockers,’ the men who work the diamond mines deep in the up-country jungles. Thereafter incident follows exciting incident. Shark has hardly entered the strange, violent world of the pork knockers before it becomes apparent that he has inherited his father’s lucky touch. He makes a fortune in diamonds, becomes a fabled figure among the miners, until his name is even woven into the Blues they sing around the campfires. He has staunch friends in Bullah, the ex-boxer storekeeper, and Belle, the beautiful Georgetown prostitute who follows him into the jungle. Suddenly grown rich and full of good intentions, Shark takes his friends back to Georgetown. But the city has seen successful pork knockers arrive before, and knows how to corrupt them. Shark’s life becomes one of pathetic profligacy. He tries to buy his way into a white man’s world, spending his money wantonly on women, a huge house, an equipage drawn by white horses in which he drives to the races. At the climax of his career he is overtaken by ruin.
Born 24 September 1920 in Guyana, Jan Carew is a novelist, playwright, poet and educator. His poetry and first two novels, Black Midas and The Wild Coast, were significant landmarks of the West Indian literature.
Jan Carew’s main achievement in his first published novel, BLACK MIDAS is to illuminate the inner workings, relationships and structure of Guyanese society, in all its colonial and multicultural variety, diversity and complexity. As such, it is one of the earliest novels (1958) to provide reliable insight into that milieu. The hero and narrator of the novel, Aron Smart, is known as ‘Shark’ because he ‘had small white teeth and a shark grin’. This process of naming through raw, physical detail illustrates the unusual importance of physical attributes in the society to which Aron belongs. Aron is black. He is also poor, because poverty is historically linked to the experience of black people as former slaves in his society. Moreover, with such a variety of races and inevitable racial mixing among them, shades of colour come to assume great importance. What BLACK MIDAS offers is a fictional portrait of Guyanese colonial society in which class or rank is assigned to individuals or groups according to factors of race, ethnicity or colour.
Jan Rynveld Carew (born 24 September 1920 in Agricola, Guyana) is a novelist, playwright, poet and educator. Born 24 September, 1920 at Agricola, a village in Guyana also called Rome, Carew was educated at the Berbice High School. At age 17, he left Guyana for the United States where he studied at Howard University and Western Reserve University (1944-8). He also went to Charles University in Prague (1948-50) and the Sorbonne in Paris. He has taught at London University, Princeton, Rutgers, Illinois Wesleyan, Hampshire College, Northwestern and Lincoln Universities. Jan Carew has lived in Holland, Mexico, England, France, Spain, Ghana, Canada and the United States. In England, he acted with Sir Laurence Olivier and edited the Kensington Post. Some of the noted figures he has been connected to are W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Shirley Graham DuBois, Maurice Bishop, Cheikh Anta Diop, Edward Scobie, John Henrik Clarke, Tsegaye Medhin Gabre, Sterling D. Plumpp and Ivan Van Sertima. He is the author of GREEN WINTER, GRENADA: THE HOUR WILL STRIKE AGAIN, BLACK MIDAS, THE WILD COAST, FULCRUMS OF CHANGE, GHOSTS IN OUR BLOOD: WITH MALCOLM X IN AFRICA, ENGLAND AND THE CARIBBEAN, THE LAST BARBARIAN, and THE GUYANESE WANDERER. His essays include: ‘The Caribbean writer in exile’, ‘Columbus and the origin of racism in the Americas’, ‘The fusion of African and Amerindian folk myths’, ‘United we stand’,’Culture and Rebellion’,’Black America: the street and the campus’, ‘Jonestown revisited’,’The Ivory trade: The cruelest trade of all, white gold’,’The Synergen project’,’The Amarnth project’, ‘Estevanico: The African Explorer,’ ‘Rape of Paradise: Columbus and the Origin of Racism in the Americas,’ and ‘Moorish Culture-Bringers: Bearers of Englightment’.
"Jan first novel Black Midas was a landmark in Caribbean literature. His best works are vivid and powerful social documents informed with his pristine magic and vitality. It is not just in the novel that he has made his mark He is the author of several plays, short stories, poems and essays published throughout the world.... His political insights and wide range of expertise have made him a confidant and advisor to several Prime Ministers in the Third World. He was the moving force behind the organization of African and African American programs at both Rutgers and Princeton.... Jan Carew has provided the stimulus for new departures and directions for thousands of students. I owe him much." - Ivan Van Sertima, author, They Came Before Columbus. "In this brilliant and original collection of essays, Jan Carew combines the lyricism of the poet with the breadth of the scholar. He writes with a clarity of vision that not only makes the past present, but draws our present from that past" —A. Sivanandan, editor, Race & Class. "Fulcrums of Change represents Jan Carew, the polyglot griot of Africa, oppressed minorities, and pain—at his very best—fusing a path from ruins in a universe where those pressed the farthest down have always forced themselves to freedom. It is a collection of essays on racism, exile, Third Worldism and visions of future promise. For griot-Carew the truth simply is: therefore these wonder prose efforts read like scenes from a novel with bits and pieces of proverbs, songs, and poems interspersed among them. It is a rare testimony from a man who has been a part of so many of the changes shaping this century." —Sterling D. Plumpp, University of Illinois at Chicago. "This is an important and pioneering work in a neglected area of study." Dennis Brutus, University of Pittsburgh.
Jan Rynveld Carew (born 24 September 1920 in Agricola, Guyana) is a novelist, playwright, poet and educator. Born 24 September, 1920 at Agricola, a village in Guyana also called Rome, Carew was educated at the Berbice High School. At age 17, he left Guyana for the United States where he studied at Howard University and Western Reserve University (1944-8). He also went to Charles University in Prague (1948-50) and the Sorbonne in Paris. He has taught at London University, Princeton, Rutgers, Illinois Wesleyan, Hampshire College, Northwestern and Lincoln Universities. Jan Carew has lived in Holland, Mexico, England, France, Spain, Ghana, Canada and the United States. In England, he acted with Sir Laurence Olivier and edited the Kensington Post. Some of the noted figures he has been connected to are W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Shirley Graham DuBois, Maurice Bishop, Cheikh Anta Diop, Edward Scobie, John Henrik Clarke, Tsegaye Medhin Gabre, Sterling D. Plumpp and Ivan Van Sertima. He is the author of GREEN WINTER, GRENADA: THE HOUR WILL STRIKE AGAIN, BLACK MIDAS, THE WILD COAST, FULCRUMS OF CHANGE, GHOSTS IN OUR BLOOD: WITH MALCOLM X IN AFRICA, ENGLAND AND THE CARIBBEAN, THE LAST BARBARIAN, and THE GUYANESE WANDERER. His essays include: ‘The Caribbean writer in exile’, ‘Columbus and the origin of racism in the Americas’, ‘The fusion of African and Amerindian folk myths’, ‘United we stand’,’Culture and Rebellion’,’Black America: the street and the campus’, ‘Jonestown revisited’,’The Ivory trade: The cruelest trade of all, white gold’,’The Synergen project’,’The Amarnth project’, ‘Estevanico: The African Explorer,’ ‘Rape of Paradise: Columbus and the Origin of Racism in the Americas,’ and ‘Moorish Culture-Bringers: Bearers of Englightment’.
" 'You are now over Soviet territory and from now on you will be subject to Soviet Laws.' " So begins Green Winter, a novel by the first student from British Guiana to get a scholarship behind the Iron Curtain. In this book, Jan Carew tells the story of Joseph, who, being from a colonial nation and colored, looks at Russia with insights as startling as those of Marco Polo when he went to Cathay. Foreign students are given an opportunity to learn Russian quickly before they go on to the Patrice Lumumba University, the Moscow State University, or to colleges in Odessa, Leningrad, or Kiev. Thus, with the gift of the Russian language, thousands of students like Joseph have become the first foreigners in any significant numbers whom the Russians have had in their midst since the revolution. Colored students in Russia become involved in situations both complex and fantastic. Joseph, like the others, visits Russian homes, picks up Russian girls. He falls in love with one, who is banished to the Virgin Lands. He hears colored students called "black monkey' in the streets, fights back against the Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and learns about the phantoms of the terror that survive in Russia. This story is part of the cry of the black man whose hopes are dashed against the day-to-day realities of life behind the Iron Curtain. Elizabeth Bowen wrote of Black Midas, Jan Carew's first book "This reckless novel is picaresque in the great Defoe and Fielding tradition." Green Winter goes far beyond that. It is brutally real.
Jan Rynveld Carew (born 24 September 1920 in Agricola, Guyana) is a novelist, playwright, poet and educator. Born 24 September, 1920 at Agricola, a village in Guyana also called Rome, Carew was educated at the Berbice High School. At age 17, he left Guyana for the United States where he studied at Howard University and Western Reserve University (1944-8). He also went to Charles University in Prague (1948-50) and the Sorbonne in Paris. He has taught at London University, Princeton, Rutgers, Illinois Wesleyan, Hampshire College, Northwestern and Lincoln Universities. Jan Carew has lived in Holland, Mexico, England, France, Spain, Ghana, Canada and the United States. In England, he acted with Sir Laurence Olivier and edited the Kensington Post. Some of the noted figures he has been connected to are W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Shirley Graham DuBois, Maurice Bishop, Cheikh Anta Diop, Edward Scobie, John Henrik Clarke, Tsegaye Medhin Gabre, Sterling D. Plumpp and Ivan Van Sertima. He is the author of GREEN WINTER, GRENADA: THE HOUR WILL STRIKE AGAIN, BLACK MIDAS, THE WILD COAST, FULCRUMS OF CHANGE, GHOSTS IN OUR BLOOD: WITH MALCOLM X IN AFRICA, ENGLAND AND THE CARIBBEAN, THE LAST BARBARIAN, and THE GUYANESE WANDERER. His essays include: ‘The Caribbean writer in exile’, ‘Columbus and the origin of racism in the Americas’, ‘The fusion of African and Amerindian folk myths’, ‘United we stand’,’Culture and Rebellion’,’Black America: the street and the campus’, ‘Jonestown revisited’,’The Ivory trade: The cruelest trade of all, white gold’,’The Synergen project’,’The Amarnth project’, ‘Estevanico: The African Explorer,’ ‘Rape of Paradise: Columbus and the Origin of Racism in the Americas,’ and ‘Moorish Culture-Bringers: Bearers of Englightment’.
" 'You are now over Soviet territory and from now on you will be subject to Soviet Laws.' " So begins Green Winter, a novel by the first student from British Guiana to get a scholarship behind the Iron Curtain. In this book, Jan Carew tells the story of Joseph, who, being from a colonial nation and colored, looks at Russia with insights as startling as those of Marco Polo when he went to Cathay. Foreign students are given an opportunity to learn Russian quickly before they go on to the Patrice Lumumba University, the Moscow State University, or to colleges in Odessa, Leningrad, or Kiev. Thus, with the gift of the Russian language, thousands of students like Joseph have become the first foreigners in any significant numbers whom the Russians have had in their midst since the revolution. Colored students in Russia become involved in situations both complex and fantastic. Joseph, like the others, visits Russian homes, picks up Russian girls. He falls in love with one, who is banished to the Virgin Lands. He hears colored students called "black monkey' in the streets, fights back against the Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and learns about the phantoms of the terror that survive in Russia. This story is part of the cry of the black man whose hopes are dashed against the day-to-day realities of life behind the Iron Curtain. Elizabeth Bowen wrote of Black Midas, Jan Carew's first book "This reckless novel is picaresque in the great Defoe and Fielding tradition." Green Winter goes far beyond that. It is brutally real.
Jan Rynveld Carew (born 24 September 1920 in Agricola, Guyana) is a novelist, playwright, poet and educator. Born 24 September, 1920 at Agricola, a village in Guyana also called Rome, Carew was educated at the Berbice High School. At age 17, he left Guyana for the United States where he studied at Howard University and Western Reserve University (1944-8). He also went to Charles University in Prague (1948-50) and the Sorbonne in Paris. He has taught at London University, Princeton, Rutgers, Illinois Wesleyan, Hampshire College, Northwestern and Lincoln Universities. Jan Carew has lived in Holland, Mexico, England, France, Spain, Ghana, Canada and the United States. In England, he acted with Sir Laurence Olivier and edited the Kensington Post. Some of the noted figures he has been connected to are W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Shirley Graham DuBois, Maurice Bishop, Cheikh Anta Diop, Edward Scobie, John Henrik Clarke, Tsegaye Medhin Gabre, Sterling D. Plumpp and Ivan Van Sertima. He is the author of GREEN WINTER, GRENADA: THE HOUR WILL STRIKE AGAIN, BLACK MIDAS, THE WILD COAST, FULCRUMS OF CHANGE, GHOSTS IN OUR BLOOD: WITH MALCOLM X IN AFRICA, ENGLAND AND THE CARIBBEAN, THE LAST BARBARIAN, and THE GUYANESE WANDERER. His essays include: ‘The Caribbean writer in exile’, ‘Columbus and the origin of racism in the Americas’, ‘The fusion of African and Amerindian folk myths’, ‘United we stand’,’Culture and Rebellion’,’Black America: the street and the campus’, ‘Jonestown revisited’,’The Ivory trade: The cruelest trade of all, white gold’,’The Synergen project’,’The Amarnth project’, ‘Estevanico: The African Explorer,’ ‘Rape of Paradise: Columbus and the Origin of Racism in the Americas,’ and ‘Moorish Culture-Bringers: Bearers of Englightment’.
In The Guyanese Wanderer, Jan Carew sets a fabulist eye and elegant hand to both old world and new. Combining Caribbean folklore, ghost story, adventure tale, and the literature of European exile, these narratives contain a spirited dialect and colloquial voice that startles and delights. The journey begins in Carew’s homeland, among the gaudy parrots, jaguars, and six o’clock bees of Guyana, and then shifts to the boulevards of London and Paris. Carew’s characters—hunters and seers, buffoons and book-people—defy convention, especially the strong-willed women. Betina puts her husband in his place with a prospecting knife. Belfon comes of age with the help, and seduction, of Couvade, a preacher-woman. A tagalong hunter named Tonic gets in over his head in a stampede of hogs. And in London, a black man called Caesar, prefers a landlord who puts his racism up front. Carew has lived a long life, in countries all over the world. He’s comfortable taking on just about anything, whether racial prejudice or whimsical fable, the fierce natural world or city slum. These are the brilliant songs of a learned man.
Born 24 September 1920 in Guyana, Jan Carew is a novelist, playwright, poet and educator. His poetry and first two novels, Black Midas and The Wild Coast, were significant landmarks of the West Indian literature.
On the Courentyne coast of British Guiana – ‘the wild coast’ where Raleigh first heard about the city of El Dorado – the boy Hector Bradshaw of Dutch-Creole origin, lives with his guardian, a negro matriarch, heir to the estate of his absent father at the village of Tarlogie. It is a savage world which surrounds him, whose inhabitants pay lip-service to the Christianity which has been brought to them but where the pagan superstitions of their slave ancestors still rule their hearts. There are murder and madness, the blood orgy of a herd of wild hogs attacking a jaguar, the frenzy and ecstasy of the dance of the winds. There is Doorne, the old hunter, a man existing in his own evilness, and Tengar, his son, a giant of a man invincible in his innocence, who brings a courtesan from the city back to be his woman. In such an environment Hector must grow up, part of it because there is slave blood in his veins too, yet apart from it because he is the boy from ‘the big house.’ How through sexual adventure, violence and death he comes to manhood is the theme of a novel which is in essence a portrait of a whole community, vividly, sharply, compulsively alive. Of Carew’s first novel, BLACK MIDAS, Elizabeth Bowen wrote: ‘This reckless novel is picaresque in the great Defoe and Fielding tradition.’ Less reckless in construction than its predecessor, THE WILD COAST is filled throughout with the stuff from which great fiction is made.
Jan Rynveld Carew (born 24 September 1920 in Agricola, Guyana) is a novelist, playwright, poet and educator. Born 24 September, 1920 at Agricola, a village in Guyana also called Rome, Carew was educated at the Berbice High School. At age 17, he left Guyana for the United States where he studied at Howard University and Western Reserve University (1944-8). He also went to Charles University in Prague (1948-50) and the Sorbonne in Paris. He has taught at London University, Princeton, Rutgers, Illinois Wesleyan, Hampshire College, Northwestern and Lincoln Universities. Jan Carew has lived in Holland, Mexico, England, France, Spain, Ghana, Canada and the United States. In England, he acted with Sir Laurence Olivier and edited the Kensington Post. Some of the noted figures he has been connected to are W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Shirley Graham DuBois, Maurice Bishop, Cheikh Anta Diop, Edward Scobie, John Henrik Clarke, Tsegaye Medhin Gabre, Sterling D. Plumpp and Ivan Van Sertima. He is the author of GREEN WINTER, GRENADA: THE HOUR WILL STRIKE AGAIN, BLACK MIDAS, THE WILD COAST, FULCRUMS OF CHANGE, GHOSTS IN OUR BLOOD: WITH MALCOLM X IN AFRICA, ENGLAND AND THE CARIBBEAN, THE LAST BARBARIAN, and THE GUYANESE WANDERER. His essays include: ‘The Caribbean writer in exile’, ‘Columbus and the origin of racism in the Americas’, ‘The fusion of African and Amerindian folk myths’, ‘United we stand’,’Culture and Rebellion’,’Black America: the street and the campus’, ‘Jonestown revisited’,’The Ivory trade: The cruelest trade of all, white gold’,’The Synergen project’,’The Amarnth project’, ‘Estevanico: The African Explorer,’ ‘Rape of Paradise: Columbus and the Origin of Racism in the Americas,’ and ‘Moorish Culture-Bringers: Bearers of Englightment’.
Set in the bone-dry northern foothills of Trinidad, this debut evokes the vibrant rhythms of the Caribbean and captures the island unseen by tourists, as men and women struggle side by side in a cramped hillside neighborhood, thirsting for love, wholeness, and a better future.
Roslyn Carrington (born January 31, 1966, Santa Cruz, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Trinidadian who has traveled extensively, but chooses to live and work on her native island. For three years, she wrote a popular weekly opinion column in Trinidad and Tobago's most established newspaper, "The Guardian. In addition to "A Thirst for Rain, Every Bitter Thing Sweet, and "Candy Don't Come in Gray, she has written a collection of short stories titled "Sex and Obeah.
In the mid-1970s the Rastafarian movement first appeared on the streets of England and provoked suspicion and anxiety. Ernest Ellis Cashmore penetrates the mystique of a movement, whose policy of total non-contact with whites is often an obstacle to understanding. Cashmore analyzes the genesis and development of the movement, reactions to it and what it means to its members. Cashmore delineates a history that begins in sixteenth-century Jamaica tracing it to the streets of Handsworth and Brixton; from the Rastas' puzzling relationship with their reluctant prophet Marcus Garvey to their intriguing liaison with the punk rock movement.
Ernest Cashmore was born and spent his first eighteen years in Birmingham, mostly in the dense immigrant area of Handsworth. His doctoral research at the London School of Economics was on the Rastafarian movement in England, and he is presently a visiting Lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the University of Aston.
Aime Cesaire, the renowned African poet, has written this passionate play about the African leader Patrice Lumumba, who was murdered in the Congo in 1961. The play is marked by Cesaire's sensitivity to African experience and character, his care in preserving the outline of those facts that are a matter of historical record, and his ability to imagine the substance of life that must have occurred between the lines of historical evidence. Cesaire himself says of the play: '[Lumumba is] a man of imagination, always on top of the present situation, and because of this also a man of faith; thus he is the African, the 'muntu,' at once the man who shares the vital force (the 'ngolo' ) and the man of words (the 'nommo'). ‘Struggling with the difficulties of the modern world, the cold world of logic and of private interests, he achieves, quite lucidly, his destiny as both victim and hero. Conquered, but also conqueror. Breaking himself against the bars of the cage, but also making a breach in them. Through this man (a man whose very stature seems to designate him asa legend) the whole history of a continent and of a people is played out in an exemplary and symbolic manner.’
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
A troupe of black actors perform their own Tempest. Cesaire's rich and insightful adaptation draws on contemporary Carribean society, the African-American experience and African mythology to raise questions about colonialism, racism and their lasting effects.
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
A ‘cadastre’ is an official register of the quantity, value, and ownership of real estate used in apportioning taxes. But where does a Black man, born in the New World, find his name, genealogy and estate in the cadastre of history? Only in the plundered continent of Africa. In all his poetry Césaire seeks to recover the roots from which he and his Black brothers in the West Indies and the Americas have been torn. Each poem is a safari into the past, each word an evocation, in some way, of Africa often through her flora and fauna which are named with precision, anguish, and love. This is a world reconstructed even beyond genesis: a marriage of birds, fishes, insects with the saps of trees and the furrows of the earth, consummated under ‘the erect majesty of the original eye’ — the sun, overseeing history. But history is made by men and in these poems Césaire vents his anger at those who had presumed they could expropriate for themselves both the natural and the human order. As early as ‘Return To My Native Land’ (1939) the poet had written: ‘my memory is circled with blood.’ In CADASTRE, which represents the poet’s work from 1945 to 1959, the blood coagulates into specific images of torture, of burnt flesh, of vitiated dreams — and also, of an insatiable love waiting for the propitious moment to express itself among men of all races freed from stupidity, greed, and hatred. Aime Césaire was born in Basse Pointe, Martinique in 1913. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he met Leopold Sédar Senghor. Together with Leon Damas, they later founded the Negritude Movement in Literature. Césaire was Mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique and a member of the French National Assembly. His long list of distinguished poetry and drama includes RETURN TO MY NATIVE LAND, FERREMENTS, and A SEASON IN THE CONGO based on the Lumumba tragedy. Emile Snyder is professor of Comparative, French, and African Literatures at Indiana University. Sanford Upson, on extended leave from teaching, studied French Literature at Wesleyan University and at the Universities of Paris and Indiana. .
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
A ‘cadastre’ is an official register of the quantity, value, and ownership of real estate used in apportioning taxes. But where does a Black man, born in the New World, find his name, genealogy and estate in the cadastre of history? Only in the plundered continent of Africa. In all his poetry Césaire seeks to recover the roots from which he and his Black brothers in the West Indies and the Americas have been torn. Each poem is a safari into the past, each word an evocation, in some way, of Africa often through her flora and fauna which are named with precision, anguish, and love. This is a world reconstructed even beyond genesis: a marriage of birds, fishes, insects with the saps of trees and the furrows of the earth, consummated under ‘the erect majesty of the original eye’ — the sun, overseeing history. But history is made by men and in these poems Césaire vents his anger at those who had presumed they could expropriate for themselves both the natural and the human order. As early as ‘Return To My Native Land’ (1939) the poet had written: ‘my memory is circled with blood.’ In CADASTRE, which represents the poet’s work from 1945 to 1959, the blood coagulates into specific images of torture, of burnt flesh, of vitiated dreams — and also, of an insatiable love waiting for the propitious moment to express itself among men of all races freed from stupidity, greed, and hatred. Aime Césaire was born in Basse Pointe, Martinique in 1913. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he met Leopold Sédar Senghor. Together with Leon Damas, they later founded the Negritude Movement in Literature. Césaire was Mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique and a member of the French National Assembly. His long list of distinguished poetry and drama includes RETURN TO MY NATIVE LAND, FERREMENTS, and A SEASON IN THE CONGO based on the Lumumba tragedy. Emile Snyder is professor of Comparative, French, and African Literatures at Indiana University. Sanford Upson, on extended leave from teaching, studied French Literature at Wesleyan University and at the Universities of Paris and Indiana. .
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
Bilingual edition. Title in English: Memorandum on my Martinique.
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
The trans. is based on the 1947 translation (see No. 576), incorporating changes in the edition definitive (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1956). A bilingual edition. Césaire's famous poem, first published in periodical form (1939), then as a book, is now considered a document which is prophetic of the négritude movement.
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
This volume makes available for the first time in English the most important political essay by the father of ‘Negritude’ as concept and as movement. Césaire’s Discourse on Colonial• ism was first published in 1955, and did much to shape the emergent Third World view of Europe and the United States. Included as well is an interview with Césaire about his ideas and work, conducted by the Haitian poet René Depestre in Havana in 1967. Césaire is already well known to the English-reading public through his plays and poetry, especially RETURN TO MY NATIVE LAND, which André Breton called ‘nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of all time.’ These political essays make available his pathbreaking contributions to the revolt of the Third World. The main subject of these writings is the barbarism of the colonizer and the unhappiness of the colonized, the destruction of civilizations that were dignified and fraternal by the colonizer’s machine for exploitation. Césaire praises as healthy contact between the peoples of the world. But between the colonizer and the colonized there is no contact; there is only intimidation, police, taxes, thievery, rape, contempt, mistrust, and the morgue. it is not human contact, but the contact between dehumanized elites and degraded masses. Far from seeing the end of the era of formal colonization as the end of the problem, Césaire singles out the American form of imperialism as the only variety of oppression that surpasses that of Europe. Barbarism’s hour, he says, has arrived — modern barbarism, the American hour. Like Fanon, who was also born in Martinique and educated in France, Césaire turned to Africa for values he could counterpose to the Europe he came to despise. The ‘humanism’ of Europe he denounced as a pseudo-humanism, with a sordidly racist conception of the rights of man. European and United States civilization he saw as sick; morally weakened by its use of force against the subjugated, and by its justifications of imperialism, it calls down upon itself its own punishment. .
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
Corps perdu (LOST BODY), Césaire’s shortest collection, is a group of ten poems, published in 1950 and illus¬trated with thirty-two engravings by Picasso. In 1986 George Braziller published a facsimile edition of the book. In LOST BODY Césaire addresses themes of ‘blackness’, exile, and negritude.
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
Aime Cesaire was born in 1913 in Martinique in the French Caribbean. He left for Paris in 1931 at the age of 18 with a scholarship for school. During his time at the Lycee Louis-le Grand, he helped found a student publication, Etudiant Noir. In 1936 Cesaire started working on his famed piece ‘Cahier’ which was not published until 1939. He married fellow student Suzanne Roussi in 1937, and the couple moved back to Martinique with their son in 1939. Both Aime and Suzanne got jobs at the Lycee Schoelcher. In 1945 Cesaire began his political career when he was elected mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy in the Constituent Assembly on the French Communist Party ticket. During the 1940s, Cesaire was busy writing and publishing many collections of his work. He seemed to be influenced by art because he wrote a tribute to a painter named Wilfredo Lam and one of his collections has illustrations by Pablo Picasso (Cesaire xxxviii). In 1956 Aime Cesaire resigned from the French Communist Party and two years later he began the ‘Parti Progressiste Martiniquais.’ During these years Cesaire attended two conferences for ‘Negro Writers and Artists’ in Paris. In 1968 he published the first version of Une Tempete, ‘a radical adaptation of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest’ (Davis xvi). He continued on with his writings of poetry and plays and retired from politics in 1993. All of Cesaire’s writings are in French with a limited number having English translations.
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
The black Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, whose first major work was hailed by André Breton as ‘the greatest lyric monument of our time,’ has long been regarded in France as one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Moreover, the philosophy of negritude evolved by Césaire and his friend Leopold Senghor is an important bridge between modernism and contemporary Third World nationalistic movements. The twenty poems in this book, presented in French with facing English translations, have been chosen to illustrate fundamental aspects of Césaire’s thought, imagery, and style as these crystallized into a single, coherent system in the late 1940’s and the 1950’s. The work aims to assist both nonspecialist reader and scholar to a deeper comprehension of the poems and their formidable linguistic difficulties. The translator’s skillful commentary steers a reader around the pitfalls in Césaire’s complex and idiosyncratic use of language (notably the absence of conventional punctuation, deformations of syntax, and verbal inventiveness), and he emphasizes the larger themes and patterns of imagery that link these poems both among themselves and to the rest of Césaire’s work. A substantial introduction discusses Césaire, his intellectual context, and the major critical issues in his work. The book is illustrated with a selection from the etchings done by Picasso for Cesaire’s collection Corps perdu.
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM. Gregson Davis is Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.
Aimé Césaire is most well known as the co-creator (with Leopold Senghor) of the concept of negritude. His long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, written at the end of World War II, is a masterpiece of immense cultural significance and beauty and became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith achieve a laudable adaptation of Césaire’s work to English by clarifying double meanings, stretching syntax, and finding equivalent English puns, all while remaining remarkably true to the French text. Andre Breton’s introduction, ‘A Great Black Poet,’ situates the text and provides a moving tribute to Césaire. ‘You hold in your hands one of the 20th century’s greatest works of art by one of the world’s greatest poets.’ - Robin D. G. Kelley, author of YO’MAMA’S DISFUNKTIONAL!: FIGHTING THE CULTURE WARS IN URBAN AMERICA. ‘Aimé Césaire is one of the most significant and influential poets of the twentieth century. Notebook is a social, philosophical, political, aesthetic lighthouse . . . We are lucky to have this fine translation at the beginning of the new millennium.’ - Jayne Cortez, author of SOMEWHERE IN ADVANCE OF NOWHERE. . Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith translated AIMÉ CÉSAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY (1983), which won the Witter Bynner Award from the Poetry Society of America. . Originally published in 1947 as Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
RETURN TO MY NATIVE LAND – Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (translated in this volume by John Berger and Anna Bostock) was written years ago but seems to belong very much to our own time. Its theme is the future of the Negro race, expressed in the spirit of Frantz Fanon or Malcolm X or the Olympic athletes who raised black-gloved hands in Mexico. Nevertheless this is no political tract, but a poem of remarkable lyricism and probably the most sustained to have been inspired by the French Surrealist movement. Cesaire’s life and work is discussed at length in an introduction which has been written for this edition by the South African poet Mazisi Kunene.
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
A work of immense cultural significance and beauty, this long poem became an anthem for the African diaspora and the birth of the Negritude movement. With unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, a bouquet of language-play, and deeply resonant rhythms, Césaire considered this work a break into the forbidden, at once a cry of rebellion and a celebration of black identity. ‘It was in April 1941, while passing through Martinique on his wartime journey to New York, that André Breton chanced on a long poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, freshly printed in the magazine Tropiques. He at once declared it a masterpiece and the work of a great black poet. Its author was a young Caribbean writer, Aimé Césaire, and the native land of its title was Martinique, to which the author had returned after a long stay as a student in Paris. Composed in 1939, his poem would circulate in various forms until a definitive edition was issued by Présence Africaine in Paris in 1956. An explosive critique of French colonialism, it had become a central text of the Negritude movement. In 1939, the island of Martinique was still an open wound, left septic after French rule. The poem pulls no punches. Now tremulous, now grating, the improvised text drums and jabs in spasmodic phrases and slogans. Each encounter, each twist of idiom, thrusts itself into the reader’s mind as a fierce challenge to understand and to empathize. Breton saw in Césaire’s writing a quality of mastery in his tone and was thrilled to discover that Surrealism could erupt in the tropics, the expression of a fresh poetics that shattered the even hum of French colonial discourse. Césaire’s poetry makes for difficult reading. Its headlong progression is accretive and associative, full of repeated phrases and unsettling detours. Its ruling device is the surrealist image, in which words clash and flare, to create tantalizing moments of revelation, paradoxically offering meaning while undermining coherence. The text spills forth in searing details and tableaux, ranging from the whispered evocation of a little line of sand to the description of a poverty-stricken black man on a bus, whose decrepit state inspires in the poet disgust and shame, which swiftly modulate into anger. Martinique is an island lost but now found, as the young writer hammers out his portrait of a debased homeland crying out for recognition and redemption. The poem’s uncompromising delivery was thoroughly absorbed and emulated by the translators John Berger and Anna Bostock, who wrestled its outbursts into a forceful yet faithful English equivalent. Their version dates from 1969. To this reissue are added six charcoal drawings by the late Peter de Francia, showing African bodies in poses suggestive of sheer torpor: yet we may take it that tropical languor is but a prelude to decisive rebellion.’ - Roger Cardinal. ‘Return to My Native Land is a monumental tome to our times, and this new translation by John Berger and Anya Bostock possesses the tropical heat of the poet’s sonority. Though, in his refrain, Aimé Césaire intones the small hours, there isn’t anything small about the raw lyricism articulated into this incantation of fiery wit. The translators convey the spirit of improvisation, yet, with a deftness of image and music, they deliver this book-length poem as a seamless work of art—an existential cry against a man-made void. What translates is the speaker’s revolutionary psyche on to the page—his fierce affirmation of existence through an eloquent clarity of the real and surreal. Nowhere is Césaire’s passion sacrificed; this translation is a tribute to the poet.’ - Yusef Komunyakaa.
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
Soleil cou coupé (SOLAR THROAT SLASHED) is Aimé Césaire’s most explosive collection of poetry. Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with an African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. A Césaire poem is an intersection at which metaphoric traceries create historically aware nexuses of thought and experience, jagged solidarity, apocalyptic surgery and solar dynamite. The original 1948 French edition of Soleil cou coupé has a dense magico-religious frame of reference. In the late 1950s, Césaire was increasingly politically focused and seeking a wider audience, when he, in effect, gelded the 1948 text – eliminating 31 of the 72 poems, and editing another 29. Until now, only the revised 1961 edition, called CADASTRE, has been translated. The revised text lacks the radical originality of Soleil cou coupe. This Wesleyan edition presents all the original poems en face with the new English translations and includes an introduction by A. James Arnold and notes by Clayton Eshleman.
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM. CLAYTON ESHLEMAN is a poet, translator, essayist, and editor. He is the author of collections of poetry, and the primary American translator of Cesar Vallejo, Aime Cesaire, and Antonin Artaud. Eshleman is the first poet to realize a huge, researched, and imaginative project, in prose and poetry, on Ice Age cave art: JUNIPER FUSE: UPPER PALEOLITHIC IMAGINATION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE UNDERWORLD. He was also the founder and editor of Caterpillar magazine(1967-1973)and Sulfur magazine (1981-2000). In 2011, Black Widow Press will publish his cotranslation with Lucas Klein of BEi Dao’s ENDURE. A. JAMES ARNOLD is an emeritus professor French at the University of Virginia. He is the lead editor of Cesaire’s complete literary works in French (in Pregress), editor of Cesaire’s LYRIC AND DRAMATIC POETRY (1946-82), and author of MODERNISM AND NEGRITUDE THE POETRY AND POETICS OF AIME CESAIRE.
102 Poems selected from Les Armes miraculeuses (1947), Cadastre (1961), and Ferrements (1960).
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
‘In Aimé Césaire the great surrealist tradition draws to a close, achieves its definitive meaning and is destroyed: surrealism, a European movement in poetry, is snatched from the Europeans by a black man who turns it against them and assigns a rigorously defined function to it . . . a Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket, suns burst forth whirling and exploding like new suns - it perpetually surpasses itself - Jean-Paul Sartre . . . Born in 1913 on the French-speaking Caribbean island of Martinique, Aimé Césaire went to Paris as a scholarship student at the age of eighteen. There, with Leopold Senghoi later to become famous as a poet and an African statesman, Césaire, as he put it, ‘discovered Africa.’ The first fruit of the discovery came on the eve of World War II when, awaiting his return to Martinique, Césaire wrote a long and brilliant poem, entitled Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. The effect of that work - ‘the national anthem of blacks the world ovel’ as one critic described it - has been extraordinary. Portions of it have simply entered the language of French-speaking Africa. The Notebook inaugurated Césaire’s long search for negritude, the black cultural archetype that would negate the political and geographical categories of colonialism. The same search continued in a surprising new way when in 1945 he was elected mayor of Martinique and deputy to the French National Assembly, positions he has held to the present day, as a Communist until 1956 and thereafter as the head of his own party. He has remained intensely active in literature, writing, roughly, poetry in the 1950s, drama in the 1960s, and essays throughout. Cësaire was early recognized as a major poet in the surrealist tradition. In 1943, André Bréton wrote of him: ‘It is a black man today who wields the French language as today no white man can. It is a black man who is our guide to the unexplored, making connections as he goes, and almost playfully, that pave our path with electricity. It is a black who is not only a black but all mankind, expressing all its queries, all its anxieties, all its hopes, and all its ecstasies.’ For Smith and Eshleman, Césaire ‘symbolizes and sums up what is probably the twentieth century’s most important phenomenon: the powerful surge next to the old and the new world, of a third world both very new and very old.’ Their edition, containing introduction, notes, the French original, and a new translation of Césaire’s poetry - the complex and challenging later work as well as the famous Notebook - will remain the definitive Césaire in English, a monument to a poet who is, to quote from one of his own works, ‘that very ancient yet new being, at once very complex and very simple who at the limit of dream and reality, of day and night, between absence and presence, searches for and receives in the sudden triggering of inner cataclysms the password of connivance and power.’ . Clayton Eshleman has published many books of poetry, essays, and translations. He won the National Book Award in 1979 for his translation with José Rubia Barcia of César Vallejo: The Complete Posthumous Poetry (University of California Press, 1978), and is the editor of Sulfur, a poetry journal. Annette Smith is French, and was born in Algeria in a milieu much involved with the emergence of African nations. She is Associate Professor of French at the California Institute of Technology, and the author of a book and several articles on the relationship between the natural sciences and French literature in the nineteenth century.
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire gathers all of Cesaire's celebrated verse into one bilingual edition. The French portion is comprised of newly established first editions of Césaire's poetic œuvre made available in French in 2014 under the title Poésie, Théâtre, Essais et Discours, edited by A. J. Arnold and an international team of specialists. To prepare the English translations, the translators started afresh from this French edition. Included here are translations of first editions of the poet's early work, prior to political interventions in the texts after 1955, revealing a new understanding of Cesaire's aesthetic and political trajectory. A truly comprehensive picture of Cesaire's poetry and poetics is made possible thanks to a thorough set of notes covering variants, historical and cultural references, and recurring figures and structures, a scholarly introduction and a glossary. This book provides a new cornerstone for readers and scholars in 20th century poetry, African diasporic literature, and postcolonial studies.
Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) was best known as the co-creator (with Léopold Senghor) of the concept of négritude. Clayton Eshleman is emeritus professor of English at Eastern Michigan University and the foremost American translator of César Vallejo and Aimé Césaire. A. James Arnold is emeritus professor of French at the University of Virginia. He edited A History of Literature in the Caribbean and authored Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire.
Aime Cesaire, the celebrated black poet from Martinique, tells a double story in this psychologically and politically acute play: the epic of the independence of a colony and a new version of the ancient theme of hubris. Henri Christophe, the black ex-slave and cook who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, became first a general and then King of Haiti, is in this play a man driven by ambition. His terrible need to imprint the glory of free Haiti on the historical consciousness of the world fires his imagination to deeds which at first seem glorious but finally take a devastating toll of the people and of himself. The greatest symbol of Christophe’s reign, the citadel with the ironic name of Sans Souci, proves to be the symbol of his downfall. For the building of this citadel is the task which breaks the hearts and will of his people and convinces them that Christophe is no longer a benevolent ruler but a despot who must die. But Césaire submits that even in his final mad- ness Christophe did not altogether lose his humanity, and that his original dedication to his people and his native land, and his vision of the freedom of black people throughout the world, made his lonely death less ignoble. .
AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
The Great Camouflage translates and assembles in one volume the seven articles Suzanne Césaire wrote for the cultural journal Tropiques. Césaire engages anthropology, esthetics, surrealism, history, and poetry as she grapples with questions of power and deception, self-deception, the economic slipknot of a post-slavery debt system, identity and inauthenticity, bad faith, psychological and affective aberration, and cultural zombification. All are caught in the web of "the great camouflage." The collection provides a multifaceted portrait of Césaire, and includes short writings from others who wrote passionately about her, including André Breton, André Masson, René Ménil, Daniel Maximin, and her husband Aimé Césaire and daughter, Ina Césaire.
Suzanne Césaire [née Roussi] (11 August 1915 – 16 May 1966), born in Martinique, an overseas department of France, was a French writer, teacher, scholar, anti-colonial and feminist activist, and Surrealist. Her husband was the poet and politician Aimé Césaire. Césaire (née Roussi) was born on 11 August 1915 in Poterie, Martinique, to Flore Roussi (née William), a school teacher, and Benoït Roussi, a sugar factory worker. She began her education at her local primary school in Rivière-Salée in Martinique (which still had the status of a French colonial territory at that time), before attending a girls' boarding-school in the capital, Fort-de-France. Having completed her secondary education, she went to study literature in Toulouse and then in Paris at the prestigious École normale supérieure from 1936-1938. During her first year as a student in Paris, Suzanne (then still named Roussi) meet Léopold Sédar Senghor, who introduced her to Aimé Césaire, a fellow student at the École normale supérieure. The following year, on 10 July 1937, the couple married at the town hall of the 14th arrondissement in Paris. During their studies, the Césaires were both part of the editorial team of the militant journal L'Étudiant noir. In 1938 the couple had their first child. The following year they returned to Martinique where they both took up teaching jobs at the Lycée Schoelcher. They went on to have six children together, divorcing in April 1963 after 25 years of marriage. Césaire wrote in French and published seven essays during her career as a writer. All seven of these essays were published between 1941 and 1945 in the Martinique cultural journal Tropiques, of which she was a co-founder and editor along with her husband, Aimé Césaire, and René Ménil, both of whom were notable French poets from Martinique. Her writing explored themes such as Caribbean identity, civilisation, and surrealism. While her writing remains largely unknown to Anglophone readers, excerpts from her essays "Leo Frobenius and the Problem of Civilisations", "A Civilisation’s Discontent", "1943: Surrealism and Us", and "The Great Camouflage" can be found translated into English in the anthology The Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (Verso, 1996), edited by Michael Richardson. Césaire had a particular affinity with surrealism, which she described as "the tightrope of our hope". In her essay "1943: Surrealism and Us", she called for a Martinican surrealism: Our surrealism will then deliver it the bread of its depths. Finally those sordid contemporary antinomies of black/white, European/African, civilised/savage will be transcended. The magical power of the mahoulis will be recovered, drawn forth from living sources. Colonial stupidity will be purified in the blue welding flame. Our value as metal, our cutting edge of steel, our amazing communions will be recovered." Césaire also developed a close relationship with André Breton following his visit to Martinique in 1941. She dedicated an essay to him ("André Breton, poet", 1941) and received a poem dedicated to her in return ("For madame Suzanne Césaire", 1941). This encounter with André Breton opened the way for her development of Afro-Surrealism. Her writing is often overshadowed by that of her husband, who is the better known of the two. However, in addition to her important literary essays, her role as editor of Tropiques can be regarded as an equally significant (if often overlooked) contribution to Caribbean literature. Tropiques was the most influential francophone Caribbean journal of its time and is widely acknowledged for the foundational role it played in the development of Martiniquan literature. Césaire played both an intellectual and administrative role in the journal's success. She managed the journal's relations with the censor — a particularly difficult role given the oppositional stance of Tropiques towards the war-time Vichy government — as well as taking responsibility for the printing. The intellectual impact she had on the journal is underlined by her essay "The Great Camouflage", which was the closing article of the final issue. Despite her substantial written and editorial contribution to the journal, the collected works of Tropiques, published by Jean-Michel Place in 1978, credits Aimé Césaire and René Ménil as the journal's catalysts. Tropiques published its last issue in September 1945, at the end of World War Two. With the closing of the journal, Suzanne Césaire stopped writing. The reasons for this are unknown. However, journalist Natalie Levisalles suggests that Suzanne Césaire would have perhaps made different choices if she had not had the responsibilities of mothering six children, teaching, and being the wife of an important politician and poet, Aimé Césaire. Indeed, her first daughter, Ina Césaire, remembers her saying regularly: "Yours will be the first generation of women who choose." Having stopped writing she pursued her career as a teacher, working in Martinique and Haiti. She was also an active feminist and participated in the Union des Femmes Françaises. Césaire was a pioneer in the search for a distinct Martiniquan literary voice. Though she was attacked by some Caribbean writers, following an early edition of Tropiques, for aping traditional French styles of poetry as well as supposedly promoting "The Happy Antilles" view of the island advanced by French colonialism, her essay of 1941, "Misère d'une poésie", condemned what she termed "Littérature de hamac. Littérature de sucre et de vanille. Tourisme littéeraire" [Literaure of the hammock, of sugar and vanilla. Literary tourism]. Her encounter with André Breton opened the way for her development of Afro-Surrealism, which followed in the footsteps of her use of surrealist concepts to illuminate the colonial dilemma. Her dictum - "La poésie martinique sera cannibale ou ne sera pas" [Cannibal poetry or nothing] - was an anti-colonial appropriation of a surrealist trope. Suzanne Césaire's repudiation of simple idealised answers - whether assimilationist, Africanist, or creole - to the situation of colonialism in the Caribbean has proved increasingly influential in later postcolonial studies.
In 1946, a storm-tossed boat carrying Hollywood’s most famous swashbuckler arrived dramatically if accidentally in Jamaica, and the glamorous world of 1940s Hollywood converged on a small West Indian society. After a long and storied career on the silver screen, Errol Flynn spent much of the last years of his life on a small island off Jamaica, throwing parties and sleeping with increasingly younger teenaged girls. THE PIRATE’S DAUGHTER features an exotic, romantic setting filled with gorgeous landscapes, old pirates’ tales and hunting for lost treasure, all with an extravagant Hollywood connection. But most of all, this extraordinary novel is the compelling mother/daughter story of two women of color whose well-being and place in life are very much at risk. THE PIRATE’S DAUGHTER brings to life their story of star-crossed loves - great and tentative, doomed and promising - set within a larger clash of cultures and social upheaval at a time when Jamaica is throwing off its colonial bonds. Margaret Cezair-Thompson has written a smart and engaging novel with rich, intriguing characters and a story to capture the imagination.
Margaret Cezair-Thompson is the author of a widely acclaimed previous novel, THE TRUE HISTORY OF PARADISE. Born in Jamaica, West Indies, she teaches literature and creative writing at Wellesley College.
Easter, 1981, and Jamaica's in a state of emergency. With violence in the streets and a government about to collapse, the Landing family gathers to bury one of its own. For Monica Landing, the proud, imperious matriarch who had not spoken to her daughter in fifteen years, the death of Lana Landing is the cruelest kind of loss. For Lana's younger sister, Jean, it is a tragedy she cannot comprehend. All she knows is that her beloved homeland, with its blue mountains and exuberant flora, its rich African rhythms and crashing ocean waves, holds no future for her.. 'But flight means crossing a landscape where soldiers turned executioners and armed gangs rule, where fires rage and unburied bodies lie in the roads. Flight means making her way through the memories that engulf her, with a good and silent man, perhaps the only man she has ever loved, traveling by her side, caught up in his own tormented memories of Jean's beautiful, flamboyant sister.. 'Told from a multiplicity of perspectives, The True History of Paradise captures the grace, beauty, and brutality that are indelible parts of the Jamaican experience. The story of three women born into a divided, troubled paradise becomes the history of a country, of generations of wanderers coming together in a place that can neither sustain nor be sustained by them, but that will shape them forever.
Margaret Cezair-Thompson (born August 19, 1956) is the author of a widely acclaimed previous novel, THE TRUE HISTORY OF PARADISE. Born in Jamaica, West Indies, she teaches literature and creative writing at Wellesley College.
Published in France in 1986, CHRONICLE OF THE SEVEN SORROWS is Patrick Chamoiseau’s first novel. It traces the rise and fall of Pipi Soleil, ‘king of the wheelbarrow’ at the vegetable market of Fort-de-France, in a tale as lively and magical as the marketplace itself. In a Martinique where creatures from folklore walk the land and cultural traditions cling tenuously to life, Chamoiseau’s characters confront the crippling heritage of colonialism and the overwhelming advance of modernization with touching dignity, hilarious resourcefulness, and truly courageous joie de vivre. When the poor have nothing else, they have their language. CHRONICLE OF THE SEVEN SORROWS has superb language, of a pith and juiciness that bring splendor to the most humble incident in Chamoiseau’s moving homage to the vanishing art of the Creole storyteller. ‘A bewitching writer . . . Chamoiseau’s particular gift is to be both buoyant in spirit and trenchant in observation.’ - New York Times Book Review. ‘Imaginative and moving’ -Washington Post. ‘Sardonic and lyrical.’ - Publishers Weekly. ‘Lovers of language, rejoice! . . . Chamoiseau’s portraits of his native Martinique have exploded into the English language in a fascinating mixture of classical oils and Creole colors . . . What is glorious, as always, is Chamoiseau’s poetry’ - Los Angeles Times. ‘A joy to read’ - Chicago Tribune. . Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel TEXACO won the Prix Goncourt in 1992. Linda Coverdale’s many translations include Chamoiseau’s School Days (Nebraska 1997) and Jorge Semprun’s Literature or Life, winner of the 1997 French-American Foundation Translation Prize.
Patrick Chamoiseau is a French author from Martinique known for his work in the créolité movement. Chamoiseau was born on December 3, 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he currently resides. After he studied law in Paris he returned to Martinique inspired by Édouard Glissant to take a close interest in Creole culture. Chamoiseau is the author of a historical work on the Antilles under the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte and several non-fiction books which include Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), co-authored with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. Awarded the Prix Carbet (1990) for Chemins d’enfance. His novel Texaco was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992, and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It has been described as ‘a masterpiece, the work of a genius, a novel that deserves to be known as much as Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Cesaire’s Return to My Native Land’. Chamoiseau may also safely be considered as one of the most innovative writers to hit the French literary scene since Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His freeform use of French language — a highly complex yet fluid mixture of constant invention and ‘creolism’ — fuels a poignant and sensuous depiction of Martinique people in particular and humanity at large.
In this unusual collection of stories and fables, 1992 Goncourt prize-winner Patrick Chamoiseau re-creates in truly magical language the stories he heard as a child in Martinique in his first book to be published in the U.S. Included are delightfully coarse and lively folktales incorporating European and African motifs and stories apparently handed down from the time of slavery. In one, ‘Ti-Jean Horizon,’ the eponymous hero repeatedly outwits his Beke (white) master, as does Conquering John in African American tales. Others warn of the danger of foolish behavior, as in ‘Nanie-Rosette the Belly-Slave,’ of whom the storyteller remarks ‘Quite a pretty name for a disaster with an abyss for a stomach, a riverbed for a throat. In short, Nanie-Rosette loved to eat, oh yes.’ Her gluttony leads to her downfall at the hands of a devil. The lyric language here is often bawdy, even in a uniquely Martinique variant of the Cinderella tale. Witty asides enrich these fables and allegories, though their protagonists are poor, enslaved people striving to survive in a politically hostile world. The stories have a contemporary edge that transcends their colonial roots.
Patrick Chamoiseau is a French author from Martinique known for his work in the créolité movement. Chamoiseau was born on December 3, 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he currently resides. After he studied law in Paris he returned to Martinique inspired by Édouard Glissant to take a close interest in Creole culture. Chamoiseau is the author of a historical work on the Antilles under the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte and several non-fiction books which include Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), co-authored with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. Awarded the Prix Carbet (1990) for Chemins d’enfance. His novel Texaco was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992, and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It has been described as ‘a masterpiece, the work of a genius, a novel that deserves to be known as much as Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Cesaire’s Return to My Native Land’. Chamoiseau may also safely be considered as one of the most innovative writers to hit the French literary scene since Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His freeform use of French language — a highly complex yet fluid mixture of constant invention and ‘creolism’ — fuels a poignant and sensuous depiction of Martinique people in particular and humanity at large.
One of the liveliest and most creative voices in French literature today is that of Patrick Chamoiseau. Born in 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he still lives, he has published several autobiographical narratives (Antan d’enfance, Chemin-d’école) in addition to his novels: Chronique des sept misères, Solibo magnifique, and Texaco, which won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1992. He collaborated with Raphael Confiant and Jean Bernabé on the critical essay Eloge de La créolité and is the coauthor, with Confiant, of Lettres créoles: Tracées antillaises et continentales de La littérature, 1635-1975. His other essays include Martinique and Guyane, Traces-me-moires du bagne. Creole Folktales (Au temps de l’an tan) was the first of his works to be translated into English. Chamoiseau has explored the traditional themes of Caribbean fiction - slavery, colonialism, the development of class and caste distinctions, the collapse of the plantation economy-with an imaginative brio both daring and magisterial. In texts of striking poetic density, he evokes the terrifying destitution at the heart of this lush, tropical world: the loss of ancestral ties to an Africa itself now long gone; the decline of village life and a growing estrangement from the land; the suppression and devaluation of Creole, the everyday language of slavery, in favor of French, the language of the white colonial plantocracy. In the French Antilles, the language, literature, and culture of France were transmitted to all sectors of society through a strictly metropolitan education, but this increased identification with France came at the cost of further alienation from indigenous folk values. The 1930s, however, saw the birth of the French ‘black pride’ literary movement of Negritude, one of whose leaders was the great Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire. The postwar decades have been characterized by a search for an original, authentic Caribbean culture, a movement that has led in the French West Indies to a revaluation of Creolite. As a writer, Chamoiseau has found resonant themes in the tension between the French and Creole cultures and in the complexities of class, race, and language this tension reveals. The writer’s relationship with the written word-indeed, with the very ability to write-is of paramount interest to Chamoiseau, who embodies the central paradox of Martinican literature: writing necessarily represents a profound break with the essential orality of Creole language and culture, like Edouard Glissant, the influential literary theoretician of Antillanité, Chamoiseau proclaims the need to respect the continuity between the Creole storyteller and the writer as ‘word maker,’ He writes in a French that is both highly polished and extravagantly unconventional: antic, lyrical, sarcastic, at times oneiric, even opaque, and above all, vocal. The African griot has been called the repository of the cultural memory of a people. The fabulous narrator of School Days recalls to life the cultural memory of a writer-to-be, in the diminutive person of a little black boy of courage and cunning who goes off to school one day with a blithe heart, only to find that he has ventured into a foreign country from which he can never return. When he looks around him, he realizes that in the eyes of his teachers his own world barely exists, Caught betwixt and between, stunned by this otherness that has been imposed on him (and on all colonial children everywhere), he nevertheless manages to find his voice, discovering-in both Creole tongue and French text-the awesome healing and subversive powers of language. ABOUT THE TRANSLATION: Chamoiseau does not believe in glossaries, preferring that his readers open themselves to the ‘subterranean magic’ of strange words, but a short glossary has been appended to this translation to explain a few basic (or irresistibly choice) terms, The author’s Creole expressions have been retained, sometimes with English translations provided in footnotes, Perhaps the most important word in Chemin-d’ecole is negrillon-a word that is impossible to translate exactly ‘Pickaninny’ is too pejorative, as is ‘little nigger boy.’ ‘Pickney’ is used in the English-speaking Caribbean but for this same reason is closely associated with the literature of that region and would seem jarring in Martinique. ‘The little black boy,’ although quite a mouthful, seems closest to the sense of negrillon here. Precisely because it is a mouthful, and serene in the knowledge that no reader will forget for a moment that our tiny hero is black, I usually refer to him-with the author’s consent-as ‘the little boy.’
Patrick Chamoiseau is a French author from Martinique known for his work in the créolité movement. Chamoiseau was born on December 3, 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he currently resides. After he studied law in Paris he returned to Martinique inspired by Édouard Glissant to take a close interest in Creole culture. Chamoiseau is the author of a historical work on the Antilles under the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte and several non-fiction books which include Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), co-authored with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. Awarded the Prix Carbet (1990) for Chemins d’enfance. His novel Texaco was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992, and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It has been described as ‘a masterpiece, the work of a genius, a novel that deserves to be known as much as Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Cesaire’s Return to My Native Land’. Chamoiseau may also safely be considered as one of the most innovative writers to hit the French literary scene since Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His freeform use of French language — a highly complex yet fluid mixture of constant invention and ‘creolism’ — fuels a poignant and sensuous depiction of Martinique people in particular and humanity at large.
Intoxicating in its language, lush in its evocation of Creole island culture, SEVEN DREAMS OF ELMIRA: A TALE OF MARTINIQUE is a vivid and hallucinatory fable, written by widely acclaimed author Patrick Chamoiseau and illustrated with stunning photographic portraits by Jean-Luc Laguardigue. Based on interviews, observation, and invention, this story takes as its canvas the everyday lives of the workers at the old Saint-Etienne rum distillery in the hills of Martinique, and the strange vision of the beautiful Elmira who appears to a select few. This magical tale explores themes that are specific to the West Indies, but universally resonant.
Patrick Chamoiseau is a French author from Martinique known for his work in the créolité movement. Chamoiseau was born on December 3, 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he currently resides. After he studied law in Paris he returned to Martinique inspired by Édouard Glissant to take a close interest in Creole culture. Chamoiseau is the author of a historical work on the Antilles under the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte and several non-fiction books which include Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), co-authored with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. Awarded the Prix Carbet (1990) for Chemins d’enfance. His novel Texaco was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992, and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It has been described as ‘a masterpiece, the work of a genius, a novel that deserves to be known as much as Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Cesaire’s Return to My Native Land’. Chamoiseau may also safely be considered as one of the most innovative writers to hit the French literary scene since Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His freeform use of French language — a highly complex yet fluid mixture of constant invention and ‘creolism’ — fuels a poignant and sensuous depiction of Martinique people in particular and humanity at large.
From a Prix Goncourt writer hailed by Milan Kundera as the heir of Joyce and Kafka, a gripping story of an escaped slave in Martinique and the killer hound that pursues him. From one of the most innovative and subversive novelists writing in French, a writer of exceptional and original gifts (The New York Times), whose Texaco won the Prix Goncourt and has been translated into fourteen languages, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly slave’s daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his master and a fearsome hound on his heels. We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because the old man’s flight to freedom will transform them all in truly astonishing—even otherworldly—ways, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest reshapes reality and time itself. Chamoiseau’s exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the Creole culture of Martinique and brilliantly translated by Linda Coverdale, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.
Patrick Chamoiseau is a French author from Martinique known for his work in the créolité movement. Chamoiseau was born on December 3, 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he currently resides. After he studied law in Paris he returned to Martinique inspired by Édouard Glissant to take a close interest in Creole culture. Chamoiseau is the author of a historical work on the Antilles under the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte and several non-fiction books which include Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), co-authored with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. Awarded the Prix Carbet (1990) for Chemins d’enfance. His novel Texaco was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992, and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It has been described as ‘a masterpiece, the work of a genius, a novel that deserves to be known as much as Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Cesaire’s Return to My Native Land’. Chamoiseau may also safely be considered as one of the most innovative writers to hit the French literary scene since Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His freeform use of French language — a highly complex yet fluid mixture of constant invention and ‘creolism’ — fuels a poignant and sensuous depiction of Martinique people in particular and humanity at large.
It’s Carnival time in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Before an uninterrupted public, Solibo Magnificent, the great teller of tales, is felled, seemingly choked by his own words. Is it auto strangulation or murder? Two police officers lead the investigation, but what they discover is a transitory universe at the threshold of oblivion-the universe of the Masters of the Word who, like Solibo, possess the gift of language: perfect for rich and boundless discourse, but not very helpful for unraveling a crime. Patrick Chamoiseau’s grand and intriguing riff on the police procedural is a stunning confirmation of the ‘exceptional and original gifts’ (New York Times) that have placed him among the world’s foremost contemporary writers. Patrick Chamoiseau’s other books include TEXACO, which won France’s Prix Goncourt, and CREOLE FOLKTALES. He lives in Martinique.
Patrick Chamoiseau is a French author from Martinique known for his work in the créolité movement. Chamoiseau was born on December 3, 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he currently resides. After he studied law in Paris he returned to Martinique inspired by Édouard Glissant to take a close interest in Creole culture. Chamoiseau is the author of a historical work on the Antilles under the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte and several non-fiction books which include Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), co-authored with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. Awarded the Prix Carbet (1990) for Chemins d’enfance. His novel Texaco was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992, and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It has been described as ‘a masterpiece, the work of a genius, a novel that deserves to be known as much as Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Cesaire’s Return to My Native Land’. Chamoiseau may also safely be considered as one of the most innovative writers to hit the French literary scene since Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His freeform use of French language — a highly complex yet fluid mixture of constant invention and ‘creolism’ — fuels a poignant and sensuous depiction of Martinique people in particular and humanity at large.
Patrick Chamoiseau produces a mythic history of the Creole nation that arose from the forced marriage of French and African peoples in his native Martinique. The chief spokeswoman for that nation is the indomitable and profanely wise Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the founder of Texaco, a teeming shantytown poised on the edge of a city that constantly threatens to engulf it. Now Marie-Sophie is Texaco’s protectress as well. For only she can dissuade an urban planner from ordering her anarchic quarter razed to the ground. Like Scheherazade before her, she relies on stories - stories of slaves and sorcerers, thugs and courtesans, uprisings and eruptions.
Patrick Chamoiseau is a French author from Martinique known for his work in the créolité movement. Chamoiseau was born on December 3, 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he currently resides. After he studied law in Paris he returned to Martinique inspired by Édouard Glissant to take a close interest in Creole culture.
Patrick Chamoiseau produces a mythic history of the Creole nation that arose from the forced marriage of French and African peoples in his native Martinique. The chief spokeswoman for that nation is the indomitable and profanely wise Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the founder of Texaco, a teeming shantytown poised on the edge of a city that constantly threatens to engulf it. Now Marie-Sophie is Texaco’s protectress as well. For only she can dissuade an urban planner from ordering her anarchic quarter razed to the ground. Like Scheherazade before her, she relies on stories - stories of slaves and sorcerers, thugs and courtesans, uprisings and eruptions.
Patrick Chamoiseau is a French author from Martinique known for his work in the créolité movement. Chamoiseau was born on December 3, 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he currently resides. After he studied law in Paris he returned to Martinique inspired by Édouard Glissant to take a close interest in Creole culture. Chamoiseau is the author of a historical work on the Antilles under the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte and several non-fiction books which include Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), co-authored with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. Awarded the Prix Carbet (1990) for Chemins d’enfance. His novel Texaco was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992, and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It has been described as ‘a masterpiece, the work of a genius, a novel that deserves to be known as much as Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Cesaire’s Return to My Native Land’. Chamoiseau may also safely be considered as one of the most innovative writers to hit the French literary scene since Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His freeform use of French language — a highly complex yet fluid mixture of constant invention and ‘creolism’ — fuels a poignant and sensuous depiction of Martinique people in particular and humanity at large.
An outstanding collection of folk-tales from such writers as James Berry, Grace Nichols, Petronella Breinburg. All four main language traditions of the Caribbean-French, English, Spanish, and Dutch-are represented by these stories. Inspired by the art of the storytellers to be found in towns and villages throughout the countries of the region, they spin the tales about Maskalili, Anancy, Tata Dohende, Greasyman, La Diabless, the Panja Jar and many more.
Faustin Charles (born in 1944 in Trinidad) is an acclaimed and highly popular poet and writer for children. The Selfish Crocodile was his first picture book for Bloomsbury and he also has two poetry books published: Once Upon an Animal and Teacher Alligator. Faustin is mesmeric in performance and in demand for his events in schools libraries and festivals. Faustin was born and grew up in the rural countryside of Trinidad, by the sea. He lives in London.
18th-century Haiti: gaiety hid smouldering violence, the 'dance on the volcano.' Lovely young Minette sang her way to fame - to tragedy and great love. . . If you read for history, here are the political and emotional tides, the passionate men and women who brought about the Slave Rebellions of Haiti which were sparked by the French Revolution. If you read for drama, it is in every mood and movement of the story, Minette was the first colored person to entertain a white audience in Port-au-Prince, She became a great star. She also became passionately involved in the fight for freedom. The Comedie du Port-au-Prince was desperate for new talent when Minette made her appearance. The daughter of a freed slave and a white planter, she had a voice in a thousand. And she was lovely, with her creamy skin and great, slanted eyes. Excited crowds applauded her to fame. But she met the pain and humiliation of prejudice, too; met them with pride. She reached out for love - and thought she had found it in Jean Baptiste Papointe, a man of color who had risen to the status of a rich planter with slaves of his own. Warped by his struggle against bitter prejudice, he could be hard and cruel. But he needed Minette's love. These two and the people around them give the rich texture of living history to this exceptionally fine story. It is based on contemporary records, Through them Mme. Chauvet, Haitian herself, recaptures the vivid life of the island - the white creoles, the people of color, the French military - along with the tragedy and hopes and heroism of the time. Marie Chauvet lived with her husband and children in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where she was born. She was interested in writing all her life and was firmly launched on a literary career long before it was considered suitable for a girl. Her first love was the theatre, and as a child she wrote a number of plays performed in private by her young friends, with the author acting as director and stage manager. Mme. Chauvet's professional start came, however, with a prize-winning short story.
Marie Vieux Chauvet (1916–1973) was a Haitian novelist. Born and educated in Port-au-Prince, her most famous works were the novels Fille d'Haïti (1954), La Danse sur le Volcan (1957), Fonds des Nègres (1961), and Amour, Colère, Folie (1969). The trilogy Amour, Colère, Folie was published by Gallimard press in Paris with the support of Simone de Beauvoir. The trilogy was perceived as an attack on the Haitian despot François Duvalier. Fearing the dictator's legions of Tonton Macoutes, her husband bought all the copies of the book he could find in Haiti, and Chauvet's daughters bought the remaining copies from Gallimard in Paris a few years later. She died in the United States of America.
Set in late-18th century Haiti, Dance on the Volcano follows the extraordinary career of Minette, who uses her prodigious voice to cross racial barriers. Her talent brings her an opportunity to perform at the Theater of Port-au-Prince, an honor previously reserved only for whites. However, once the curtain falls she finds herself back to life as normal. Praised but unpaid, applauded but shut out, Minette develops a political and racial conscience that that will not rest as long as slavery still exists on the island. Her involvement soon leads her to butt heads with the man she loves, a free black man as cruel to his slaves as many white landholders, and to cross paths with the future heroes of the revolution. Born in Port-au-Prince in 1916, Marie Vieux-Chauvet is widely considered one of the greatest writers of the francophone Caribbean.
Marie Vieux Chauvet (1916–1973) was a Haitian novelist. Born and educated in Port-au-Prince, her most famous works were the novels Fille d'Haïti (1954), La Danse sur le Volcan (1957), Fonds des Nègres (1961), and Amour, Colère, Folie (1969). The trilogy Amour, Colère, Folie was published by Gallimard press in Paris with the support of Simone de Beauvoir. The trilogy was perceived as an attack on the Haitian despot François Duvalier. Fearing the dictator's legions of Tonton Macoutes, her husband bought all the copies of the book he could find in Haiti, and Chauvet's daughters bought the remaining copies from Gallimard in Paris a few years later. She died in the United States of America. Kaiama L. Glover received a B.A. in French History and Literature and Afro-American Studies from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in French and Romance Philology from Columbia University. She is now an associate professor of French at Barnard College. Her book, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, explores the Haitian Spiralist movement. She has taught English at Stanford University and French at Barnard College and Columbia University, sits on the editorial boards of the Romanic Review and Small Axe, and regularly contributes to The New York Times Book Review.
Racial taboos were rampant in Haiti at the end of the eighteenth century: European colonists, rich and powerful, bought and sold slaves in the market-place. Between the colonists and the slaves were the ‘mixed-bloods’, to which class belonged the sisters Minette and Lise, daughters of a slave and her white master, and gifted with extraordinary voices. A creole neighbour who heard Minette singing determined to get her an engagement with the theatrical troupe of the town. It is the first time ever that a person of negro blood appears on the stage at the theatre of Port-au-Prince and the outcry from the ‘Whites’ is loud and scathing. But in spite of the prejudices and prohibitions, Minette rises steadily to glory, regarding each triumph as one way of avenging the suffering of her people. She rises against the dark and troubled scene like a bright songbird. Refusing to become the mistress of any white man, she falls in love with a young and rich freedman who, however, treats his own slaves with the same cruelty as a white master. So Minette is forced to continue her fight alone. All the picturesque life of a colony at the end of the ancient regime appears here in this warm and colourful novel. Through the roar of applause in the theatre and the rattle of gunshot in the sugar-cane fields, we follow the passionate adventure of Minette. The author, Marie Chauvet, herself a Haitian, is inspired by authentic historical fact: Minette really did live, did sing at the theatre of Port-au-Prince, did dedicate herself and her glorious voice to the cause of freedom against hatred. The author, MARIE CHAUVET, was a member of a prominent family in Haiti. Her uncle was ex-President Magloire; her father-in-law a representative of Haiti at the United Nations. Marie Chauvet held the rank of Officer of the ‘Ordre Universel du Mérite Humain’ (Geneva), and was awarded a major French Literary prize - Prix de l’Alliance Francaise - for her first novel Fille D’Haiti.
Marie Vieux Chauvet (1916–1973) was a Haitian novelist. Born and educated in Port-au-Prince, her most famous works were the novels Fille d'Haïti (1954), La Danse sur le Volcan (1957), Fonds des Nègres (1961), and Amour, Colère, Folie (1969). The trilogy Amour, Colère, Folie was published by Gallimard press in Paris with the support of Simone de Beauvoir. The trilogy was perceived as an attack on the Haitian despot François Duvalier. Fearing the dictator's legions of Tonton Macoutes, her husband bought all the copies of the book he could find in Haiti, and Chauvet's daughters bought the remaining copies from Gallimard in Paris a few years later. She died in the United States of America.
Set in Barbados in the early 1950s, this uncompromising novel depicts the pain of childhood in a world where poverty and blackness are despised, and kids are treated as objects on which adults can take out their self-contempt and frustration. Milton Sobers is a nine-year-old on the run from a series of sadistic beatings from both his schoolmaster and his washer-woman mother. Dreaming of a life in Harlem, which is predominately black, open, and free, Milton encounters many comic and sad adventures that inevitably return him to the situation he was trying to escape. Originally published in 1965, this pertinent portrayal of the destruction of innocence explores the commonality of physical violence in the lives of Caribbean youth while offering hope for the intelligent child protagonist.
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke, CM OOnt (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
In sight of green sugar-cane fields and the sea, the Rum Shop and the Tailor Shop are awash with buckshee rum and male talk. W hile Sarge (known to have broken an innocent man's legs with his truncheon) holds forth about blasted 'properganda', Seabert the Tailor has ambitions for a seat in Parliament and his eye on a big car. As a young man, Michael William Wilberforce Thorne - 'Boy' to the villagers - learns about life from these vibrant characters. Coming of age in the Barbados of the 1950s, he is both horrified and fascinated by the political scheming that surrounds him. After spending several years at a Canadian university on a scholarship, Boy returns to his country with a sharper awareness of its people and possibilities. When an election is called and this tiny, colonial island hovers on the brink of a new political dawn, he is treated a s a political saviour, the first of a new breed. This rich novel, at once serious and hilariously funny, gives a wonderfully exuberant picture of life in Barbados in the early 1950s, painted with unflagging humour and zest."
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke, CM OOnt (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
The related themes of loneliness, self-hatred, and cultural exclusion are the main concerns of Clarke's Canadian trilogy, THE MEETING POINT, STORM OF FORTUNE, and THE BIGGER LIGHT. The three works center on the lives of a group of West Indians in Toronto—especially Bernice Leach, her sister Estelle, Boysie Cumberbatch, his wife Dots, and Henry White. THE MEETING POINT concentrates on Bernice's experiences as a maid in the home of the wealthy Burrmann family, and emphasizes the usual themes of sexual loneliness, cultural isolation, and the sense of economic exploitation. THE MEETING POINT is a harsh and poignant account of the lives of Barbadian immigrants in the white-dominated and socially ossified Toronto of the 1960s.
Austin Clarke was born in Barbados and came to Canada to study at Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He has enjoyed a varied and distinguished career as a broadcaster, civil rights leader, and professor. His award-winning work, which includes eight novels and five collections of short fiction, is widely studied in residence at the University of Guelph, and is the 1998 inaugural winner of The Rogers Communications Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. He lives in Toronto.
THE MEETING POINT is the story of a group of West Indians in Toronto, and is the third novel by this highly talented young writer whose previous book, AMONGST THISTLES AND THORNS, was hailed by the press and described by the Times Literary Supplement as 'funny, and bursting at the seams with vitality'. Bernice Leach is a West Indian, working as a maid for the Burrmanns, a rich, Canadian-Jewish couple whose marriage gives Bernice and her friend Dots plenty of scope for surprised and original comment. When Bernice's sister, Estelle, comes over apparently on holiday from Barbados, her stay has first comic, then tragic results. THE MEETING POINT is a brilliant study of the clashes, tensions and sheer comedy resulting from the confrontation of totally different ways of life ; and Austin Clarke's great gift for character and dialogue is apparent in both the Canadians and the West Indian in the novel.
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
Growing up stupid under the Union Jack, by the noted Barbadian author Austin Clark, is a meaningful contribution to anticolonial nationalist literature in the Caribbean. A realist novel without a greatly sophisticated formal elaboration, it nevertheless shows a brilliant use of language and integrates local elements with a controlled and effective idiom at the service of a marked socio-politic intention and an accurate message which never become simplistic. The novel is a criticism to colonial policies in the field of education, a topic that has been dealt with by Caribbean essayists and has emerged in the works of many English-speaking writers in the area. It presents the failures of the system and the lack of opportunities for higher education within the colonial context. It is a novel of stirring tension which gives way to serious human reflections. It enriches the thematic stream of childhood reminiscences in Anglo-Caribbean novels, which has George Lamming, Michael Anthony, Geoffrey Drayton, Peter Kempadoo and Jan Carew among its more outstanding representatives. This novel by Austin Clarke deserves a meaningful place in the literature for the liberation of the Caribbean peoples.
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
At the news of her son BJ's involvement in gang crime, Idora Morrison, a maid at the local university, collapses in her basement apartment. For four days and nights she retreats into a vortex of memory, pain, and disappointment that becomes a riveting expose of her life as a Caribbean immigrant living abroad. While she struggled to make ends meet, her deadbeat husband, Bertram, abandoned her for a better life in New York. Left alone to raise her son, Idora has done her best to survive against immense odds. But now that BJ has disappeared into a life of crime, she recoils from his loss and is unable to get out of bed, burdened by feelings of invisibility. As she summons the strength to investigate her son's troubles - and her own weaknesses - the book quietly builds to its crescendo. Eventually Idora finds her way back into the light with a courage that is both remarkable and unforgettable. MORE zeroes in, with laserlike intensity, on the interior life of an extraordinary ‘ordinary woman.’ showcasing Clarke's skill as a writer of inimitable force.
AUSTIN CLARKE is a professor of literature and has taught at Yale, Brandeis, Williams, Duke, and the Universities of Texas and Indiana. He assisted in setting up a Black Studies program at Yale in 1968, after which he became the cultural attache of the Embassy of Barbados in Washington, D.C. Culminating with the international success of THE POLISHED HOE, which won the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the Trillium Prize, Austin Clarke's work since 1964 includes eleven novels, six short-story collections, and four memoirs. He lives in Toronto.
Austin Clarke has been capturing Toronto’s West Indian community in vibrant prose for over twenty years. His writing is irresistibly appealing - his ear for dialect, the ironic blend of humour and anger, the marvelous mixture of political statement and sexual energy are all combined in the wonderful strut and swagger of his language. The stories introduce us to unforgettable characters: the West Indian green hornet who overzealously tickets the automobiles of politicians in the hope of being promoted to the ‘real’ police force; the wealthy West Indian who deceives his wife for years as, under the guise of being a bachelor lawyer, he keeps a fastidious daily routine of visiting five different lovers. These nine stories are a compelling portrait of the guilts and nostalgic dreams of outsiders caught between their homeland and their new land. ‘Clarke’s stories, with their calypso idiom, are as near to poetry as prose can be.’ - Toronto Star.
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
Part memoir - part cookbook, part family history - by 'one of the more talented novelists at work in theEnglish language today' (Norman Mailer). Reminiscent of Like Water for Chocolate, Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit blends lyrical, evocative writing with engaging descriptions of how to cook the dishes of Austin Clarke's native Barbados. Winner of the 1999 Martin Luther King, Jr., Achievement Award and author of eight highly praised novels and five short-story collections, Clarke is considered one of the preeminent Caribbean writers of our time. Pig Tails 'n Breadfruit describes the way he learned traditional Bajan recipes - food that has its origins in the days of slavery, hardship, and economic grief - by listening to his mother, aunts, and cousins talk about food while they cooked it. From Oxtails with Mushrooms, Smoked Ham Hocks with Lima Beans, and Breadfruit Cou-Cou with Braising Beef, to Clarke's renowned Chicken Austintacious, each dish evokes the vibrant, sun-drenched island of his childhood and is accompanied by stories about the rituals of food and family. The result is not only succulent food, but a unique portrait of growing up in Barbados in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
In sight of green sugar-cane fields and the sea, the Rum Shop and the Tailor Shop are awash with buckshee rum and male talk. W hile Sarge (known to have broken an innocent man's legs with his truncheon) holds forth about blasted 'properganda', Seabert the Tailor has ambitions for a seat in Parliament and his eye on a big car. As a young man, Michael William Wilberforce Thorne - 'Boy' to the villagers - learns about life from these vibrant characters. Coming of age in the Barbados of the 1950s, he is both horrified and fascinated by the political scheming that surrounds him. After spending several years at a Canadian university on a scholarship, Boy returns to his country with a sharper awareness of its people and possibilities. When an election is called and this tiny, colonial island hovers on the brink of a new political dawn, he is treated a s a political saviour, the first of a new breed. This rich novel, at once serious and hilariously funny, gives a wonderfully exuberant picture of life in Barbados in the early 1950s, painted with unflagging humour and zest."
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
Published in 1972, The Meeting Point was the first book in Austin Clarke's trilogy of novels portraying the fortunes of a group of West Indian domestics, their friends, lovers, spouses and employers, living in Toronto. Storm of Fortune is the second - and even finer - volume in that trilogy. In rich, joyous language, Clarke creates a world bursting with exuberance, a world inhabited by earthy, loquacious, but terribly isolated people, all West Indians living, working, and struggling with the alien culture they find in Toronto. Storm of Fortune is both a continuation of The Meeting Point and a wholly complete, beautiful novel in itself. Continuing the stories of Bernice Leach and her good-looking sister Estelle, Bernice's fellow domestic Dots and her genial husband Boysie Cumberbatch, and Boysie's luckless friend Henry, it weaves four narratives together: Bernice's increasing difficulties in her job as she is forced to deal with the consequences of Estelle's pregnancy - a pregnancy courtesy of Bernice's employer; Estelle's desperate attempt to escape her shame, first by fleeing to northern Ontario at the invitation of a strange Scottish woman who has befriended her, and then by losing herself in anonymous poverty in Toronto; Dots's carefully planned and executed social climb, which is matched by Boysie's gradual awakening to the power of ambition and learning; and Henry's erratic decline and eventual destruction, precipitated by marriage to his rich white girlfriend, Agatha. As Clarke tightly and gracefully mingles these stories, he expands his vision to explore the whole social fabric that binds his West Indians together: their attitudes toward themselves, their own community, and toward the surrounding sea of white Canadian culture; their sense of status and social mobility; their relationship to the physical reality of a cold, northern city. In doing so, he reveals both a tremendous compassion and understanding and a brilliant gift for dialogue and character. Broader, richer, even more vibrant than The Meeting Point, Storm of Fortune demonstrates that Austin Clarke is an exciting literary discovery whose skill and stature grow with each effort.
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
THE BIGGER LIGHT is the final novel in Austin Clarke’s critically acclaimed trilogy about a group of West Indian domestics, their friends, lovers, spouses, and employers living in Toronto. In rich, exuberant language, Clarke again animates a world inhabited by earthy, loquacious, but terribly isolated people, all living, working, and struggling with the alien, white, Canadian culture. The author focuses on Boysie Cumberbatch, owner of a prospering office-cleaning business, and his wife, Dots. Once easy-going and genial, Boysie now feels himself slowly suffocating in the imitation haut bourgeois life that financial success has brought. Money has begun to separate him from Dots; it has all but estranged both of them from their genuine West Indian identities. Instead, when Boysie isn’t out cleaning, he spends his time daydreaming, writing letters to the editors of Toronto newspapers, and listening endlessly to Judy Collins sing ‘Both Sides Now’ (he’s thrown away all his calypso records). He also wears three-piece suits, avoids the raucous West Indian eating and dancing joints he once loved, and worries constantly about the proprieties of a ‘man in his position.’ Then one morning, while staring out of his apartment’s picture window, Boysie becomes fixated on a young woman walking down the street from the subway exit. Bit by bit, the routinized, artificial life he has built begins to crumble. Different in tone from the previous two novels, THE MEETING POINT and STORM OF FORTUNE, THE BIGGER LIGHT is a sequel to them and at the same time a wholly complete, powerful novel in itself. Austin Clarke brilliantly articulates the themes of his trilogy through the dilemma of Boysie Cumberbatch: his unsettled attitudes toward himself, his community, and his fellow immigrants; his questions about his status and his delusions of social mobility; his uncomfortable relationship with the physical reality of a cold, northern city. And in Boysie’s stumbling search for ‘the bigger light’ in which he can truthfully see who and what he is, the author unites these themes into a devastating commentary on the quest for success in North America. Dominated by its warm, superbly drawn main character, capped by its vibrant, unerring dialogue, The Bigger Light concludes the trio of novels that establishes Austin Clarke as a writer of major importance. . Born in Barbados, Austin Clarke graduated from Harrison College and left the island in 1955 for Canada, where he attended Trinity College at the University of Toronto. He has taught at Yale, Brandeis, Smith, Williams, and at Duke University. In addition to his novels, he has written a widely praised collection of short stories, When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks. He is at present cultural attaché to the embassy of Barbados in Washington. .
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
When Mary-Mathilda, one of the most respected women on the colonized island of Bimshire (also known as Barbados), calls the police to confess to a crime, the result is a shattering all-night vigil. She claims the crime is against Mr. Belfeels, the powerful manager of the sugar plantation that dominates the villagers' lives and for whom she has worked for more than thirty years as a field laborer, kitchen help, and maid. She was also Mr. Belfeel's mistress, kept in good financial status in the Great House of the plantation, and the mother of his only son, Wilberforce, a successful doctor, who after living abroad returns to the island.' Set in the period following World War II, The Polished Hoe unravels over the course of twenty-four hours but spans the lifetime of one woman and the collective experience of a society characterized by slavery.
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
The tourists call it paradise; this tiny island in the sun. And John Moore, returning to his native land after over twenty years in the North to assume a government post, is proud to be "going home." But he finds that the nation's new independent status has not changed the hypocrisy and ignorance of the people, and his optimism soon gives way to frustration and paranoia. Men and women are ruthlessly power-hungry here, and unfamiliarity with power is John Moore's undoing. He is innocently drawn into a plot to overthrow the government, then singled out as the scapegoat of the conspiracy and framed publicly as a dangerous radical. And although it becomes clear that his life is in danger, he is powerless to retaliate. He can only watch and wait, protected by the beautiful and influential native woman who has befriended him – while the political intrigue builds to a surprising climax. "The Prime Minister" is a bold departure from Austin Clarke's earlier novels, and he proves himself to be a master storyteller. Among the descriptions of the natural beauty of the land, and the colorful reminiscences of a childhood spent there, he deftly weaves a plot that is all the more sinister in contrast with its enchanted setting. This is a rich, evocative picture of a developing nation, and the reader will not soon forget the raw violence behind the lush scenery, the entrancing smells, the soft accents and languid way of life of the tropics.
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
A compelling collection that explores the lives of Afro-Caribbean immigrants living in Canada, these eight short stories delve into the experiences of displaced persons living in contemporary society - all with a richness of language and rhythm that is authentically urban.
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
The work of Austin Clarke is ‘beautiful, comic, innovative, spellbinding and tragic,’ a prominent critic recently wrote. ‘Clarke has a matchless ear for dialogue; he is a master of several idioms.’ And nowhere is that talent better displayed than in these eleven stories. WHEN HE WAS FREE AND YOUNG AND HE USED TO WEAR SILKS moves effortlessly from stinging irony to lyric romanticism to pure comedy, exploding throughout with earthy, exuberant characters and the rich joy of language. Clarke carries the reader from Barbados to Canada to the United States in such stories as: ‘One Among Them,’ in which a mild, conservative West Indian studying meteorology at Duke University discovers that admiring black militants have mistaken his weather maps for revolutionary bombing plots; ‘‘The Motor Car,’ a comic reversal of LeRoi Jones’s DUTCHMAN, in which a Barbadian working in a Toronto car wash finds himself behind the wheel of a big car with a fast and easy Canadian white woman by his side; and ‘An Easter Carol,’ a beautiful, poignant story set in Barbados about what happens to a young boy who is forced by his mother into a new Easter suit with painfully ill-fitting shoes, told not to swear, and sent to the Easter service at the pristine Anglican church. In all of these stories, Clarke comically, tragically explores the repercussions when different cultures meet, and at the same time transcends the question of color by making the reader see his characters and situations in true human dimensions. His stories are brilliantly, lovingly crafted and a delight to read. Born in Barbados, Austin Clarke graduated from Harrison College and left the island in 1955 for Canada, where he attended Trinity College at the University of Toronto. While in Canada, he worked for the CBC as a stagehand, an actor, and a broadcaster, and conducted radio documentaries on Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones, black music and culture in Harlem, and the civil rights movement. In the United States, he has taught literature at Yale, Brandeis, Smith, Williams, and at Duke University. He is the author of two novels published in the United States, THE MEETING POINT and STORM OF FORTUNE, and his work has appeared in several anthologies and in Evergreen Review, New American Review and Works in Progress. Austin Clarke has also recently been appointed Cultural Attache to the Embassy of Barbados in Washington. .
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
They come from the "Wessindies" to Canada, these labourers in search of a better life. Most find only hostility and frustration. For the few who attain the elusive dream of success in a system as fickle as their woman's embrace, there comes a more troubling dilemma: they become strangers in their own flesh. In eight powerful stories, Austin Clarke captures the repressed passions of the West Indian immigrant in Canada. In scenes as alive with the possibility of violence as a cocked pistol, Clarke takes the reader from tumultuous poker games to explosions of joy and rage. WHEN WOMEN RULE deals brilliantly with the universal theme of lofty hopes and cancelled dreams. Austin Clarke's interest in Barbados, where he was born, provided the inspiration for his first two widely praised novels, THE SURVIVORS OF THE CROSSING and AMONGST THISTLES AND THORNS. He has also published the trilogy, THE MEETING POINT, STORM OF FORTUNE and THE BIGGER LIGHT, which distinguished him as a leading Canadian novelist.
Austin Ardinel Chesterfield Clarke (born July 26, 1934), is a Canadian novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has been called ‘Canada's first multicultural writer’. Born in St. James, Barbados, Clarke had his early education there and taught at a rural school for three years. In 1955 he moved to Canada to attend the University of Toronto but after two years turned his hand to journalism and broadcasting. He was a reporter in the Ontario communities of Timmins and Kirkland Lake, before joining the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a freelance journalist. He subsequently taught at several American universities, including Yale University (Hoyt fellow, 1968–70), Duke University (1971-72), and the University of Texas (visiting professor, 1973). In 1973 he was designated cultural attaché at the Barbadian embassy in Washington, DC. He was later General Manager of the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation in Barbados (1975-1977). Returning to Canada, in 1977 he ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario election. He was writer in residence at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec (1977) and at University of Western Ontario (1978). From 1988 to 1993 he served on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. In September 2012, at the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Clarke was announced as the winner of the $10,000 Harbourfront Festival Prize ‘on the merits of his published work and efforts in fostering literary talent in new and aspiring writers’. Previous recipients of the award (established in 1984) include Dionne Brand, Wayson Choy, Christopher Dewdney, Helen Humphreys, Paul Quarrington, Peter Robinson, Seth, Jane Urquhart and Guy Vanderhaeghe. Clarke was reported as saying: ‘‘I rejoiced when I saw that Authors at Harbourfront Centre had named me this year's winner of the Harbourfront Festival Prize. I did not come to this city on September 29, 1959, as a writer. I came as a student. However, my career as a writer buried any contention of being a scholar and I thank Authors at Harbourfront Centre for saving me from the more painful life of the 'gradual student.' It is an honour to be part of such a prestigious list of authors.’
This message was found on John Brown's body following his ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry. History books do not record the contribution of his mysterious collaborator, 'M.E.P.,' but in Free Enterprise, acclaimed novelist Michelle Cliff tells the remarkable story of frontier legend Mary Ellen Pleasant. In 1858, two black women meet at a restaurant and begin to plot a revolution. Mary Ellen Pleasant owns a string of hotels in San Francisco that cater to wealthy whites and secretly double as havens for runaway slaves. Her comrade, Annie, is a young Jamaican who has given up her life of privilege to fight for the abolitionist cause. Together they join John Brown's doomed enterprise, and barely escape with their lives. In 1858, two black women meet and later join John Brown's doomed raid on Harper's Ferry, barely escaping with their lives. Acclaimed author Michelle Cliff places an actual historical figure at the center of her powerful new novel, which brings to life the passionate struggle for liberation that began not long after the first slavers landed in Virginia.
Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise. Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a lesbian who grew up in Jamaica.
‘Michelle Cliff has always been a fierce and fearless writer. In this incendiary collection Cliff examines place and race and legacy, the things we carry with us in our memory and blood. ‘Revolutionaries are made, not born.’ This book could make them. Be prepared.’ - Rebecca Brown. A deeply personal meditation on history and memory, place and displacement by a major writer Born in a Jamaica still under British rule, the acclaimed and influential writer Michelle Cliff embraced her many identities, shaped by her experiences with the forces of colonialism and oppression: a light-skinned Creole, a lesbian, an immigrant in both England and the United States. In her celebrated novels and short stories, she has probed the intersection of prejudice and oppression with a rare and striking lyricism. In her first collection of nonfiction, Cliff displays the same poetic intensity, interweaving reflections on her life in Jamaica, England, and the United States with a powerful and sustained critique of racism, homophobia, and social injustice. IF I COULD WRITE THIS IN FIRE begins by tracing her transatlantic journey from Jamaica to England, coalescing around a graceful, elliptical account of her childhood friendship with Zoe, who is dark-skinned and from an impoverished, rural background; the divergent life courses that each is forced to take; and the class and color tensions that shape their lives as adults. In other essays and poems, Cliff writes about the discovery of her distinctive, diasporic literary voice, recalls her wild colonial girlhood and sexual awakening, and recounts traveling through an American landscape of racism, colonialism, and genocide - a history of violence embodied in seemingly innocuous souvenirs and tourist sites. IF I COULD WRITE THIS IN FIRE explores the complexities of identity as they meet with race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and the legacies of the Middle Passage and European imperialism. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Michelle Cliff has lectured at several universities and was Allan K. Smith Professor of English Language and Literature at Trinity College in Hartford. She is the author of the acclaimed novels ABENG, NO TELEPHONE TO HEAVEN, and FREE ENTERPRISE, as well as two collections of short fiction, BODIES OF WATER and THE STORE OF A MILLION ITEMS. .
Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise. Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a lesbian who grew up in Jamaica.
Haitian writer Clitandre blends traditional narrative, fragments of conversation, dreams and visions to bring to life the shantytown surrounding Port-au-Prince, where John, a bus driver, his son Raphael and their fellow denizens experience a hideous poverty that is outside the ken of most Americans. Time is fluid and is marked more by children growing up or dying than by dates, since the community is too poor to buy new calendars every year. Progress comes only in the form of electricity, and ominous factory sheds, where workers are locked in all day, push many of the poor into the swamp. Brutal police curtail the shanty dwellers’ few freedoms. But in this novel, the poor have had enough. After Raphael is murdered by the police, John leads the people in concert with farmers from the countryside in an uprising on the anniversary of Haiti’s independence. Jones masterfully translates Haitian patois into West Indian English. - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.
Journalist, painter and novelist, Pierre Clitandre was born on 20 March 1954 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He studied painting at the Académie de Beaux-Arts from 1974 to 1977 and continued his studies at the Faculty of Ethnology until 1979. He is a cultural journalist and collaborator in the main Haitian newspapers: Le Nouvelliste , Le Matin and Le Petit Saturday Evening . He is also a columnist for Radio Haiti Inter, and for two years he collaborates with Radio Plus for programs in culture and archeology, ethnology and town planning.
A bilingual edition of Caribbean and African poets. Those from the Caribbean are: Leon Damas (French Guiana), Aimé Césaire (Martinique), Jacques Roumain (Haiti), Jean Brierre (Haiti), René Depestre (Haiti), Anthony Phelps (Haiti), Paul Niger (Guadeloupe), Guy Tirolien (Guadeloupe). Most of the selections are by Damas and Césaire. Photos.
This vibrant novel from the Caribbean introduces the passionate voice of Black writer Merle Collins. Set on the island of Grenada, the story centers on several generations of women and traces the struggle of the Grenadian people to achieve political autonomy. Angel, daughter of Doodsie, is a young child when the houses of the white landowners in Grenada are burned to the ground, an event that ushers in thirty years of change on the island. Angel grows up headstrong and rebellious, eventually leaving the community to attend university, where her radical ideas deepen. As political unrest in Grenada mounts, Angel returns home and plunges into activity - work that is cut short by the sudden invasion of U.S. troops. An outstanding fiction debut by a gifted writer, ANGEL is a richly evocative and memorable novel. ‘My joy - a first reaction to Merle Collins’ novel, ANGEL - stemmed from the nostalgia created by the use of its language, so familiar to me, so dear - captured in all of the lustiness, its great splashes of humor in my native patois. Then came its telling. She draws a portrait so profound of the former British colonial Caribbean family - forever living on this side of happiness. Ms. Collins has emerged as a major writer and storyteller. Bravo, bravo!’ - Rosa Guy. ‘Merle Collins has written a richly textured and moving story of the West Indies that exists behind the tourist hype of happy islands in the sun. In Angel McAllister, whose coming of age parallels recent events in Grenada’s history, including the U.S. invasion, Collins has created a truly contemporary West Indian heroine. Her mother, Doodsie, is both a triumph of characterization and a testament to the resiliency and strength of Black women the world over. ANGEL ‘sings’ with her vivid and authentic voice.’ — Paule Marshall.
Merle Collins (born 29 September 1950 in Aruba) is a distinguished Grenadian poet and short story writer. Collins' parents are from Grenada, where they returned from Aruba shortly after her birth. Her primary education was in St George's, Grenada. She later studied at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, earning degrees in English and Spanish in 1972. She then taught history and Spanish in Grenada for two years and subsequently in St Lucia. In 1980, she graduated from Georgetown University, Washington, DC, with a master's degree in Latin American Studies. She graduated from the London School of Economics with a Ph.D. in Government. Collins was deeply involved in the Grenadian Revolution and served as a government coordinator for research on Latin America and the Caribbean. She left Grenada for England in 1983. From 1984 to 1995, Collins taught at the University of North London. She is currently a Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Maryland. Her critical works include "Themes and Trends in Caribbean Writing Today" in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World (ed. Helen Carr, Pandora Press, 1989), and "To be Free is Very Sweet" in Slavery and Abolition (Vol. 15, issue 3, 1994, pp. 96–103). Her first collection of poetry, Because the Dawn Breaks, was published in 1985, at which time she was a member of African Dawn, a performance group combining poetry, mime, and African music. In England, she began her first novel, Angel. In 1987, she published Angel, which follows the lives of Grenadians as they struggled for independence. Specifically, Angel is about a young woman going through the political turbulence in Grenada. Her collection of short stories, Rain Darling, was produced in 1990, and a second collection of poetry, Rotten Pomerack, in 1992. Her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, was published in 1995. A review of her 2003 poetry collection, Lady in a Boat, states, "Ranging from poems reveling in the nation language of her island to poems that capture the beauty of its flora, Collins presents her island and people going about the business of living. They attempt to come to terms with the past and construct a future emerging out of the crucible of violence. Lady in a Boat is a poignant retelling of a period in history when, for a brief moment, Caribbean ascendancy seemed possible. Merle Collins shows how the death of this moment continues to haunt the Caribbean imagination." Her most recent collection of stories, The Ladies Are Upstairs, was published in 2011.
All of these poems, with two exceptions, were written in the 1940s. Frank Appleton Collymore was born on January 7, 1893 at Woodville Cottage, Chelsea Road, where he lived all his life. He entered Combermere School for boys in 1903 and remained there as a student until 1910 when he was invited to join the staff . He retired from Combermere officially in 1958, having risen to the position of Deputy Headmaster. After retirement he often returned to teach until 1963. Frank Collymore was married twice and was the father of four daughters. He died at the age of eighty-seven on July 17, 1980. It is for his work as a poet and an editor that Frank Collymore is best known and especially for his significant contribution to the development of West Indian Literature as the editor of BIM Magazine. BIM was first published in 1942 with E.L. Jimmy Cozier as editor. Frank Collymore became joint editor with W. Therold Barnes from Issue no. 3 when Jimmy Cozier left for Trinidad. He remained editor until 1975, producing the magazine twice a year often single-handly even in difficult times. With BIM he provided an outlet for aspiring Caribbean writers. Contributions for this magazine were received from across the region and some material from the magazine was used by the BBC Overseas Services in a programme entitled ‘Caribbean Voices’. Collymore became known as a friend and inspiration to writers both at home and abroad. ‘ . . . Frank Collymore’s influence on West Indian literature was not only felt through BIM, but as a teacher, his pupils included George Lamming, Austin (Tom) Clarke and the late Timothy Callendar. He is remembered by some students for allowing free expression in drawing, free flow of thought, for encouraging them to write on topics drawn from their surroundings, and for inviting special speakers for sixth formers, whom he did not teach. Among these speakers were Bruce Hamilton and Edgar Mittleholzer . . . ‘.
Frank Appleton Collymore (7 January 1893 - 17 July 1980) was a famous Barbadian literary editor, author, poet, stage performer and painter. His nickname was ‘Barbadian Man of the Arts’. He also taught for 50 years at Combermere School, where he sought out and encouraged prospective writers in his classes, notably George Lamming. Collymore was born at Woodville Cottage, Chelsea Road, Saint Michael, Barbados (where he lived all his life). Aside from being a student at Combermere School (from 1903 until 1910), he was also one of its staff members until his retirement in 1958, up to which point he was its Deputy Headmaster. After this, he often returned to teach until 1963. On the stage, he became a member of the ‘Bridgetown Players’, which began in 1942. As an artist, he made many drawings and paintings to illustrate his own writings. He called them ‘Collybeasts’ or ‘Collycreatures’. In 1942, he began the famous Caribbean literary magazine BIM (originally published four times a year), for which he is most well-known, and was also its editor until 1975. John T. Gilmore has written of Collymore: ‘As a lover of literature, he was also a dedicated and selfless encourager of the work of others, lending books to aspiring writers from their schooldays onwards, publishing their early work in Bim, the literary magazine he edited for more than fifty issues from the 1940s to the 1970s, and helping them to find other markets, especially through the relationship he established with Henry Swanzy, producer of the influential BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices.’ Three literary awards have been named after him.
Frank Collymore was at the centre of the West Indian literary renaissance of the forties and fifties. He was a master of the short story, bringing together a mordant wit and a sympathetic understanding of human failings to tackle subjects ranging from the eccentric to the psychotic. This collection includes ‘Shadows’, a sombre depiction of alienation, a satirical dissection of social climbing in ‘RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall’, and in ‘The Snag’ a young boy’s growing pains are written about with gentle irony.
Frank Appleton Collymore MBE (7 January 1893 - 17 July 1980) was a famous Barbadian literary editor, author, poet, stage performer and painter. His nickname was ‘Barbadian Man of the Arts’. He also taught for 50 years at Combermere School, where he sought out and encouraged prospective writers in his classes, notably George Lamming. Collymore was born at Woodville Cottage, Chelsea Road, Saint Michael, Barbados (where he lived all his life). Aside from being a student at Combermere School (from 1903 until 1910), he was also one of its staff members until his retirement in 1958, up to which point he was its Deputy Headmaster. After this, he often returned to teach until 1963. On the stage, he became a member of the ‘Bridgetown Players’, which began in 1942. As an artist, he made many drawings and paintings to illustrate his own writings. He called them ‘Collybeasts’ or ‘Collycreatures’. In 1942, he began the famous Caribbean literary magazine BIM (originally published four times a year), for which he is most well-known, and was also its editor until 1975. John T. Gilmore has written of Collymore: ‘As a lover of literature, he was also a dedicated and selfless encourager of the work of others, lending books to aspiring writers from their schooldays onwards, publishing their early work in Bim, the literary magazine he edited for more than fifty issues from the 1940s to the 1970s, and helping them to find other markets, especially through the relationship he established with Henry Swanzy, producer of the influential BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices.’ Three literary awards have been named after him.
This book is an exploration of the life and art of Maryse Condé, who first won international acclaim for Segu, a novel about West African experience and the slave trade. Born in Guadeloupe in 1937, Condé lived in Guinea after it won its independence from France. Later she lived in Ghana and Senegal during turbulent, decisive moments in the histories of these countries. Her writings-novels, plays, essays, stories, and children’s books-have led her to an increasingly important role within Africa and throughout the world. Françoise Pfaff met Maryse Condé in 1981, when she first interviewed her. Their friendship grew quickly. In 1991 the two women continued recording conversations about Condé’s geographical sojourns and literary paths, her personality, and her thoughts. Their conversations reveal connections between Condé’s vivid art and her eventful, passionate life. In her encounters with historical and literary figures, and in her opinions on politics and culture, Condé appears as an engaging witness to her time. The conversations frequently sparkle with humor; at other moments they are infused with profound seriousness.
Maryse Condé is the recipient of the French literary awards Le Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme and Le Prix de l’Académie Française. She currently teaches at Columbia University and her most recent works include Tree of Life and Crossing the Mangrove. Born and educated in Paris, Françoise Pfaff is a professor of French at Howard University. The translator of this book, she is also the author of Twenty-five Black African Filmmakers: A Critical Study, with Filmography and Bio-Bibliography and The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene, A Pioneer of African Cinema. Entretiens avec Maryse Condé was first published in France in 1993.
In Rihata, a small, sleepy, backwater town in a fictitious African state, a couple and their family struggle to come to terms with each other against a background of political maneuvering and upheaval. Marie-Helene, far from her native home in Guadeloupe, lives unhappily with her African husband, Zek, who is riddled with material problems and weighted down by his own burden of inferiority towards his younger and more successful brother, Madou. Their uneasy existence is further disturbed by the arrival of Madou, now Minister for Rural Development, on an official visit to Rihata. Murky events from the past resurface and send ripples through their lives. The portrait of an African community torn between progress and tradition and subject to the whims of a dictatorship unfolds through this subtle web of personal relationships. A SEASON IN RIHATA is a novel of political power, exile, grief and loneliness.
Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.
In this beautifully crafted, Rashomon-like novel, Maryse Conde has written a gripping story imbued with all the nuances and traditions of Caribbean culture. Francis Sancher--a handsome outsider, loved by some and reviled by others--is found dead, face down in the mud on a path outside Riviere au Sel, a small village in Guadeloupe. None of the villagers are particularly surprised, since Sancher, a secretive and melancholy man, had often predicted an unnatural death for himself. As the villagers come to pay their respects they each--either in a speech to the mourners, or in an internal monologue--reveal another piece of the mystery behind Sancher's life and death. Like pieces of an elaborate puzzle, their memories interlock to create a rich and intriguing portrait of a man and a community. In the lush and vivid prose for which she has become famous, Conde has constructed a Guadeloupean wake for Francis Sancher. Retaining the full color and vibrance of Conde's homeland, Crossing the Mangrove pays homage to Guadeloupe in both subject and structure.
Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.
Ranelise is a cook in the small village of La Pointe in Guadeloupe where she rescues a teenage girl from suicide by drowning. The girl, Reynalda Titane, lives at the local jeweler's grand house where her mother, Nina, is a maid. Reynalda is pregnant and in a state of despair. Ranelise cares for her and the child, christened Marie-Noelle, but Reynalda soon flees to France, intent upon getting the education to allow her to rise above her mother's fate. Desirada is the story of Marie-Noelle and her quest to understand the mother who abandoned her, and discover the identity of her father, despite the opposing stories from her mother and her grandmother. It is also the story of generations of island women and the pursuit of a meaningful life despite a tainted personal history. Desirada was awarded the prestigious Prix Carbet de la Caraibe in 1998 given for the best book by a Caribbean author. It is Ms. Conde's twelfth novel.
Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.
A powerful novel of Africa's history and the men and women who determined its fate. From the East came Islam. From the West, the slave trade. The battle for Africa's soul had begun... ‘A wondrous novel about a period of African history few other writers have addressed... Much of the novel's radiance comes from the lush descriptions of a traditional life that is both exotic and violent.’ -THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. ‘Segu is an overwhelming accomplishment. It injects into the density of history characters who are as alive as you and I. Passionate, lusty, greedy, they are in conflict with themselves as well as with God and Mammon. Maryse Conde has done us all a tremendous service by rendering history so compelling and exciting. Segu is a literary masterpiece I could not put down.’ -LOUISE MERIWETHER.
Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.
Maryse was the eighth child in her family, an unexpected one. Her father, a civil servant, had been awarded the Legion d’honneur; her elegant mother had been a schoolteacher. She arrived after a difficult pregnancy while the town of La Pointe, Guadeloupe was in the midst of celebrating Mardi Gras. She was raised to appreciate culture, the opera, the great French paintings and was sent to a privately-run school. Hers was a proud family in which appearances, skin tone, language, and class was important, her parents ever mindful of being a part of a world which for centuries had been reserved for Whites only.In this collection of autobiographical essays, Maryse Condé vividly evokes the relationships and events which gave her childhood meaning: discovering her parents feelings of alienation; her first crush and short-lived romance; a falling out with her best friend over a frank assessment of her beauty; the death of her beloved grandmother when she was nine; an incident at a playground that was her first encounter with racism. Maryse began to invent a universe of her own at an early age, and these gem-like vignettes capture the spirit of her fiction: haunting, powerful, poignant, and leavened with a streak of humor. They paint a wonderful picture of a little girl trying to find her place in the world, one that is redolent of the music and colors of the Caribbean, as well as of the harsher climate of Paris.Tales from the Heart was awarded the Prix Yourcenar in 1999 for excellence in French writing by an author who resides in the United States.
Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.
When he opposes French colonialism in his native Africa, regal Behanzin is exiled to the far-off island of Martinique. In the course of her novel, renowned author Maryse Conde tells the story of Behanzin's scattered offspring and their lives in the Caribbean and the United States. She skillfully intertwines themes of exile, lost origins, and hope--with Africa hovering in the background.
Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.
One dark night in Cape Town, Rosélie’s husband goes out for a pack of cigarettes and never comes back. Not only is she left with unanswered questions about his violent death but she is also left without any means of support. At the urging of her housekeeper and best friend, the new widow decides to take advantage of the strange gifts she has always possessed and embarks on a career as a clairvoyant. As Rosélie builds a new life for herself and seeks the truth about her husband’s murder, acclaimed Caribbean author Maryse Condé crafts a deft exploration of post-apartheid South Africa and a smart, gripping thriller. THE STORY OF THE CANNIBAL WOMAN is both contemporary and international, following the lives of an interracial, intercultural couple in New York City, Tokyo, and Capetown. Maryse Condé is known for vibrantly lyrical language and fearless, inventive storytelling—she uses both to stunning effect in this magnificently original novel.
Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.
The New York Times Book Review hailed Segu, Maryse Conde's unforgettable saga of nineteenth-century Africa as 'the most significant historical novel about black Africa published in many a year.' Children of Segu, the gripping sequel, was greeted with the acclaim due to a master storyteller at the height of her gifts. Now, with Tree of Life, Conde turns her impassioned, epic eye to the chaos and upheaval of the twentieth century. Rapidly shifting back and forth between Guadeloupe and Harlem, moving from Haiti's desperate slums to the exclusive enclaves of the Parisian upper class, this deeply personal story traces one Guadeloupe family's rise from poverty to riches through several generations. The story begins with Albert, the forebear, who leaves an island plantation to work on the Panama Canal and out of the horror of prejudice and oppression, fierily recreates himself as a man of immense wealth. We learn about his sons: Jacob, doomed to carry on his father's business but yearning for a life of his own, and Jean, who rejects the privilege and riches that are his birthright and becomes a martyr to the struggling people of his tragic land; about his granddaughter, Thecla, who tries to find happiness through politics and men; and about Albert II, who meets his puzzling and heartbreaking end an ocean away from his family and his roots. The extraordinary tale is recounted by Coco, a contemporary female descendant, who finally reconciles herself to a past that has haunted her all her life. Like Segu and Children of Segu, Tree of Life is a grand historical pageant, overflowing with the interlocking tales of many lives, teeming with social, cultural, and political details. 'Rich and colorful and glorious' was how Maya Angelou described Segu. Tree of Life expands Maryse Conde's unique vision into our time.
Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.
The deeply prolific and widely celebrated author of such books as Segu and Tales from the Heart, Maryse Condé returns with an unforgettable new novel, Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? Inspired by a tragedy in the late twentieth century, Condé sets this fiction in the late nineteenth century with her characteristic blend of magical realism and fantasy. Condé lyrically, hauntingly imagines Celanire: a woman who was mutilated at birth and left for dead. Mysterious, seductive, and disarming, she is driven to uncover the truth of her past at any cost. On one hand, Celanire appears to be a saint; she is a tireless worker who has turned numerous neglected institutions into vibrant schools for motherless children. But she is also a woman apprehended by demons, as death and misfortune seem to follow in her wake. Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? follows both her triumphs and her trials as this survivor becomes a beautiful and powerful woman who travels from Guadeloupe to West Africa to Peru in order to solve the mysteries of her past and avenge the crimes committed against her. This beautifully rendered story, translated by Richard Philcox from the French edition, is sure to be considered the most dazzling addition to Condé’s brilliant body of work.
Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.
A retelling of Bronte's Wuthering Heights set in nineteenth-century Guadeloupe and Cuba. Prize-winning Caribbean novelist Maryse Cond reimagines Emily Bronte's passionate novel as a tale of obsessive love between the ‘African’ Rayze and Cathy, the mulatto daughter of the man who takes Rayze in and raises him, but whose treatment goads Rayze into rebellious flight. In Cuba, Rayze makes his fortune, but upon his return he discovers Cathy has wed the weak scion of a socially prominent Creole family. Rayze determines to be avenged for the loss of his love. His vengeance continues into the next generation, haunting both Cathy's daughter and his son. In characteristic lush prose, Cond transposes Wuthering Heights to her native island of Guadeloupe, retaining the emotional power of the original while showing us Caribbean society in the wake of emancipation. First published in 1998 by Faber U.K. in Caryl Phillips's prestigious Caribbean series, Windward Heights is making its first appearance in the United States.
Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.
Adelise is a girl trapped working in the cane fields of Martinique. Yearning for communication, she confides in the mysterious flowering tree in her backyard; her mother calls her a dragonfly, for she refuses to settle down and learn that life is not a game. When Adelise is forced to move from her village to Fort-de-France, the island’s politically restive capital, her aunt introduces her to the unsavory business of nightlife among the mulatto elite, and she comes to rely even more on an elaborate system of detachment from her body. ‘Raphael Confiant has incontestably become a principal character in French literary history,’ a reviewer for Le Monde observed. ‘One is struck by the luminous intelligence of his insights, by the wit of his dialogue, by his soaring lyricism.’ MAMZELLE DRAGONFLY, the first of Confiant’s books to be published in English, is a vivid and intimately affecting novel; its spare style is reminiscent of Cristina Garcia’s, while its fiercely independent heroine brings to mind those in Edwidge Danticat’s fiction, it is a nostalgic and erotic story, and also a sophisticated look at modern Martinique.
Raphaël Confiant (born January 25, 1951) is a Martinican writer known for his literary commitment towards Creole literature. Raphaël Confiant was born in Le Lorrain, Martinique. He studied English and Political Science at the Sciences Po Aix and Law at Paul Cézanne University in Aix-en-Provence, France. During the 1970s, Confiant became a militant proponent of use of the Creole language and later worked with Jean Bernabé and Patrick Chamoiseau to create the créolité movement.
A study of more than 20 men women and children talking about their daily experiences as black people in Britain.
THOMAS J. COTTLE (born January 22, 1937, Chicago, IL) is Professor of Education at Boston University. He has written over 25 books, including Private Lives and Public Accounts, A Family Album, Children in Jail, Children's Secrets, Hidden Survivors, Time's Children, Like Fathers, Like Sons, Barred from School, Perceiving Time, Black Children-White Dreams, and Black Testimony. His work has appeared in many scholarly journals as well as mainstream media.
A collection of prose, poetry and drama. Includes selections by Aimé Césaire (Martinique) and Jacques Roumain (Haiti).
Haiti, brought vividly to life in this book, is a rugged, mountainous land, thickly populated by farmers who live close to the edge of hunger. Descended from Africans brought as slaves to the New World in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, they have developed a culture blended of African, American, and French influences - rich in folklore, music, art, dance, religion, and language. Now, as social change begins to sweep the Caribbean, Haiti must face its problems of feudal land tenure and overpopulation. However, the future of Haiti will be shaped also by novel influences from its past, and Mr. Courlander’s intriguing book will provide a thorough understanding of this background. One such influence is vodoun, the religious system of Haiti - a survival of West African beliefs with an infiltration of Roman Catholic doctrine. In contrast to sensationalized accounts of vodoun, Mr. Courlander provides a detailed story of vodoun rituals, with a guide to the thousands of loa, or spirits. Vodoun, he writes, ‘is an integrated system of concepts concerning human behavior, the relation of mankind to those who have lived before, and to the natural and supernatural forces of the universe. . . . In short, it is a true religion which attempts to tie the unknown to the known and thus create order where chaos existed before.’ He goes on to tell of the day-by-day role of spirits and rituals in the life of the Haitian people, describing certain extraordinary ceremonies dealing with supplication of the dead and invocation of deities. He gives the text, in Creole and in English translation, of numerous incantations, tales, proverbs, and songs. Many of these he traces to their West African precursors. He also traces many dances to the same source, noting that Haitian dances are usually participative rather than exhibitionistic. Mr. Courlander also discusses the Creole language - a blend of archaic French vocabulary and West African speech patterns and rhythms. The Haitians do not separate play and work (‘the drum and the hoe’) in the conventional Western manner. Mr. Courlander has attempted to convey in this book a unified picture of the resulting way of life — an unusually rich one, and one in which Americans are finding an increasing fascination. During his twelve trips to Haiti, totaling some four years’ stay, Mr. Courlander recorded hundreds of songs and took hundreds of remarkable photographs of dances, rites, art objects, and people at work and play. These are reproduced in the book in 48 pages of plates and 109 pages of music for songs and drum rhythms. A discography lists recordings of Haitian music.
Harold Courlander, who is a specialist in African and Afro-American folklore, folk music, and related fields, has written HAITI SINGING and a novel set in the West Indies, THE CABALLERO. He has done much anthropological research and writing, some of it for the United Nations.
These stories of love, injustice and the innermost feelings of women are tender and poignant as they weave between generations, past and present. They give a powerful and vivid view of Jamaican life shot through with pride and struggle, contempt and pain. In MINT TEA, her first collection of short stories, Craig displays a flair for language and imagery and a subtle sense of irony. Christine Craig is a Jamaican author, now living in the United States.
Christine Craig (born 24 June 1943) is a Jamaican writer living in Florida, US. She has published collections of poetry and short stories, as well as children's fiction and several non-fiction works. Christine Craig was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in rural Saint Elizabeth. She received a BA from the University of the West Indies. In 1970, she published her first work, Emanuel and His Parrot, a children's book. She began publishing poetry in the late 1970s and published her first poetry collection, Quadrille for Tigers, in 1984. In 1993, Craig published a collection of short stories entitled Mint Tea. She also researched, wrote and presented a series of stories on Jamaican history for children's television. Craig tutored English literature at the University of the West Indies and was adjunct professor at Barry University in Florida. In 1989, she took part in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She was editor in Miami for the The Jamaica Gleaner from 1990 to 1998. She later moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
C.L.R. James (1901-1989) made important contributions in a host of fields - literature, criticism, cultural studies, political theory, history, and philosophy. One of the most astute minds of this century, he served as mentor for two generations of international intellectuals. He contributed enormously to their understanding of the colonial question, the Negro question, the Russian question, the role of dialectics in proletarian struggle, and the theory and practice of Marxism in the Americas. In addition to THE BLACK JACOBINS, his incisive account of the Haitian revolution of the 1790s, and NOTES ON DIALECTICS, James published a range of other books, including a classic work on the game of cricket and a study of Herman Melville. This collection of essays offers a variety of fresh perspectives on James’s life and writings. Included are reminiscences of those who knew James well and critical essays by eminent scholars. The book is the first to offer a full treatment of James’s many contributions to twentieth-century intellectual life.
Selwyn R. Cudjoe is professor of Africana studies at Wellesley College. He is author of V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading and editor of Caribbean Women Writers and Eric E. Williams Speaks. Professor of English at Wellesley College, William E. Cain is author of The Crisis in Criticism and F. O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism.
‘Analysis, literary or otherwise, not only involves the quantification of data and description of events but also seeks to discover what Engles described as ‘the inner causal connection in the course of a development’ of these events. The search should be for the essence that yields a more critical study and helps predict further development of the phenomenon. Thus, when we examine Caribbean literature, we look for a continuous thread giving this literature its particular resonance, tonality and, most important of all, content. I have dispensed with a strict chronology of the works because the uneven economic development of the Caribbean islands has created varying social development. For example, Barbados in the seventeenth century was more developed than, say, Jamaica, and the consciousness of writers reflected this. In Cuba today, the social consciousness of writers is more advanced than that of writers in Haiti. In dispensing with chronology, I have correlated similar socio-political experiences with their concomitant artistic forms. Thus AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RUNAWAY SLAVE (1963) is treated as arising necessarily and logically out of Slave Narrative of Juan Manzano (1840); KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD (1949) is dealt with in the same context as THE WHOLE ARMOUR (1962). This is valid because it reflects a given level of social consciousness even though different countries achieved that level at different times. This is not merely the aesthetic imposition of judgment but the real reflection of social development and illustrates the belief that the ‘imaginative content of a work of art should correspond to the objective image of reality.’ My major concern is to reflect a literary theory which emanates from the ‘objective reality’ rather than vice versa and to present a cohesive and gnostical view of the literature which, developing out of the Caribbean experience, has been fashioned by resistance at various levels. The approach, which is holistic and organic, proceeds from the premise that ‘every serious work of literature is a live human document reflecting the epoch’s actual historical processes and phenomena.’ To yield a richer understanding of literary works, criticism should show an understanding of the ‘historical processes and phenomena’ out of which a literature grows and should examine artistic form as a vehicle for carrying forward ideological content. For this reason I examine the artistic forms used to carry the ideological content of Caribbean literature forward: This work is meant to consolidate what we now know, to open possibilities for further study and to see literary scholarship in a ‘holistic’ manner.’ - from the Introduction by the author.
Selwyn R. Cudjoe (born December 1, 1943, Tacarigua, Trinidad and Tobago) is Professor of Africana Studies, Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literature, and, from 1995 to 1999, was the fourth Marion Butler McLean Chair in the History of Ideas at Wellesley College. He teaches courses on the African American literary tradition, African literature, black women writers, and Caribbean literature. A graduate of Fordham University where he received both a B.A. in English (1969) and an M.A. in American Literature (1972), Professor Cudjoe earned a Ph.D. in American Literature from Cornell University (1976). Prior to joining the Wellesley faculty in 1986, he taught at Ithaca College and Cornell, Harvard, Brandeis, Fordham, and Ohio universities. He has been a lecturer at Auburn (N.Y.) State Prison and taught at Bedford-Stuyvesant (N.Y.) Youth-In-Action. Professor Cudjoe is the author and editor of several books, and has produced several documentaries. He has written for the New York Times; The Washington Post; Boston Globe; Harvard Educational Review; International Herald Tribune; New Left Review; Baltimore Sun; the Amsterdam News; Trinidad Guardian; and Trinidad Express.
UNDER THE BONE is a harrowing, evocative tale of political intrigue and violence in post-Duvalier Haiti. Against the backdrop of electoral tensions, the novel opens with the discovery of a corpse, outside Port-au-Prince, by Elysse Voltaire, a young Haitian woman who is later framed for murder. Her plight, and that of Ti Cedric, a missing peasant activist, become the focus of an investigation by Leslie Doyle, an American human-rights worker, aided by a circle of Haitian advocates. Leslie's journey leads her from the houses ransacked by the Tontons Macoutes - Haiti's death squads - to killing fields, hospitals, prisons, and, finally to the truth. At once a mystery and a chronicle of hope and despair in the world's first black republic, UNDER THE BONE weaves a range of narrative to present a vivid, compelling picture of life in contemporary Haiti. Lyrical, haunting, and streaked with black humor, under the Bone marks the debut of a gifted young novelist and an astute observer of the human condition.
Anne-Christine d'Adesky is an American journalist and activist of French and Haitian descent. Her father was born in Haiti, where the family's roots go back far; spending her childhood summers and still has extended family living there
Using the intimate rhyme scheme of Byron's great picaresque Don Juan and the narrative devices of Pushkin's enduring Eugene Onegin, D'Aguiar creates poetry dazzling in its inventiveness and wonder. Moving from the Civil War to the present day, Bloodlines follows the lives of five characters, each trying to escape the bonds of slavery. Among them is the narrator, who knows neither of his parents because, by the time he is born, his black mother has been sold back into slavery and dies in childbirth, and his white father has been indentured as a boxer in a traveling fair. Cursed by the thwarted love of his parents, the narrator is condemned to bear witness until the races become equal. He speaks to us of his quest for freedom.
Fred D'Aguiar (born 2 February 1960) is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist and playwright. He is currently Professor of English at Virginia Tech. Fred D'Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents, Malcolm Frederick D'Aguiar and Kathleen Agatha Messiah. In 1962 he was taken to Guyana where he lived with his grandmother until 1972 when he returned, at the age of twelve, to England. D'Aguiar trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, graduating in 1985. On graduating he applied for a PhD on the Guyanese author Wilson Harris at the University of Warwick, but - after winning two writers-in-residency positions, at Birmingham University and the University of Cambridge (where he was the Judith E. Wilson Fellow from 1989 to 1990) - his PhD studies ‘recededed from [his] mind’ and he began to focus all of his energies on creative writing. In 1994, D'Aguiar moved to the United States to take up a Visiting Writer position at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1992–94). Since then, he has taught at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine (Assistant Professor, 1994–95) and the University of Miami where he held the position of Professor of English and Creative Writing. In 2003 he took up the position of Professor of English and Co-Director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. D'Aguiar's first collection of poetry, Mama Dot (1985), was published to much acclaim. It centres upon an ‘archetypal‘ grandmother figure, Mama Dot, and was notable for its fusion of standard English and Nation language. Along with his 1989 collection Airy Hall (which is named after the village in Guyana where D'Aguiar spent his childhood), Mama Dot won the Guyana Poetry Prize. Where D'Aguiar's first two poetry collections were set in Guyana, his third - British Subjects (1989) - explores the experiences of peoples of the West Indian diaspora in London. London was also the focus of another long poem, Sweet Thames, which was broadcast as part of the BBC ‘Worlds on Film’ series on 3 July 1992 and won the Commission for Racial Equality Race in the Media Award. After turning to writing novels rather than poetry for a period of time, D'Aguiar returned to the poetic mode in 1998, publishing Bill of Rights (1998): a long narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1979, which is told in Guyanese versions of English, fusing patois, Creole and nation language with the standard vernacular. It was shortlisted for the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize. Bill of Rights was followed by another narrative poem, Bloodlines (2000), which tells the story of a black slave and her white lover. His 2009 collection of poetry, Continental Shelf, centres on a response to the Virginia Tech Massacre in which 32 people were killed by a student in 2007. It was a finalist for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize. D'Aguiar's first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), tells the story of Whitechapel, a slave on an eighteenth-century Virginia plantation. The book won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. It was adapted for television and televised by Channel 4 in the UK. Returning to themes he had earlier developed in British Subjects, D'Aguiar's 1996 novel, Dear Future, explores the history of the West Indian diaspora through a fictional account of the lives of one extended family. D'Aguiar's third novel, Feeding the Ghosts (1997), was inspired by a visit D'Aguiar made to the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool and is based on the true story of the Zong massacre in which 132 slaves were thrown from a slave ship into the Atlantic for insurance purposes. According to historical accounts, one slave survived and climbed back onto the ship; and in D'Aguiar's narrative this slave - about whom there is next to no historical information - is developed as the fictional character Mintah. His fourth novel, Bethany Bettany (2003), is centred on a five-year-old Guyanese girl, Bethany, whose suffering has been read by some as symbolising that of a nation (Guyana) seeking to make itself whole again. D'Aguiar's plays include High Life, which was first produced at the Albany Empire in London in 1987, and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1991.
The author’s third book of poems. Home is 'always elsewhere' for Fred D'Aguiar: born in Britain, brought up in Guyana, and now living in London and America. In his previous two books, Mama Dot and Airy Hall, he caught up with his past by writing about his upbringing in Guyana. Now his focus is Britain: being and feeling British, feeling at home but not being made to feel at home. Confronted by the Customs men at Heathrow, his passport stamp 'British Citizen not bold enough for my liking and too much for theirs'. Fred D'Aguiar maps out new poetic territory in British Subjects, re-discovering a sense of belonging in poems charting landmarks in his life: the return to Guyana with exiled writer Wilson Harris; finding the grave of an unknown African slave in Bristol; an unsettling visit to Germany; living by the Thames at Greenwich, and then by the sea at Whitley Bay. Always searching, always on edge, D'Aguiar can only lose himself when all the barriers come down, as in poems celebrating love, the body, and the fusing spirit of Notting Hill Carnival. Behind all these poems is his personal talisman, the River Thames, the Sweet Thames of his recent film, a great watery snake entering his dreams like a fertility god, transplanted from Britain to the rainforest of Guyana. 'He filters a village childhood through an English education. A literary style rubs up against a Caribbean pulse.. .Fred D'Aguiar is not going to settle for charming us with dreams of Caribbean innocence. He has more difficult goals in mind, and is willing to lead us off the beaten track to find them' — PHILIP GROSS, Poetry Review 'D'Aguiar writes with Biblical sensuality' — PETER PORTER, The Observer.
Fred D'Aguiar (born 2 February 1960) is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist and playwright. He is currently Professor of English at Virginia Tech. Fred D'Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents, Malcolm Frederick D'Aguiar and Kathleen Agatha Messiah. In 1962 he was taken to Guyana where he lived with his grandmother until 1972 when he returned, at the age of twelve, to England. D'Aguiar trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, graduating in 1985. On graduating he applied for a PhD on the Guyanese author Wilson Harris at the University of Warwick, but - after winning two writers-in-residency positions, at Birmingham University and the University of Cambridge (where he was the Judith E. Wilson Fellow from 1989 to 1990) - his PhD studies ‘recededed from [his] mind’ and he began to focus all of his energies on creative writing. In 1994, D'Aguiar moved to the United States to take up a Visiting Writer position at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1992–94). Since then, he has taught at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine (Assistant Professor, 1994–95) and the University of Miami where he held the position of Professor of English and Creative Writing. In 2003 he took up the position of Professor of English and Co-Director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. D'Aguiar's first collection of poetry, Mama Dot (1985), was published to much acclaim. It centres upon an ‘archetypal‘ grandmother figure, Mama Dot, and was notable for its fusion of standard English and Nation language. Along with his 1989 collection Airy Hall (which is named after the village in Guyana where D'Aguiar spent his childhood), Mama Dot won the Guyana Poetry Prize. Where D'Aguiar's first two poetry collections were set in Guyana, his third - British Subjects (1989) - explores the experiences of peoples of the West Indian diaspora in London. London was also the focus of another long poem, Sweet Thames, which was broadcast as part of the BBC ‘Worlds on Film’ series on 3 July 1992 and won the Commission for Racial Equality Race in the Media Award. After turning to writing novels rather than poetry for a period of time, D'Aguiar returned to the poetic mode in 1998, publishing Bill of Rights (1998): a long narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1979, which is told in Guyanese versions of English, fusing patois, Creole and nation language with the standard vernacular. It was shortlisted for the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize. Bill of Rights was followed by another narrative poem, Bloodlines (2000), which tells the story of a black slave and her white lover. His 2009 collection of poetry, Continental Shelf, centres on a response to the Virginia Tech Massacre in which 32 people were killed by a student in 2007. It was a finalist for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize. D'Aguiar's first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), tells the story of Whitechapel, a slave on an eighteenth-century Virginia plantation. The book won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. It was adapted for television and televised by Channel 4 in the UK. Returning to themes he had earlier developed in British Subjects, D'Aguiar's 1996 novel, Dear Future, explores the history of the West Indian diaspora through a fictional account of the lives of one extended family. D'Aguiar's third novel, Feeding the Ghosts (1997), was inspired by a visit D'Aguiar made to the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool and is based on the true story of the Zong massacre in which 132 slaves were thrown from a slave ship into the Atlantic for insurance purposes. According to historical accounts, one slave survived and climbed back onto the ship; and in D'Aguiar's narrative this slave - about whom there is next to no historical information - is developed as the fictional character Mintah. His fourth novel, Bethany Bettany (2003), is centred on a five-year-old Guyanese girl, Bethany, whose suffering has been read by some as symbolising that of a nation (Guyana) seeking to make itself whole again. D'Aguiar's plays include High Life, which was first produced at the Albany Empire in London in 1987, and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1991.
DEAR FUTURE tells the story of a Caribbean family, centering on the youngest child, Redhead. Accidentally hit on the head with an axe by his uncle, he thereafter sees the world from a strange, visionary, twisted perspective. And as his family experiences its own vicissitudes, an election is brewing in the capital: an election that leads to an unexpected and terrible act of violence that destroys the family’s home - indeed, its world.
Fred D'Aguiar (born 2 February 1960) is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist and playwright. He is currently Professor of English at Virginia Tech.
Returning from Africa, the slave ship The Zong falls prey to disease. Its Captain orders his crew to throw the sick slaves overboard. But one slave survives drowning and climbs back on-board the ship, hiding in the food store. For the remainder of the voyage she tries to rouse the slaves to rebel against the killings, stirring up unease among the crew, a voice of conscience they are unable to stifle. On reaching London the Captain confidently lodges his insurance claim for his loses, but his claim is challenged and the voice of the slave who returned from the dead is heard again. Fred D'Aguiar was born in London and raised in Guyana. His previous novel Dear Future was nominated for the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and won the David Higham Prize.
Fred D'Aguiar (born 2 February 1960) is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist and playwright. He is currently Professor of English at Virginia Tech. Fred D'Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents, Malcolm Frederick D'Aguiar and Kathleen Agatha Messiah. In 1962 he was taken to Guyana where he lived with his grandmother until 1972 when he returned, at the age of twelve, to England. D'Aguiar trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, graduating in 1985. On graduating he applied for a PhD on the Guyanese author Wilson Harris at the University of Warwick, but - after winning two writers-in-residency positions, at Birmingham University and the University of Cambridge (where he was the Judith E. Wilson Fellow from 1989 to 1990) - his PhD studies ‘recededed from [his] mind’ and he began to focus all of his energies on creative writing. In 1994, D'Aguiar moved to the United States to take up a Visiting Writer position at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1992–94). Since then, he has taught at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine (Assistant Professor, 1994–95) and the University of Miami where he held the position of Professor of English and Creative Writing. In 2003 he took up the position of Professor of English and Co-Director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. D'Aguiar's first collection of poetry, Mama Dot (1985), was published to much acclaim. It centres upon an ‘archetypal‘ grandmother figure, Mama Dot, and was notable for its fusion of standard English and Nation language. Along with his 1989 collection Airy Hall (which is named after the village in Guyana where D'Aguiar spent his childhood), Mama Dot won the Guyana Poetry Prize. Where D'Aguiar's first two poetry collections were set in Guyana, his third - British Subjects (1989) - explores the experiences of peoples of the West Indian diaspora in London. London was also the focus of another long poem, Sweet Thames, which was broadcast as part of the BBC ‘Worlds on Film’ series on 3 July 1992 and won the Commission for Racial Equality Race in the Media Award. After turning to writing novels rather than poetry for a period of time, D'Aguiar returned to the poetic mode in 1998, publishing Bill of Rights (1998): a long narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1979, which is told in Guyanese versions of English, fusing patois, Creole and nation language with the standard vernacular. It was shortlisted for the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize. Bill of Rights was followed by another narrative poem, Bloodlines (2000), which tells the story of a black slave and her white lover. His 2009 collection of poetry, Continental Shelf, centres on a response to the Virginia Tech Massacre in which 32 people were killed by a student in 2007. It was a finalist for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize. D'Aguiar's first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), tells the story of Whitechapel, a slave on an eighteenth-century Virginia plantation. The book won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. It was adapted for television and televised by Channel 4 in the UK. Returning to themes he had earlier developed in British Subjects, D'Aguiar's 1996 novel, Dear Future, explores the history of the West Indian diaspora through a fictional account of the lives of one extended family. D'Aguiar's third novel, Feeding the Ghosts (1997), was inspired by a visit D'Aguiar made to the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool and is based on the true story of the Zong massacre in which 132 slaves were thrown from a slave ship into the Atlantic for insurance purposes. According to historical accounts, one slave survived and climbed back onto the ship; and in D'Aguiar's narrative this slave - about whom there is next to no historical information - is developed as the fictional character Mintah. His fourth novel, Bethany Bettany (2003), is centred on a five-year-old Guyanese girl, Bethany, whose suffering has been read by some as symbolising that of a nation (Guyana) seeking to make itself whole again. D'Aguiar's plays include High Life, which was first produced at the Albany Empire in London in 1987, and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1991.
From William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner to Toni Morrison's Beloved, modern American fiction engaged with slavery has provoked fiery controversy. So will The Longest Memory, the powerful, beautifully crafted, internationally acclaimed fictional debut of prizewinning Guyanese poet Fred D'Aguiar. In language extraordinary for its tautness and resonance, The Longest Memory tells the story of a rebellious, fiercely intelligent young slave, who in 1810 attempts to flee a Virginia plantation - and of his father who inadvertently betrays him. The young slave's love for a white girl who slakes his forbidden thirst for learning and his painful relationship with his father are hauntingly evoked in this novel of astonishing lyrical simplicity. It is a measure of D'Aguiar's achievement and bravery that The Longest Memory is informed not only by the complicities between black slave and white master but also by the tensions among slaves themselves - between stoic survivalists and passionate rebels. Remarkable for its keenness of observation, subtlety, and restraint, The Longest Memory heralds the arrival of a major new voice in the contemporary literature of the African diaspora. In language unique for its tautness and resonance, this powerful debut novel, set in 1810 Virginia, tells the story of a rebellious, fiercely intelligent young slave and his father, who inadvertently betrays him. The young slave's love for a white girl who quenches his forbidden thirst for learning and his painful relationship with his father are unforgettably drawn in this astonishingly lyrical work.
Fred D'Aguiar (born 2 February 1960) is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist and playwright. He is currently Professor of English at Virginia Tech. Fred D'Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents, Malcolm Frederick D'Aguiar and Kathleen Agatha Messiah. In 1962 he was taken to Guyana where he lived with his grandmother until 1972 when he returned, at the age of twelve, to England. D'Aguiar trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, graduating in 1985. On graduating he applied for a PhD on the Guyanese author Wilson Harris at the University of Warwick, but - after winning two writers-in-residency positions, at Birmingham University and the University of Cambridge (where he was the Judith E. Wilson Fellow from 1989 to 1990) - his PhD studies ‘recededed from [his] mind’ and he began to focus all of his energies on creative writing. In 1994, D'Aguiar moved to the United States to take up a Visiting Writer position at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1992–94). Since then, he has taught at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine (Assistant Professor, 1994–95) and the University of Miami where he held the position of Professor of English and Creative Writing. In 2003 he took up the position of Professor of English and Co-Director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. D'Aguiar's first collection of poetry, Mama Dot (1985), was published to much acclaim. It centres upon an ‘archetypal‘ grandmother figure, Mama Dot, and was notable for its fusion of standard English and Nation language. Along with his 1989 collection Airy Hall (which is named after the village in Guyana where D'Aguiar spent his childhood), Mama Dot won the Guyana Poetry Prize. Where D'Aguiar's first two poetry collections were set in Guyana, his third - British Subjects (1989) - explores the experiences of peoples of the West Indian diaspora in London. London was also the focus of another long poem, Sweet Thames, which was broadcast as part of the BBC ‘Worlds on Film’ series on 3 July 1992 and won the Commission for Racial Equality Race in the Media Award. After turning to writing novels rather than poetry for a period of time, D'Aguiar returned to the poetic mode in 1998, publishing Bill of Rights (1998): a long narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1979, which is told in Guyanese versions of English, fusing patois, Creole and nation language with the standard vernacular. It was shortlisted for the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize. Bill of Rights was followed by another narrative poem, Bloodlines (2000), which tells the story of a black slave and her white lover. His 2009 collection of poetry, Continental Shelf, centres on a response to the Virginia Tech Massacre in which 32 people were killed by a student in 2007. It was a finalist for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize. D'Aguiar's first novel, The Longest Memory (1994), tells the story of Whitechapel, a slave on an eighteenth-century Virginia plantation. The book won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. It was adapted for television and televised by Channel 4 in the UK. Returning to themes he had earlier developed in British Subjects, D'Aguiar's 1996 novel, Dear Future, explores the history of the West Indian diaspora through a fictional account of the lives of one extended family. D'Aguiar's third novel, Feeding the Ghosts (1997), was inspired by a visit D'Aguiar made to the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool and is based on the true story of the Zong massacre in which 132 slaves were thrown from a slave ship into the Atlantic for insurance purposes. According to historical accounts, one slave survived and climbed back onto the ship; and in D'Aguiar's narrative this slave - about whom there is next to no historical information - is developed as the fictional character Mintah. His fourth novel, Bethany Bettany (2003), is centred on a five-year-old Guyanese girl, Bethany, whose suffering has been read by some as symbolising that of a nation (Guyana) seeking to make itself whole again. D'Aguiar's plays include High Life, which was first produced at the Albany Empire in London in 1987, and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death, performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1991.
On the night of August 17, 1823, the distinctly African sounds of blaring shell-horns and beating drums signalled the start of one of the most massive slave rebellions in the history of the Western Hemisphere, the uprising in the British colony of Demerara (now Guyana). That evening, nine to twelve thousand slaves surrounded the main houses of about sixty plantations, armed with cutlasses, knives fastened on poles, and guns. They broke down doors, smashed windows, commandeered arms and ammunition, and put their masters and overseers in the stocks. Intent on avoiding a blood bath (over three days of fighting, colonial forces took the lives of more than 255 slaves, while only two or three white men were killed), the rebels spoke of 'rights,' and planned to present their grievances to the governor. For a few days, the slaves succeeded in turning the world upside down, treating masters the way masters had always treated slaves. Retaliation from colonial officials would be swift, bloody, and brutal. In Crowns of Glory, Emilia Viotti da Costa tells the riveting story of a pivotal moment in the history of slavery. Studying the complaints brought by slaves to the office of the Protector of Slaves, she reconstructs the experience of slavery through the eyes of the Demerara slaves themselves. Da Costa also draws on eyewitness accounts, official records, and private journals (most notably the diary of John Smith, one of four ministers sent by the London Missionary Society to convert Demerara's 'heathen'), to paint a vivid portrait of a society in transition, shaken to its foundations by the recent revolutions in America, France, and Haiti. Smith and his wife, Jane, the planters and colonial politicians, and the leaders of the rebellion emerge as flesh-and-blood individuals, players trapped in a complex political game none of them could fully understand. Unravelling the complex web of events leading up to the climactic rebellion, Da Costa explains how Smith, a dedicated but inexperienced minister who arrived at the Le Resouvenir plantation confident that all faithful missionaries would win 'a crown of glory that fadeth not away,' could seven years later find himself convicted by court martial of fostering rebellion amongst the slaves, and sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead. She details the colonials' orgy of repression following the rebellion-scores of slaves were sentenced more or less at random to grisly public executions and ritualistic floggings, and Smith died in his cell before news arrived that the Crown had granted him mercy-and shows how it fueled the anti-slavery movement in Britain, leading to the abolishment of slavery in the colonies ten years later. Casting new light on the nuances of racial relations in the colonies, the inevitable clash between the missionaries' message of Christian brotherhood and a social order based on masters and slaves, and the larger historical forces that were profoundly eroding the institution of slavery itself, Crowns of Glory is an original and unforgettable book.
Emilia Viotti da Costa has written extensively on Brazilian history and on slavery and emancipation. Her books include Da Senzala a Colonia and Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823. She is also professor of history at Yale University
David Dabydeen’s first book of poems, SLAVE SONG, was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Cambridge University Quiller-Couch Prize. COOLIE ODYSSEY, his second collection, probes the experience of diaspora, the journeying of peasant labourers from India to the Caribbean then to Britain, dwelling on the dream of romance, the impotence of racial encounter, the metamorphosis of language. FROM THE PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR - The first poem started on a train journey from Edinburgh to Birmingham, with further pieces written in trains from Coventry to London and in planes from London over the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Lines came slowly, in fragments. The poems offer glimpses into an odyssey, not a chronicle of threaded events. The journey is from India to Guyana to England, and it is as much a journey of words as deeds. The encounter with whites, sketched in the early pieces, becomes more intense in the journey to England where the experiences are described in a series of poems about the ‘White Woman’ (Miranda/Britannia), taking up the central theme of my first book, SLAVE SONG. ‘Whether lament over colonial brutality in the canefields of Guyana, or a celebration of life in its villages, Dabydeen’s poetry vibrates with passion, energy and splendid rhythm.’ - ANITA DESAI. ‘There are sudden, startling images in this collection of poems and these tend, I find, to thread their way into an abrupt, ruptured odyssey that repudiates — even as it subsists upon — a nightmare romance of being that is central to the writer’s vision. That vision indicts crude fantasy and even cruder manifestations of physical and mental injustice ingrained in the soil and the legacies of colonialism. The unpalatable dream symbolism in the writing may have a moral purpose in hinting at a pornography of empire that still rules the heart of coloniser and colonised.’ - WILSON HARRIS. ‘A poetic flight from the canefields of Guyana to the basements of London, rich with the imagery and the misery of the East Indian experience.’ - SAMUEL SELVON. ‘Throughout these poems we find a confluence of past and present, the personal and the historical which are seemingly effortlessly intertwined in memories of ‘back-home’. His voice is the cool, reflective one of distance and detachment, the voice of the exile whose return is a journey back in time.’ - LINTON KWESI JOHNSON.
David Dabydeen (born 9 December 1955) is a Guyanese-born critic, writer, novelist and academic. Since 2010 he has been Guyana's ambassador to China. Dabydeen was born in Berbice, Guyana, his birth registered at New Amsterdam Registrar of Births as David Horace Clarence Harilal Sookram. His parents divorced while he was young and he grew up with his mother, Veronica Dabydeen, and his maternal grandparents. At the age of 10 he won a scholarship to Queen's College in Georgetown. When he was 13 years old, he moved to London, England, to rejoin his father, attorney David Harilal Sookram, who had migrated to Britain. At the age of 18 he took up a place at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, to read English, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with honours. He then gained a Ph.D. in 18th-century literature and art at University College London in 1982, and was awarded a research fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. Between 1982 and 1984 Dabydeen worked as a community education officer in Wolverhampton. He subsequently went to the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick in Coventry, where he progressed over the years from lecturer to director. He was president of the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, and Asian Literature between 1985 and 1987. He is a Professor at the Centre for British Comparative Cultural Studies at Warwick University. In 1993 he was made Guyana's ambassador at UNESCO and is a member of their Executive Board. In 2010 Dabydeen was appointed as Guyana’s Ambassador to China. Dabydeen is the author of novels, collections of poetry and works of non-fiction and criticism, as editor as well as writer. His first book, Slave Song (1984), a collection of poetry, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Quiller-Couch Prize. A further collection, Turner: New and Selected Poems, was published in 1994, and reissued in 2002; the title-poem, Turner is an extended sequence or verse novel responding to a painting by J. M. W. Turner, ‘Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on‘ (1840). His first novel, The Intended (1991), the story of a young Asian student abandoned in London by his father, won the Guyana Prize for Literature. Disappearance (1993) tells the story of a young Guyanese engineer working on the south coast of England who lodges with an elderly woman. The Counting House (1996) is set at the end of the nineteenth century and narrates the experiences of an Indian couple whose hopes of a new life in colonial Guyana end in tragedy. The story explores historical tensions between indentured Indian workers and Guyanese of African descent. His 1999 novel, A Harlot's Progress, is based on a series of pictures painted in 1732 by William Hogarth (who was the subject of Dabydeen's PhD) and develops the story of Hogarth's black slave boy. Through the character of Mungo, Dabydeen challenges traditional cultural representations of the slave. His latest novel, Our Lady of Demerara, was published in 2004. Dabydeen has been awarded the title of fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the second West Indian writer (V.S. Naipaul was the first) and the only Guyanese writer to receive the title. In 2001 Dabydeen wrote and presented The Forgotten Colony, a BBC Radio 4 programme exploring the history of Guyana. His one-hour documentary Painting the People was broadcast by BBC television in 2004. The Oxford Companion to Black British History, co-edited by Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, appeared in 2007. In 2007, Dabydeen was awarded the Hind Rattan (Jewel of India) Award for his outstanding contribution to literature and the intellectual life of the Indian diaspora.
Novel in which a young West Indian engineer is appointed to help save a village that sits on the crumbling edge of Dunsmere Cliff on the Kent coast, and is initiated into the underworld of village life by his elderly, eccentric landlady. David Dabydeen’s second novel.
David Dabydeen (born 9 December 1955) is a Guyanese-born critic, writer, novelist and academic. Since 2010 he has been Guyana's ambassador to China. Dabydeen was born in Berbice, Guyana, his birth registered at New Amsterdam Registrar of Births as David Horace Clarence Harilal Sookram. His parents divorced while he was young and he grew up with his mother, Veronica Dabydeen, and his maternal grandparents. At the age of 10 he won a scholarship to Queen's College in Georgetown. When he was 13 years old, he moved to London, England, to rejoin his father, attorney David Harilal Sookram, who had migrated to Britain. At the age of 18 he took up a place at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, to read English, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with honours. He then gained a Ph.D. in 18th-century literature and art at University College London in 1982, and was awarded a research fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. Between 1982 and 1984 Dabydeen worked as a community education officer in Wolverhampton. He subsequently went to the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick in Coventry, where he progressed over the years from lecturer to director. He was president of the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, and Asian Literature between 1985 and 1987. He is a Professor at the Centre for British Comparative Cultural Studies at Warwick University. In 1993 he was made Guyana's ambassador at UNESCO and is a member of their Executive Board. In 2010 Dabydeen was appointed as Guyana’s Ambassador to China. Dabydeen is the author of novels, collections of poetry and works of non-fiction and criticism, as editor as well as writer. His first book, Slave Song (1984), a collection of poetry, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Quiller-Couch Prize. A further collection, Turner: New and Selected Poems, was published in 1994, and reissued in 2002; the title-poem, Turner is an extended sequence or verse novel responding to a painting by J. M. W. Turner, ‘Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on‘ (1840). His first novel, The Intended (1991), the story of a young Asian student abandoned in London by his father, won the Guyana Prize for Literature. Disappearance (1993) tells the story of a young Guyanese engineer working on the south coast of England who lodges with an elderly woman. The Counting House (1996) is set at the end of the nineteenth century and narrates the experiences of an Indian couple whose hopes of a new life in colonial Guyana end in tragedy. The story explores historical tensions between indentured Indian workers and Guyanese of African descent. His 1999 novel, A Harlot's Progress, is based on a series of pictures painted in 1732 by William Hogarth (who was the subject of Dabydeen's PhD) and develops the story of Hogarth's black slave boy. Through the character of Mungo, Dabydeen challenges traditional cultural representations of the slave. His latest novel, Our Lady of Demerara, was published in 2004. Dabydeen has been awarded the title of fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the second West Indian writer (V.S. Naipaul was the first) and the only Guyanese writer to receive the title. In 2001 Dabydeen wrote and presented The Forgotten Colony, a BBC Radio 4 programme exploring the history of Guyana. His one-hour documentary Painting the People was broadcast by BBC television in 2004. The Oxford Companion to Black British History, co-edited by Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, appeared in 2007. In 2007, Dabydeen was awarded the Hind Rattan (Jewel of India) Award for his outstanding contribution to literature and the intellectual life of the Indian diaspora.
The narrator of The Intended is twelve when he leaves his village in rural Guyana to come to England. There he is abandoned into social care, but with determination seizes every opportunity to follow his aunt's farewell advice: '...but you must tek education...pass plenty exam'. With a scholarship to Oxford, and an upper-class white fiancee, he has unquestionably arrived, but at the cost of ignoring the other part of his aunt's farewell: 'you is we, remember you is we.' First published almost fifteen years ago, The Intended's portrayal of the instability of identity and relations between whites, African-Caribbeans and Asians in South London is as contemporary and pertinent as ever. As an Indian from Guyana, the narrator is seen as a 'Paki' by the English, and as some mongrel hybrid by 'real' Asians from India and Pakistan; as sharing a common British 'Blackness' whilst acuately conscious of the real cultural divisions between Africans and Indians back in Guyana.
David Dabydeen (born 9 December 1955) is a Guyanese-born critic, writer, novelist and academic. Since 2010 he has been Guyana's ambassador to China. Dabydeen was born in Berbice, Guyana, his birth registered at New Amsterdam Registrar of Births as David Horace Clarence Harilal Sookram. His parents divorced while he was young and he grew up with his mother, Veronica Dabydeen, and his maternal grandparents. At the age of 10 he won a scholarship to Queen's College in Georgetown. When he was 13 years old, he moved to London, England, to rejoin his father, attorney David Harilal Sookram, who had migrated to Britain. At the age of 18 he took up a place at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, to read English, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with honours. He then gained a Ph.D. in 18th-century literature and art at University College London in 1982, and was awarded a research fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. Between 1982 and 1984 Dabydeen worked as a community education officer in Wolverhampton. He subsequently went to the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick in Coventry, where he progressed over the years from lecturer to director. He was president of the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, and Asian Literature between 1985 and 1987. He is a Professor at the Centre for British Comparative Cultural Studies at Warwick University. In 1993 he was made Guyana's ambassador at UNESCO and is a member of their Executive Board. In 2010 Dabydeen was appointed as Guyana’s Ambassador to China. Dabydeen is the author of novels, collections of poetry and works of non-fiction and criticism, as editor as well as writer. His first book, Slave Song (1984), a collection of poetry, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Quiller-Couch Prize. A further collection, Turner: New and Selected Poems, was published in 1994, and reissued in 2002; the title-poem, Turner is an extended sequence or verse novel responding to a painting by J. M. W. Turner, ‘Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on‘ (1840). His first novel, The Intended (1991), the story of a young Asian student abandoned in London by his father, won the Guyana Prize for Literature. Disappearance (1993) tells the story of a young Guyanese engineer working on the south coast of England who lodges with an elderly woman. The Counting House (1996) is set at the end of the nineteenth century and narrates the experiences of an Indian couple whose hopes of a new life in colonial Guyana end in tragedy. The story explores historical tensions between indentured Indian workers and Guyanese of African descent. His 1999 novel, A Harlot's Progress, is based on a series of pictures painted in 1732 by William Hogarth (who was the subject of Dabydeen's PhD) and develops the story of Hogarth's black slave boy. Through the character of Mungo, Dabydeen challenges traditional cultural representations of the slave. His latest novel, Our Lady of Demerara, was published in 2004. Dabydeen has been awarded the title of fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the second West Indian writer (V.S. Naipaul was the first) and the only Guyanese writer to receive the title. In 2001 Dabydeen wrote and presented The Forgotten Colony, a BBC Radio 4 programme exploring the history of Guyana. His one-hour documentary Painting the People was broadcast by BBC television in 2004. The Oxford Companion to Black British History, co-edited by Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, appeared in 2007. In 2007, Dabydeen was awarded the Hind Rattan (Jewel of India) Award for his outstanding contribution to literature and the intellectual life of the Indian diaspora.
David Dabydeen's Turner is a long narrative poem written in response to J. M. W. Turner's celebrated poem 'Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying.' Dabydeen's poem focuses on what is hidden in Turner's painting, the submerged head of the drowning African. In inventing a biography and the drowned man's unspoken desires, the poem brings into confrontation the wish for renewal and the inescapable stains of history, including the meaning of Turner's painting. Author Biography: David Dabydeen heads the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick. He was born in Guyana, but has lived in the United Kingdom from his early youth. He is the author of the novels The Intended, Disappearance, The Counting House, A Harlot's Progress, and two earlier books of poetry, Slave Song, which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, and Coolie Odyssey. He is recognized among the United Kingdom's finest writers. He is also the author of The Counting House, A Harlot's Progress, and Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in 18th Century English Art.
David Dabydeen (born 9 December 1955) is a Guyanese-born critic, writer, novelist and academic. Since 2010 he has been Guyana's ambassador to China. Dabydeen was born in Berbice, Guyana, his birth registered at New Amsterdam Registrar of Births as David Horace Clarence Harilal Sookram. His parents divorced while he was young and he grew up with his mother, Veronica Dabydeen, and his maternal grandparents. At the age of 10 he won a scholarship to Queen's College in Georgetown. When he was 13 years old, he moved to London, England, to rejoin his father, attorney David Harilal Sookram, who had migrated to Britain. At the age of 18 he took up a place at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, to read English, and he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with honours. He then gained a Ph.D. in 18th-century literature and art at University College London in 1982, and was awarded a research fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. Between 1982 and 1984 Dabydeen worked as a community education officer in Wolverhampton. He subsequently went to the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick in Coventry, where he progressed over the years from lecturer to director. He was president of the Association for the Teaching of Caribbean, African, and Asian Literature between 1985 and 1987. He is a Professor at the Centre for British Comparative Cultural Studies at Warwick University. In 1993 he was made Guyana's ambassador at UNESCO and is a member of their Executive Board. In 2010 Dabydeen was appointed as Guyana’s Ambassador to China. Dabydeen is the author of novels, collections of poetry and works of non-fiction and criticism, as editor as well as writer. His first book, Slave Song (1984), a collection of poetry, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Quiller-Couch Prize. A further collection, Turner: New and Selected Poems, was published in 1994, and reissued in 2002; the title-poem, Turner is an extended sequence or verse novel responding to a painting by J. M. W. Turner, ‘Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon coming on‘ (1840). His first novel, The Intended (1991), the story of a young Asian student abandoned in London by his father, won the Guyana Prize for Literature. Disappearance (1993) tells the story of a young Guyanese engineer working on the south coast of England who lodges with an elderly woman. The Counting House (1996) is set at the end of the nineteenth century and narrates the experiences of an Indian couple whose hopes of a new life in colonial Guyana end in tragedy. The story explores historical tensions between indentured Indian workers and Guyanese of African descent. His 1999 novel, A Harlot's Progress, is based on a series of pictures painted in 1732 by William Hogarth (who was the subject of Dabydeen's PhD) and develops the story of Hogarth's black slave boy. Through the character of Mungo, Dabydeen challenges traditional cultural representations of the slave. His latest novel, Our Lady of Demerara, was published in 2004. Dabydeen has been awarded the title of fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the second West Indian writer (V.S. Naipaul was the first) and the only Guyanese writer to receive the title. In 2001 Dabydeen wrote and presented The Forgotten Colony, a BBC Radio 4 programme exploring the history of Guyana. His one-hour documentary Painting the People was broadcast by BBC television in 2004. The Oxford Companion to Black British History, co-edited by Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones, appeared in 2007. In 2007, Dabydeen was awarded the Hind Rattan (Jewel of India) Award for his outstanding contribution to literature and the intellectual life of the Indian diaspora.
African Songs of Love, War, Grief, and Abuse (1961) contains brief verses sympathetically portraying Guyanan village life.
Léon-Gontran Damas (March 28, 1912 – January 22, 1978) was a French poet and politician. He was one of the founders of the Négritude movement. He also used the pseudonym Lionel Georges André Cabassou. Léon Damas was born in Cayenne, French Guiana, to Ernest Damas, a mulatto of European and African descent, and Bathilde Damas, a Métisse of Native American and African ancestry. In 1924, Damas was sent to Martinique to attend the Lycée Victor Schoelcher (a secondary school), where he would meet his lifelong friend and collaborator Aimé Césaire. In 1929, Damas moved to Paris to continue his studies. There, he reunited with Césaire and was introduced to Leopold Senghor. In 1935, the three young men published the first issue of the literary review L'Étudiant Noir (The Black Student), which provided the foundation for what is now known as the Négritude Movement, a literary and ideological movement of French-speaking black intellectuals that rejects the political, social and moral domination of the West. In 1937, Damas published his first volume of poetry, Pigments. He enlisted in the French Army during World War II, and later was elected to the French National Assembly (1948–51) as a deputy from Guiana. In the following years, Damas traveled and lectured widely in Africa, the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean. He also served as the contributing editor of Présence Africaine, one of the most respected journals of Black studies, and as senior adviser and UNESCO delegate for the Society of African Culture. In 1970 Damas and his Brazilian-born wife Marietta, moved to Washington, D.C., to take a summer teaching job at Georgetown University. During the last years of his life, he taught at Howard University in Washington and served as acting director of the school’s African Studies program. He died on January 22, 1978, in Washington and was buried in Guyana. Although the political aspect of his poetry held less appeal in the later years of the twentieth century, Damas’s reputation was on the rise. His poems, which sometimes experimented with typography and with the sheer sound of words, were astonishingly modern for their time, and they seemed to foresee the black poetry, both English and French, of a much later timeframe.
A new line of novels about today’s immigrant experience. Written by authors who are immigrants themselves, these compelling stories are united by the characters’ journeys to find their place as Americans. . . It is election time in Haiti, and bombs are going off in the capital city of Port-Au-Prince. During a visit from her home in rural Haiti, Celiane Espérance and her Mother are nearly killed. Looking at her country with new eyes, Celiane Gains a fresh resolve to be reunited with her Father in Brooklyn, New York. The harsh winter and concrete landscape of her new home are a shock to Celiane, who witnesses her parents' struggle to earn a living, her brother's uneasy adjustment to American society, and her own encounters with learning difficulties and school violence.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK!, a National Book Award finalist, THE FARMING OF BONES, an American Book Award winner, and THE DEW BREAKER, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.
Edwidge Danticat's short story from Haiti Noir 2: The Classics, "The Port-au-Prince Marriage Special," was included in Ms. Magazine's Fall 2013 issue. "A worthy sequel that skillfully uses a popular genre to help us better understand an often frustratingly complex and indecipherable society." --Miami Herald. "There is danger and regret and fear in these stories, as characters try to negotiate a complex and often confounding land." --Miami Herald, Feature on Haiti Noir 2 Miami launch. "Presents an excellent array of writers, primarily Haitian, --The Caribbean Writer. "Just when you thought you have read it all and have experienced the best of literary brilliance, there comes along an unrivaled work of narrative intensity, penned with a spellbinding authenticity.
Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She is the editor of Haiti Noir and author of several books, including Claire of the Sea Light,, Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; and the novel-in-stories The Dew Breaker. She lives in Miami, Florida.
In four sections-Childhood, Migration, First Generation, and Return-the contributors to this anthology write powerfully, often hauntingly, of their lives in Haiti and the United States. Jean-Robert Cadet's description of his Haitian childhood as a restavec-a child slave-in Port-au-Prince contrasts with Dany Laferriere's account of a ten-year-old boy and his beloved grandmother in Petit-Gove. We read of Marie Helene Laforest's realization that while she was white in Haiti, in the United States she is black. Patricia Benoit tells us of a Haitian woman refugee in a detention center who has a simple need for a red dress-dignity. The reaction of a man who has married the woman he loves is the theme of Gary Pierre-Pierre's ‘The White Wife’; the feeling of alienation is explored in ‘Made Outside’ by Francie Latour. The frustration of trying to help those who have remained in Haiti and of the do-gooders who do more for themselves than the Haitians is described in Babette Wainwright's ‘Do Something for Your Soul, Go to Haiti.’ The variations and permutations of the divided self of the Haitian emigrant are poignantly conveyed in this unique anthology.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK!, a National Book Award finalist, THE FARMING OF BONES, an American Book Award winner, and THE DEW BREAKER, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.
In AFTER THE DANCE, one of Haiti’s most renowned daughters returns to her homeland, taking readers on a stunning, exquisitely rendered journey beyond the hedonistic surface of Carnival and into its deep heart. Edwidge Danticat had long been scared off from Carnival by a loved one, who spun tales of people dislocating hips from gyrating with too much abandon, losing their voices from singing too loudly, going deaf from the clamor of immense speakers, and being punched, stabbed, pummeled, or fondled by other lustful revelers. Now an adult, she resolves to return and exorcise her Carnival demons. She spends the week before Carnival in the area around Jacmel, exploring the rolling hills and lush forests and meeting the people who live and die in them. During her journeys she traces the heroic and tragic history of the island, from French colonists and Haitian revolutionaries to American invaders and home-grown dictators. Danticat also introduces us to many of the performers, artists, and organizers who re-create the myths and legends that bring the Carnival festivities to life. When Carnival arrives, we watch as she goes from observer to participant and finally loses herself in the overwhelming embrace of the crowd. Part travelogue, part memoir, this is a lyrical narrative of a writer rediscovering her country along with a part of herself. It’s also a wonderful introduction to Haiti’s southern coast and to the true beauty of Carnival.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!; The Farming of Bones; and Behind the Mountains, a young adult novel. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Diaspora in the United States and The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures.
At an astonishingly young age, Edwidge Danticat has become one of our most celebrated new novelists, a writer who evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti--and the enduring strength of Haiti's women--with a vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's suffering and courage. At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti--to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence, in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK!, a National Book Award finalist, THE FARMING OF BONES, an American Book Award winner, and THE DEW BREAKER, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.
From the best-selling author of THE DEW BREAKER, a major work of nonfiction: a powerfully moving family story that centers around the men closest to her heart - her father, Mira, and his older brother Joseph. From the age of four, Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph, a charismatic pastor, as her second father,’ when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for a better life in America. Listening to his sermons, sharing coconut-flavored ices on their walks through town, roaming through the house that held together many members of a colorful extended family, Edwidge grew profoundly attached to Joseph. He was the man who ‘knew all the verses for love.’ And so she experiences a jumble of emotions when, at twelve, she joins her parents in New York City. She is at last reunited with her two youngest brothers, and with her mother and father, whom she has struggled to remember. But she must also leave behind Joseph and the only home she’s ever known. Edwidge tells of making a new life in a new country while fearing for the safety of those still in Haiti as the political situation deteriorates. But Brother I’m Dying soon becomes a terrifying tale of good people caught up in events beyond their control. Late in 2004, his life threatened by a violent gang, forced to flee his church, the frail, eighty-one-year-old Joseph makes his way to Miami, where he thinks he will be safe. Instead, he is detained by U.S. Customs, held by the Department of Homeland Security, brutally imprisoned and dead within days. It was a story that made headlines around the world. His brother, Mira, will soon join him in death, but not before he holds hope in his arms: Edwidge’s firstborn, who will bear his name - and the family’s stories, both joyous and tragic - into the next generation. Told with tremendous feeling; this is a true-life epic on an intimate scale: a deeply affecting story of home and family - of two men’s lives and deaths, and of a daughter’s great love for them both.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK!, a National Book Award finalist, THE FARMING OF BONES, an American Book Award winner, and THE DEW BREAKER, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.
From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Brother, I’m Dying, a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love. Rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity, set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, Everything Inside is at once wide in scope and intimate, as it explores the forces that pull us together, or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant. In these eight powerful, emotionally absorbing stories, a romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends; a marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences; a young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival; two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives; a baby’s christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new; a man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose. This is the indelible work of a keen observer of the human heart–a master at her best.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK!, a National Book Award finalist, THE FARMING OF BONES, an American Book Award winner, and THE DEW BREAKER, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.
When Haitians tell a story, they say ‘Krik?’ and the eager listeners answer ‘Krak!’ In Krik? Krak! In her second novel, Edwidge Danticat establishes herself as the latest heir to that narrative tradition with nine stories that encompass both the cruelties and the high ideals of Haitian life. They tell of women who continue loving behind prison walls and in the face of unfathomable loss; of a people who resist the brutality of their rulers through the powers of imagination. The result is a collection that outrages, saddens, and transports the reader with its sheer beauty. Since the publication of her debut work Breath, Eyes, Memory in 1994, Edwidge Danticat has won praise as one of America’s brightest, most graceful and vibrant young writers. In this novel, and in her National Book Award-nominated collection of stories, Krik? Krak!, Danticat evokes the powerful imagination and rich narrative tradition of her native Haiti, and in the process records the suffering, triumphs, and wisdom of its people. Author Paule Marshall has said of Danticat, ‘A silenced Haiti has once again found its literary voice.’. Born in Haiti in 1969, Danticat, like the protagonist of her novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, at the age of twelve left her birthplace for New York to reunite with her parents. She earned a degree in French Literature from Barnard College, where she won the 1995 Woman of Achievement Award, and later an MFA from Brown University. More recently, she has received an ongoing grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation. Critical acclaim and awards for her first novel included a Granta Regional Award for the Best Young American Novelists, a Pushcart Prize and fiction awards from Essence and Seventeen magazines. She was chosen by Harper’s Bazaar as one of 20 people in their twenties who will make a difference, and was featured in a New York Times Magazine article that named ‘30 Under 30’ creative people to watch. This winter, Jane magazine named her one of the ‘15 Gutsiest Women of the Year.’
Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK!, a National Book Award finalist, THE FARMING OF BONES, an American Book Award winner, and THE DEW BREAKER, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.
From the universally acclaimed author of BREATH, EYES, MEMORY and KRIK? KRAK!, a brilliant, deeply moving work of fiction that explores the world of a ‘dew breaker’-a torturer-a man whose brutal crimes in the country of his birth lie hidden beneath his new American reality. We meet him late in his life. He is a quiet man, a husband and father, a hardworking barber, a kindly landlord to the men who live in a basement apartment in his home. He is a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, recognizable by the terrifying scar on his face. As the book unfolds, moving seamlessly between Haiti in the 1960s and New York City today, we enter the lives of those around him: his devoted wife and rebellious daughter, his sometimes unsuspecting, sometimes apprehensive neighbors, tenants, and clients. And we meet some of his victims. In the book’s powerful denouement, we return to the Haiti of the dew breaker’s past, to his last, desperate act of violence, and to his first encounter with the woman who will offer him a form of redemption-albeit imperfect-that will change him forever. THE DEW BREAKER is a book of interconnected lives-a book of love, remorse, and hope; of rebellions both personal and political, of the compromises we often make in order to move beyond the most intimate brushes with history. Unforgettable, deeply resonant, THE DEW BREAKER proves once more that in Edwidge Danticat we have a major American writer.
Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She is the author of several books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK! (a National Book Award finalist), and THE FARMING OF BONES (an American Book Award winner). She is also the editor of THE BUTTERFLY’S WAY: VOICES FROM THE HAITIAN DYASPORA IN THE UNITED STATES And THE BEACON BEST OF 2000: GREAT WRITING BY MEN AND WOMEN OF ALL COLORS AND CULTURES. .
It is 1937, the Dominican side of the Haitian border Amabelle, orphaned at the age of eight when her parents drowned, is a maid to the young wife of an army colonel. She has grown up in this household, a faithful servant. Sebastien is a field hand, an itinerant sugarcane cutter They are Haitians, useful to the Dominicans but not really welcome. There are rumors that in other towns Haitians are being persecuted, even killed. But there are always rumors. Amabelle loves Sebastien. He is handsome despite the sugarcane scars on his face, his calloused hands, She longs to become his wife and walk into their future, Instead, terror enfolds them, But the story does not end here: it begins. THE FARMING OF BONES is about love, fragility barbarity dignity remembrance, and the only triumph possible for the persecuted: to endure.
Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti in 1969 and came to the United States when she was twelve years old. She graduated from Barnard College and received an M.FA. from Brown University Her first novel, BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, was published to acclaim when she was twenty-five. The following year she was nominated for the National Book Award for her story collection KRIK?KRAK! Her stories have been widely anthologized. She is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Read Digest Foundation grant and was named as of the 20 ‘Best Young American Novelists’ by Granta in 1996. She lives in New York.
With her signature narrative grace, Edwidge Danticat brings Haiti's beautiful queen Anacaona to life. Queen Anacaona was the wife of one of her island's rulers, and a composer of songs and poems, making her popular among her people. Haiti was relatively quiet until the Spanish conquistadors discovered the island and began to settle there in 1492. The Spaniards treated the natives very cruelly, and when the natives revolted, the Spanish governor of Haiti ordered the arrests of several native nobles, including Anacaona, who was eventually captured and executed, to the horror of her people.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK!, a National Book Award finalist, THE FARMING OF BONES, an American Book Award winner, and THE DEW BREAKER, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.
This is an anthology of prose by writers from the West Indies, specially chosen for younger readers in their later school and pre-university years. There are extracts from the novels of George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Wilson Harris, Roger Mais, Jan Carew, Edgar Mittelholzer, and other leading writers. The selection has been made by O. R. Dathorne, the novelist from Guyana, now a lecturer in English at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He has provided a comprehensive introduction to Caribbean writing and notes on individual authors.
Oscar Ronald Dathorne (November 19, 1934 – December 18, 2007) was a Guyanese educator, novelist, poet and critic and the eldest brother of the Canadian writer Lynette Dathorne. Born in Georgetown, Guyana he attended Queen’s College prior to his parents moving the family to England in 1953. He attended the University of Sheffield obtaining his BA, English in 1958 later completing his MA in 1960 and PhD, English, in 1966. However, having completed his studies he found that few English universities were willing to offer him anything other than junior positions. He therefore sought job opportunities abroad and successfully applied for a teaching post at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. He remained in West Africa for six years completing his stay whilst holding a full professorship at the University of Sierra Leone as head of the English department. With his use of African literature as a basis for many English classes and the increased recognition that African literature be defined as written by Africans rather than about Africans; in 1969 he was invited to the United States as a guest lecturer at Yale University. With the continuing changes in the black American psyche, African culture and heritage were viewed as a past in which to take great pride. As a result, universities throughout the US were becoming interested in forming African and African-American study departments. Having specialist knowledge within this area, Dathorne became professor of African studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He was a pioneer of Black Studies in the United States teaching African American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and then spent 15 years working at Ohio State and the University of Miami, establishing and directing African, Caribbean, and African-American study programs. In 1987 he left the University of Miami to take up a post as a professor in the English department at the University of Kentucky.
The southern rim of the United States, eastern Mexico, and the Caribbean regions of Central America, Brazil, Venezuela, and the Guyanas demarcate the borders of that area of the Black man’s New World terrain that is significant in this discussion. The inner zone of this area, especially the Caribbean Islands, provides the focus of this study, although consider Canada, the United States, and Central and South America are also considered when relevant. In large measure, to allude to the Caribbean, or indeed to the New World, is to confirm the presence of the Black man in its evolution. The Indian presence, when it was not virtually extinguished, was rendered culturally neutral; but the black presence afforded these areas an air of new cultural autonomy and bestowed a pattern different from that of the old worlds of Europe and Africa. Within the Caribbean the Black man has manifested his culture in a number of diverse ways. Some generalizations obviously apply, but there is much divergence within these common manifestations. More precisely, the New World Black who lives in the United States is culturally, economically, and socially different from his New World counterparts in Nicaragua and Panama. A study of Caribbean literature can only expect to chart currents through which Black writers have chosen to move, and emphasize their similarities and differences. When discussing the New World, one comes up against the intriguing point that not only is the New World a Black invention, but the writer at the same time is engaged in threading a synthesis into literature. Because of the texture and variety of this synthesis, Afro-New World man is in many ways unique, and his literature reflects this. . Oscar Ronald Dathorne is a Guyanese born and bred author who has taught in England, Africa, and the United States. Among others, he has taught at he University of Ibadan and the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria, Yale, Howard University, the University of Wisconsin, S.U.N.Y.#NAME?. Dathorne was born in Guyana, South America and earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Sheffield in England. He has taught throughout the world, including England, Africa and the United States. Between 1977 and 1987, Dr. Dathorne directed the program of Caribbean, African and African-American Studies at the University of Miami. He is director of the Association of Caribbean Studies and has been editor of the Journal of Caribbean Studies for the past 10 years. Dr. Dathorne has been professor of English at the University of Kentucky since 1987. He has published more than 100 learned articles, short stories, poems, plays and scholarly works. Dr. Dathorne has written and published three novels, the latest titled Dele’s Child (1986). His most recent volume of poetry, Songs from a New World, appeared in 1988. Dr. Dathorne’s publications include a seminal study of Black life and culture, The Black Mind; a study of African literature and politics, African Literature in the Twentieth Century; and, most importantly, Dark Ancestor, which deals with the ramifications and impact of the African past and presence on the Caribbean and the Americas.
Oscar Ronald Dathorne (November 19, 1934 – December 18, 2007) was a Guyanese educator, novelist, poet and critic and the eldest brother of the Canadian writer Lynette Dathorne. Born in Georgetown, Guyana he attended Queen’s College prior to his parents moving the family to England in 1953. He attended the University of Sheffield obtaining his BA, English in 1958 later completing his MA in 1960 and PhD, English, in 1966. However, having completed his studies he found that few English universities were willing to offer him anything other than junior positions. He therefore sought job opportunities abroad and successfully applied for a teaching post at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. He remained in West Africa for six years completing his stay whilst holding a full professorship at the University of Sierra Leone as head of the English department. With his use of African literature as a basis for many English classes and the increased recognition that African literature be defined as written by Africans rather than about Africans; in 1969 he was invited to the United States as a guest lecturer at Yale University. With the continuing changes in the black American psyche, African culture and heritage were viewed as a past in which to take great pride. As a result, universities throughout the US were becoming interested in forming African and African-American study departments. Having specialist knowledge within this area, Dathorne became professor of African studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He was a pioneer of Black Studies in the United States teaching African American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and then spent 15 years working at Ohio State and the University of Miami, establishing and directing African, Caribbean, and African-American study programs. In 1987 he left the University of Miami to take up a post as a professor in the English department at the University of Kentucky.
Adam Questus, a West Indian living unhappily in London, decided to emigrate. He had secured a post on the English faculty of a West African university, and set off with high hopes. But Adam was to find life very different from what he had envisaged. His arrival, without baggage or dignity after an arduous ride on the back of a mammy-wagon, heralded an amazing and hilarious train of events which culminated on Independence Day. For a while he lived with Mr. Farrar, an Englishman and head of the Department of English. Farrar introduced him to his class, all slightly more puzzled than he had anticipated, and to Talkfada, its loquacious spokesman. Adam was surprised to find the syllabus consisted almost exclusively of teaching nursery- rhymes, and amazed to find the students analysing the symbolic meaning of 'Baa, Baa, Black Sheep' in terms of political propaganda. He was even more dumb- founded to meet the 'Chancellor-of-Vice' who was constantly promulgating Stand- ing Orders, through one of which he was himself eventually sacked. Strongly attracted by Helen, Farrar's nubile and provocative daughter, Adam tried to forget his troubles at the university in active social integration. But his virility was not enough. He soon learned that because he was neither 'expatriate' nor 'native' he was mistrusted by both com- munities, and his only real friend remained a sophisticated car-driving witch-doctor. He longed for Helen and was totally non- plussed by the extremes of behaviour around him. Till eventually the boisterous, uninhibited celebrations on Independence Day caused an equally violent eruption of his emotions. Mr. Dathorne is himself a West Indian and is now teaching English at Ibadan University, Nigeria. His own experiences and observations there combine with the buoyant sense of humour so evident in his earlier Dumplings in the Soup, to give the reader an unusual novel. The serious story of a personal quest among an alien society and the satirical picture of university life in West Africa unite to give a fresh and exciting vision of the 'new Africa', a view that is bound to be controversial.
Oscar Ronald Dathorne (November 19, 1934 – December 18, 2007) was a Guyanese educator, novelist, poet and critic and the eldest brother of the Canadian writer Lynette Dathorne. Born in Georgetown, Guyana he attended Queen’s College prior to his parents moving the family to England in 1953. He attended the University of Sheffield obtaining his BA, English in 1958 later completing his MA in 1960 and PhD, English, in 1966. However, having completed his studies he found that few English universities were willing to offer him anything other than junior positions. He therefore sought job opportunities abroad and successfully applied for a teaching post at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. He remained in West Africa for six years completing his stay whilst holding a full professorship at the University of Sierra Leone as head of the English department. With his use of African literature as a basis for many English classes and the increased recognition that African literature be defined as written by Africans rather than about Africans; in 1969 he was invited to the United States as a guest lecturer at Yale University. With the continuing changes in the black American psyche, African culture and heritage were viewed as a past in which to take great pride. As a result, universities throughout the US were becoming interested in forming African and African-American study departments. Having specialist knowledge within this area, Dathorne became professor of African studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He was a pioneer of Black Studies in the United States teaching African American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and then spent 15 years working at Ohio State and the University of Miami, establishing and directing African, Caribbean, and African-American study programs. In 1987 he left the University of Miami to take up a post as a professor in the English department at the University of Kentucky.
Crown Jewel is the story of the economic struggle of Trinidad workers in the 1930s. It is set at the time of the Butler riots in the oilfields of south Trinidad - part of the general disturbances of the British Caribbean during the 1930s.
Ralph Anthony Charles de Boissière (16 October 1907 – 16 February 2008) was an Trinidad-born Australian social realist novelist. Ralph de Boissière was born in Port of Spain, the son of Armand de Boissière, a solicitor, and Maude Harper, an English woman who died three weeks later. He attended Queen's Royal College and during this time discovered the Russian authors, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gorky, Chekhov, Pushkin and Gogol, who were to remain a lasting influence. Initially he wished to become a concert pianist but on leaving school took a job as a salesman, which enlightened him to the living and working conditions of ordinary Trinidadians. He then became involved in left-wing and trade union politics and also wrote for Trinidad's first literary magazine, The Beacon which he helped establish and where he met among others the writer C. L. R. James. In 1935 he married Ivy Alcantara (died 1984) and they had two daughters. But in 1947, having lost his job and unable to find another one because of his political activities, he and his family left the country for Chicago, afterwards moving to the Australian city of Melbourne in 1948. He found work in Australia as salesman and a factory-hand. Aged 42, de Boissière settled into a clerical job from which he retired in 1980. In Australia he joined the Communist Party and had his first novel, Crown Jewel published in 1952 by the leftist Australasian Book Society. Like all his work this depicts the struggles of the working class with realistic sympathy, culminating with a portrayal of a 1937 strike in Trinidad brutally put down by police shooting. Since then he has written four more novels and been translated into Polish, German, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Czech and Chinese. His work has been described by one critic as ‘combin[ing] social realism and political commitment with a concern for the culture of the feeling within the individual in a way that is unique not only among West Indian writers but among writers with a social conscience anywhere in the world.’ In 2007, his centenary year, Ralph de Boissière married his longtime companion, Dr. Annie Greet, his fourth novel, Call of the Rainbow, was published in Melbourne, and in November, he received an honorary Doctor of Literature from the University of Trinidad and Tobago. His autobiography, Life on the Edge, was posthumously published (edited by Kenneth Ramchand) in 2010. De Boissière died in Melbourne on 16 February 2008.
Set in an American owned car factory in Australia. A book packed with incident in which ordinary Australians achieve greatness. This deeply moving story is set in the early fifties in an American-owned motor car factory, though the action also reaches out to embrace many other important aspects of Australian life. In it we meet Molly Bromley, warm, vibrant, stimulating, who believes in people, not ideologies; Jack her husband, timid, yet with a strength of his own, who meets tragedy at work; Mick, her young son, a dreamer, always reaching .
Ralph Anthony Charles de Boissière (16 October 1907 – 16 February 2008) was an Trinidad-born Australian social realist novelist. Ralph de Boissière was born in Port of Spain, the son of Armand de Boissière, a solicitor, and Maude Harper, an English woman who died three weeks later. He attended Queen's Royal College and during this time discovered the Russian authors, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gorky, Chekhov, Pushkin and Gogol, who were to remain a lasting influence. Initially he wished to become a concert pianist but on leaving school took a job as a salesman, which enlightened him to the living and working conditions of ordinary Trinidadians. He then became involved in left-wing and trade union politics and also wrote for Trinidad's first literary magazine, The Beacon which he helped establish and where he met among others the writer C. L. R. James. In 1935 he married Ivy Alcantara (died 1984) and they had two daughters. But in 1947, having lost his job and unable to find another one because of his political activities, he and his family left the country for Chicago, afterwards moving to the Australian city of Melbourne in 1948. He found work in Australia as salesman and a factory-hand. Aged 42, de Boissière settled into a clerical job from which he retired in 1980. In Australia he joined the Communist Party and had his first novel, Crown Jewel published in 1952 by the leftist Australasian Book Society. Like all his work this depicts the struggles of the working class with realistic sympathy, culminating with a portrayal of a 1937 strike in Trinidad brutally put down by police shooting. Since then he has written four more novels and been translated into Polish, German, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Czech and Chinese. His work has been described by one critic as ‘combin[ing] social realism and political commitment with a concern for the culture of the feeling within the individual in a way that is unique not only among West Indian writers but among writers with a social conscience anywhere in the world.’ In 2007, his centenary year, Ralph de Boissière married his longtime companion, Dr. Annie Greet, his fourth novel, Call of the Rainbow, was published in Melbourne, and in November, he received an honorary Doctor of Literature from the University of Trinidad and Tobago. His autobiography, Life on the Edge, was posthumously published (edited by Kenneth Ramchand) in 2010. De Boissière died in Melbourne on 16 February 2008.
A sequel to Crown Jewel that concerns the struggles by Trinidadians to achieve social justice that culminates in the 1937 riots. The setting for De Boissiere's second novel "Rum and Coca Cola" (republished in 2006) is the Second World War when thousands of American soldiers came to Trinidad to build and man military bases. The novel is, in a Caribbean context, a rare and largely successful attempt to create fictional models which give a panoramic view of their society. The American military had in effect become the rulers. "Rum and Coca-Cola" is set at a time when the dollars from the American military presence changed Trinidad from a neglected and quasi-feudal British colony into a competitive market economy in which "we is all sharks, the stronger feedin' on the weaker." Both forces remain alive in Trinidadian society, the unfinished revolts of 1937 and 1970, and the individualistic consumer materialism which was fueled by the oil boom. Now that the boom has gone and social tensions rise, de Boissiere's second novel seem more relevant than ever.There is not the same tension as in his first book "Crown Jewel", because everyone had a job and many had two. The conflicts were of a more subtle sort - the breaking down of British prestige, the mockery of former British might, under American occupation. The novel is, in a Caribbean context, a rare and largely successful attempt to create fictional models which give a panoramic view of their society. It gives not merely a static or descriptive background against which characters perform, but a dynamic image of society created by the actions and social relationships of the characters. "Rum and Coca-Cola" was published first published without much remark four decades ago in Australia, has rightly reissued by Lux-Verbi and with justified acclaim. It remains relevant because it give an unrivaled portrayal of a period in Trinidad's recent past which is still very much alive in shaping its present. The book reveals de Boissiere's dedication to promoting anti-oppression politics and feminist activism. For ambitious Mopsy, Fred, a union activist, and Indra, an educated Indian woman, the arrival of American soldiers means Trinidad will never be the same. Fred Collingwood, a principled black working-class socialist is doomed because of his "moral strength in all its beauty" and he destroys the relationship with Marie, the woman he most loves, because he displaces his desire to change society onto her and in the process destroys her sense of worth.Indra, the part-Indian girl from a lower-middle-class family, struggles against a "terrible division of spirit" which affects her social and racial sensibilities. Even though she makes a commitment to the working-class movement she still feels cut off, "doomed at this time to a lonely pursuit of the dust they raised in their forward marching." But it is the character of Marie, trapped by the lightness of her color into believing that she can escape into whiteness, which provides the novel's tragic focus. Of the three main characters, she is the one to benefit most materially from the war-time boom, but her unremitting efforts to escape from her past of poverty and casual prostitution are made at the expense of her inner self. Her fate is tragic because she sees herself engaged in a battle for individual self-hood, but in the process becomes separated from what she most truly is and disintegrates as a personality. Yet "Rum and Coca-Cola" does not succumb to pessimism. Indra's cry, "O my God! But what am I capable of" is agonized, but the possibilities of moral choice and the issues of human capacity remain central to de Boissiere's vision. He sees Trinidad moving in a direction which he detests, but when he has Fred reflect on what has occurred, he shows him capable of taking something positive from it. He sees a society which is not yet free, but one in which old colonial illusions have been destroyed. The title "Rum and Coca Cola" became the name of probably the best known Calypso of all times, made famous by the Andrews Sisters in the 1940's. It was even the subject of a famous court case against Leo Feist, Inc.
Ralph Anthony Charles de Boissière (16 October 1907 – 16 February 2008) was an Trinidad-born Australian social realist novelist. Ralph de Boissière was born in Port of Spain, the son of Armand de Boissière, a solicitor, and Maude Harper, an English woman who died three weeks later. He attended Queen's Royal College and during this time discovered the Russian authors, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gorky, Chekhov, Pushkin and Gogol, who were to remain a lasting influence. Initially he wished to become a concert pianist but on leaving school took a job as a salesman, which enlightened him to the living and working conditions of ordinary Trinidadians. He then became involved in left-wing and trade union politics and also wrote for Trinidad's first literary magazine, The Beacon which he helped establish and where he met among others the writer C. L. R. James. In 1935 he married Ivy Alcantara (died 1984) and they had two daughters. But in 1947, having lost his job and unable to find another one because of his political activities, he and his family left the country for Chicago, afterwards moving to the Australian city of Melbourne in 1948. He found work in Australia as salesman and a factory-hand. Aged 42, de Boissière settled into a clerical job from which he retired in 1980. In Australia he joined the Communist Party and had his first novel, Crown Jewel published in 1952 by the leftist Australasian Book Society. Like all his work this depicts the struggles of the working class with realistic sympathy, culminating with a portrayal of a 1937 strike in Trinidad brutally put down by police shooting. Since then he has written four more novels and been translated into Polish, German, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Czech and Chinese. His work has been described by one critic as ‘combin[ing] social realism and political commitment with a concern for the culture of the feeling within the individual in a way that is unique not only among West Indian writers but among writers with a social conscience anywhere in the world.’ In 2007, his centenary year, Ralph de Boissière married his longtime companion, Dr. Annie Greet, his fourth novel, Call of the Rainbow, was published in Melbourne, and in November, he received an honorary Doctor of Literature from the University of Trinidad and Tobago. His autobiography, Life on the Edge, was posthumously published (edited by Kenneth Ramchand) in 2010. De Boissière died in Melbourne on 16 February 2008.
A magical novel of one man's odyssey from the Caribbean to Britain and Africa. In praise of 1998's Duppy Conqueror, World Literature Today said: "Ferdinand Dennis is faultless in his depiction of artifacts, customs, speech, and behavior in the three continents of Marshall's adventures; his descriptions of the externals and his analyses of the internal motivations of his characters–both minor and principal–are quite arresting, whether he is writing about 'the unintended arrogance of the shy person' or commenting on 'love that came without duty and expired without money, leaving a rancid odour of guilt.' Duppy Conqueror is neither a bildungsroman nor a political treatise, though it shares some of the elements of both subgenres; it is almost a fictional biography of a sixty-year-old thinking proletarian searching for racial and ideological roots. Some readers will read Dennis's novel as a roman a clef, others as a contemporary version of Claude McKay's Banana Bottom and Home to Harlem extended to Africa; but few will read it without admiration and considerable satisfaction." Other favourable coverage came from The Times Higher Education: "This very ambitious novel is nothing less than a history of the twentieth century, seen though Afro-Caribbean spectacles... Framed as a postcolonial picaresque, it has a hurtling energy which raises it above Dennis's previous work. Finally, and most importantly, Duppy Conqueror brims with humour and low comedy. It is a pleasing change from the wilfully ponderous treatment of historical memory and diasporic identity in much contemporary postcolonial fiction." According to The Independent’s Rachel Halliburton: "Duppy Conqueror presents a giant's eye view of the exiled African psyche. An ambitious and compelling novel.... This is a novel packed to the brim with layers of symbolism, individual and cultural memories, and fascinating historical stories. Reading it once just won't be enough."
Ferdinand Dennis (born 1956) is a writer, broadcaster, journalist and lecturer, who is Jamaican by birth but at the age of eight moved to England, where his parents had migrated in the late 1950s. Dr James Procter notes: "Perhaps as a result of his Caribbean background (a region probably marked more than any other by movements and migration), Dennis is a writer ultimately more concerned with routes than roots. This is foregrounded in much of his fictional work, notably his most recent and ambitious novel to date, Duppy Conqueror (1998), a novel which moves from 1930s Jamaica to postwar London and Liverpool, to Africa. Similarly, Dennis’ non-fiction centres on journeying rather than arrival, from Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain (1988) to Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa (2000)." Ferdinand Dennis was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in north Paddington, London, where he and his siblings – two brothers and a sister – relocated in 1964 to join their parents. Dennis read sociology at Leicester University, after which he was employed as an educational researcher in Handsworth, Birmingham. He studied for a Master's degree at Birkbeck College, London University. He received a Wingate Scholarship in 1995. He has lectured in Nigeria, and from 2003 to 2011 taught Creative and Media Writing courses at Middlesex University. As a broadcaster, he has written and presented numerous talks and documentaries for BBC Radio 4 – such as the series After Dread and Anger (1989), Journey Round My People, for which he travelled in West Africa, Back To Africa (1990) and Work Talk (1991–92, produced by Marina Salandy-Brown) – as well as a television programme about Africa for Channel 4. Dennis has also worked as a journalist for publications including Frontline and City Limits magazines. His writing has been published in a range of magazines, newspapers and anthologies, among them The Guardian, Granta, Critical Quarterly Black British Culture and Society: A Text Reader (ed. Kwesi Owusu, 2000), Hurricane Hits England: An Anthology of Writing About Black Britain (ed. Onyekachi Wambu, 2000), and IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2000). He is the author of three novels – The Sleepless Summer (1989), The Last Blues Dance (1996); and Duppy Conqueror (1998) – and two travelogues: Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain (1988) – his first book, which won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize – and Back to Africa: A Journey (1992), in which he visited Cameroon, Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and Senegal. With Naseem Khan, he co-edited Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa (2000). He also was a co-researcher (with Kole Omotoso and Alfred Zack-Williams) of the 1992 compilation West Africa Over 75 Years: selections from the raw material of history, edited by Kaye Whiteman.
Rene Depestre is a black Haitian poet and a Marxist, who has lived in Cuba since 1959. This volume includes the first major translation of his most important collection of poetry, with a critical introduction. ‘Rise up my poems, your place is in the streets’ - Depestre is a poet of negritude, inspired as much by the Haitian popular religious tradition as by politics and Marxism. He views the clash between the black and the white worlds as a source of new synthesis, a truly human society. A Rainbow for the Christian West presents this view in a sequence of poems and prose poems in which the poet, strengthened by the concept of negritude and drawing on the wealth of Voodoo symbolism, intrudes into the white man's world—conflict and transformation ensue. Joan Dayan's introduction traces the evolution of Depestre's poetry, incorporating translations of pertinent poems and explaining the Voodoo background. Her commentary is based on rare documents as well as on field work in Haiti, where she was able to talk with Voodoo priests and observe their secret rites. The text includes a complete bibliography of Depestre's works, plus a selection on negritude, Haitian culture, Voodoo, and African philosophy. ‘In my opinion this effort constitutes a remarkable analysis which places Ms. Dayan among the best critics of Caribbean literature’—Rene Belance, Brown University.
René Depestre (born 29 August 1926 Jacmel, Haiti) is a Haitian poet and former communist activist. He lived in Cuba as an exile from the Duvalier regime for many years and was a founder of the Casa de las Americas publishing house. He is best known for his poetry. He did his primary studies with the Breton Brothers of Christian Instruction. His father died in 1936, and René Depestre left his mother, his two brothers and his two sisters to go live with his maternal grandmother. From 1940 to 1944, he completed his secondary studies at the Pétion college in Port-au-Prince. His birthplace is often evoked in his poetry and his novels, in particular Hadriana in All My Dreams (1988). Étincelles (Sparks), his first collection of poetry, appeared in 1945, prefaced by Edris Saint-Amand. He was only nineteen years old when the work was published. The poems were influenced by the marvelous realism of Alejo Carpentier, who planned a conference on this subject in Haiti in 1942. Depestre created a weekly magazine with three friends: Baker, Alexis, and Gerald Bloncourt: The Hive (1945–46). ‘One wanted to help the Haitians to become aware of their capacity to renew the historical foundations of their identity’ (quote from Le métier à métisser). The Haitian government at the time seized the 1945 edition which was published in honor of André Breton, which led to the insurrection of 1946. Depestre met with all his Haitian intellectual contemporaries, including Jean Price-Mars, Léon Laleau, and René Bélance, who wrote the preface to his second collection, Gerbe de sang, in 1946. He also met with foreign intellectuals. He took part in and directed the revolutionary student movements of January 1946, which led to the overthrow of President Élie Lescot. The Army very quickly seized power, and Depestre was arrested and imprisoned before being exiled. He pursued his studies in letters and political science at the Sorbonne from 1946 - 1950. In Paris, he met French surrealist poets as well as foreign artists, and intellectuals of the négritude (Black) movement who coalesced around Alioune Diop and Présence Africaine. Depestre took an active part in the decolonization movements in France, and he was expelled from French territory. He left for Prague, from where he was driven out in 1952. He went to Cuba, invited by the writer Nicolás Guillén, where again he was stopped and expelled by the government of Fulgencio Batista. He was denied entry by France and Italy. He left for Austria, then Chile, Argentina and Brazil. He remained in Chile long enough to organize, with Pablo Neruda and Jorge Amado, the Continental Congress of Culture. After Brazil, Depestre returned to Paris in 1956 where he met other Haitians, including Jacques-Stephen Alexis. He took part in the first Pan-African congress organized by Présence Africaine in September 1956. He wrote in Présence Africaine and other journals of the time such as Esprit, and Lettres Francaises. He returned to Haiti in (1956–57). Refusing to collaborate with the Duvalierist regime, he called on Haitians to resist, and was placed under house arrest. Depestre left for Cuba in 1959, at the invitation of Che Guevara. Convinced of the aims of the Cuban Revolution, he helped with managing the country (Ministry for Foreign Relations, National Publishing, National Council of Culture, Radio Havana-Cuba, Las Casas de las Américas, The Committee for the Preparation of the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1967). Depestre travelled, taking part in official activities (the USSR, China, Vietnam, etc.) and took part in the first Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969), where he met the Congolese writer Henri Lopes, with whom he would work later, at UNESCO. During his various travels and his stay in Cuba, Rene Depestre continued working on a major piece of poetry. His most famous collection of poetry is undoubtedly Un arc-en-ciel pour l'Occident chrétien (Rainbow for the Christian Occident) (1967), a mix of politics, eroticism, and Voudoo, topics that are found in all of his works. Poet in Cuba (1973) is a reflection on the evolution of the Cuban revolution. Pushed aside by the Castrist régime in 1971, Depestre broke with the Cuban experiment in 1978 and went back to Paris where he worked at the UNESCO Secretariat. In 1979, in Paris, he published Le Mat de Cocagne, his first novel. In 1980, he published Alléluia pour une femme-jardin, for which he was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle in 1982. Depestre left UNESCO in 1986 and retired in the Aude region of France. In 1988, he published Hadriana in All My Dreams, which received many literary awards, including the Prix Théophraste Renaudot, the Prix de la Société des Gens de Lettres, the Prix Antigone of the town of Montpellier, and the Belgian Prix du Roman de l'Académie royale de la langue et de la littérature françaises. He obtained French citizenship in 1991. He continued to receive awards and honors, in particular the Prix Apollinaire de poésie for his personal Anthology (1993) and the Italian Grisane Award for the theatrical adaptation of Mat de Cocagne in 1995, as well as bursaries (Bourse du Centre National du Livre, in 1994, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995). He was the subject of a documentary film by Jean-Daniel Lafond, Haiti in All Our Dreams, filmed in Montreal (1996). Depestre also published major essays. Bonjour et adieu à la négritude (Hello and Good-bye to Négritude) presents a reflexion on his ambivalent position regarding the négritude movement started by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Leon-Gontran Damas. Impressed by Aime Césaire, who came to Haiti to speak about surrealism and négritude, he was fascinated by créole life, or the créolo-francophonie, which did not stop him from questioning the concept of négritude. Rebellious of the concept since his youth, which he associated with ethnic essentialism, he measured the historical range and situated the movement in the world history of ideas. He revisited this topic (critical re-situation of the movement) in his two collections, Ainsi parle le fleuve noir (1998) and Le Métier à métisser (1998). He paid homage to Césaire and his visionary work within the context of the créole movement in Martinique: ‘Césaire with only one word ended this empty debate: at the start of historical decolonization, In Haiti and around the world, there is the genius of Toussaint Louverture’ (Le Métier à métisser 25). His experience in Cuba - his fascination and his falling out with the ‘castrofidelism’ ideology and its constraints - is also examined in these two texts, as well as marvelous realism, the role of the erotic, Haitian history and the very contemporary topic of globalization. Far from seeing himself as an exile, Depestre prefers being described as a nomad with multiple roots, a ‘banyan‘ man - in reference to the tree which he so often evokes right down to its rhizomic roots - even described as a ‘géo-libertin’. Rene Depestre lives today in a small village in the Aude, Lézignan-Corbières, with his second wife, who is Cuban. He writes every morning, looking at the vineyards, just as he used to devour the view of Jacmel Bay from his grandmother's veranda. His work has been published in the United States, the former Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy, Cuba, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, the former German Democratic Republic (East-Germany), Argentina, and Mexico. His first volume of poetry, Sparks (Etincelles) was published in Port-au-Prince in 1945. Other publications include Gerbe de sang (Port-au-Prince, 1946), Végétation de clartés, preface by Aimé Césaire, (Paris, 1951), Traduit du grand large, poème de ma patrie enchainée, (Paris, 1952), Minerai noir, (Paris, 1957), Journal d'un animal marin (Paris, 1964), Un arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chrétien poeme mystère vaudou, (Paris, 1966). His poetry has appeared in many French, Spanish and German anthologies and collections. More current works include Anthologie personnelle (1993) and Actes sud, for which he received the Prix Apollinaire. He has spent many years in France, and was awarded the French literary prize, the prix Renaudot, in 1988 for his work Hadriana dans Tous mes Rêves. He lives in Lézignan-Corbières. He is a special envoy of UNESCO for Haiti. He is the uncle of Michaëlle Jean, the Governor General of Canada from 2005 to 2010. Joan Dayan is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at CUNY. Her work on Depestre received the Land Prize at Smith College.
René Depestre, who is perhaps the most important voice poemically emanating from contemporary Haiti, was born in Jacmel on August 29, 1926. He first came to international attention in January, 1946, on the eve of the fall of the Haitian government, when the literary-political magazine offices of ‘The Beehive’, which he had started with other revolutionary voices of the island, was closed by the police. He went into exile thereafter, living in Paris and Africa and returning to Haiti in 1958. Revolutionary activity in Cuba in the Sixties gave his most recent work its strongest impetus, judging by the fact that the Rainbow was composed in Habana; and since its Paris publication in 1967, he has published other important works. The Rainbow is intended as an exorcism through voodoo, the induction of the water-based grandeur of Blackness into the Southern-white dynastic decay. Its five parts include: (1) The Prelude, bearing the title of the work; (2) The Epiphanies of the Voodoo Gods, made of ikonic poems; (3) The Cantata for Seven Voices, where female loas take up the exorcistic cause and spell it out more fully in the second or response part of this section, with the Odes to martyred Black political and lyrical heroes; (4) The Aphorisms and Parables, which is Depestre’s summa on Blackness; and (5) The Completion of the Rainbow, where the voodoo spirit inside the Alabama mansion rises to Omaha, as a sort of vortex centering and prophetic credential.
René Depestre (born 29 August 1926 Jacmel, Haiti) is a Haitian poet and former communist activist. He lived in Cuba as an exile from the Duvalier regime for many years and was a founder of the Casa de las Americas publishing house. He is best known for his poetry. He did his primary studies with the Breton Brothers of Christian Instruction. His father died in 1936, and René Depestre left his mother, his two brothers and his two sisters to go live with his maternal grandmother. From 1940 to 1944, he completed his secondary studies at the Pétion college in Port-au-Prince. His birthplace is often evoked in his poetry and his novels, in particular Hadriana in All My Dreams (1988). Étincelles (Sparks), his first collection of poetry, appeared in 1945, prefaced by Edris Saint-Amand. He was only nineteen years old when the work was published. The poems were influenced by the marvelous realism of Alejo Carpentier, who planned a conference on this subject in Haiti in 1942. Depestre created a weekly magazine with three friends: Baker, Alexis, and Gerald Bloncourt: The Hive (1945–46). ‘One wanted to help the Haitians to become aware of their capacity to renew the historical foundations of their identity’ (quote from Le métier à métisser). The Haitian government at the time seized the 1945 edition which was published in honor of André Breton, which led to the insurrection of 1946. Depestre met with all his Haitian intellectual contemporaries, including Jean Price-Mars, Léon Laleau, and René Bélance, who wrote the preface to his second collection, Gerbe de sang, in 1946. He also met with foreign intellectuals. He took part in and directed the revolutionary student movements of January 1946, which led to the overthrow of President Élie Lescot. The Army very quickly seized power, and Depestre was arrested and imprisoned before being exiled. He pursued his studies in letters and political science at the Sorbonne from 1946 - 1950. In Paris, he met French surrealist poets as well as foreign artists, and intellectuals of the négritude (Black) movement who coalesced around Alioune Diop and Présence Africaine. Depestre took an active part in the decolonization movements in France, and he was expelled from French territory. He left for Prague, from where he was driven out in 1952. He went to Cuba, invited by the writer Nicolás Guillén, where again he was stopped and expelled by the government of Fulgencio Batista. He was denied entry by France and Italy. He left for Austria, then Chile, Argentina and Brazil. He remained in Chile long enough to organize, with Pablo Neruda and Jorge Amado, the Continental Congress of Culture. After Brazil, Depestre returned to Paris in 1956 where he met other Haitians, including Jacques-Stephen Alexis. He took part in the first Pan-African congress organized by Présence Africaine in September 1956. He wrote in Présence Africaine and other journals of the time such as Esprit, and Lettres Francaises. He returned to Haiti in (1956–57). Refusing to collaborate with the Duvalierist regime, he called on Haitians to resist, and was placed under house arrest. Depestre left for Cuba in 1959, at the invitation of Che Guevara. Convinced of the aims of the Cuban Revolution, he helped with managing the country (Ministry for Foreign Relations, National Publishing, National Council of Culture, Radio Havana-Cuba, Las Casas de las Américas, The Committee for the Preparation of the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1967). Depestre travelled, taking part in official activities (the USSR, China, Vietnam, etc.) and took part in the first Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969), where he met the Congolese writer Henri Lopes, with whom he would work later, at UNESCO. During his various travels and his stay in Cuba, Rene Depestre continued working on a major piece of poetry. His most famous collection of poetry is undoubtedly Un arc-en-ciel pour l'Occident chrétien (Rainbow for the Christian Occident) (1967), a mix of politics, eroticism, and Voudoo, topics that are found in all of his works. Poet in Cuba (1973) is a reflection on the evolution of the Cuban revolution. Pushed aside by the Castrist régime in 1971, Depestre broke with the Cuban experiment in 1978 and went back to Paris where he worked at the UNESCO Secretariat. In 1979, in Paris, he published Le Mat de Cocagne, his first novel. In 1980, he published Alléluia pour une femme-jardin, for which he was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle in 1982. Depestre left UNESCO in 1986 and retired in the Aude region of France. In 1988, he published Hadriana in All My Dreams, which received many literary awards, including the Prix Théophraste Renaudot, the Prix de la Société des Gens de Lettres, the Prix Antigone of the town of Montpellier, and the Belgian Prix du Roman de l'Académie royale de la langue et de la littérature françaises. He obtained French citizenship in 1991. He continued to receive awards and honors, in particular the Prix Apollinaire de poésie for his personal Anthology (1993) and the Italian Grisane Award for the theatrical adaptation of Mat de Cocagne in 1995, as well as bursaries (Bourse du Centre National du Livre, in 1994, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995). He was the subject of a documentary film by Jean-Daniel Lafond, Haiti in All Our Dreams, filmed in Montreal (1996). Depestre also published major essays. Bonjour et adieu à la négritude (Hello and Good-bye to Négritude) presents a reflexion on his ambivalent position regarding the négritude movement started by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Leon-Gontran Damas. Impressed by Aime Césaire, who came to Haiti to speak about surrealism and négritude, he was fascinated by créole life, or the créolo-francophonie, which did not stop him from questioning the concept of négritude. Rebellious of the concept since his youth, which he associated with ethnic essentialism, he measured the historical range and situated the movement in the world history of ideas. He revisited this topic (critical re-situation of the movement) in his two collections, Ainsi parle le fleuve noir (1998) and Le Métier à métisser (1998). He paid homage to Césaire and his visionary work within the context of the créole movement in Martinique: ‘Césaire with only one word ended this empty debate: at the start of historical decolonization, In Haiti and around the world, there is the genius of Toussaint Louverture’ (Le Métier à métisser 25). His experience in Cuba - his fascination and his falling out with the ‘castrofidelism’ ideology and its constraints - is also examined in these two texts, as well as marvelous realism, the role of the erotic, Haitian history and the very contemporary topic of globalization. Far from seeing himself as an exile, Depestre prefers being described as a nomad with multiple roots, a ‘banyan‘ man - in reference to the tree which he so often evokes right down to its rhizomic roots - even described as a ‘géo-libertin’. Rene Depestre lives today in a small village in the Aude, Lézignan-Corbières, with his second wife, who is Cuban. He writes every morning, looking at the vineyards, just as he used to devour the view of Jacmel Bay from his grandmother's veranda. His work has been published in the United States, the former Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy, Cuba, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, the former German Democratic Republic (East-Germany), Argentina, and Mexico. His first volume of poetry, Sparks (Etincelles) was published in Port-au-Prince in 1945. Other publications include Gerbe de sang (Port-au-Prince, 1946), Végétation de clartés, preface by Aimé Césaire, (Paris, 1951), Traduit du grand large, poème de ma patrie enchainée, (Paris, 1952), Minerai noir, (Paris, 1957), Journal d'un animal marin (Paris, 1964), Un arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chrétien poeme mystère vaudou, (Paris, 1966). His poetry has appeared in many French, Spanish and German anthologies and collections. More current works include Anthologie personnelle (1993) and Actes sud, for which he received the Prix Apollinaire. He has spent many years in France, and was awarded the French literary prize, the prix Renaudot, in 1988 for his work Hadriana dans Tous mes Rêves. He lives in Lézignan-Corbières. He is a special envoy of UNESCO for Haiti. He is the uncle of Michaëlle Jean, the Governor General of Canada from 2005 to 2010.
Revolutionary Haitian Poetry. On the poems: "What appears to me to belong most valuably to René Depestre is that almost constant and nearly infallible goodness with which he effects the integration of the most actual and immediate event into the most genuine poetic world; that faculty of stirring up the human adventure in a speech of full, clear and abundant voice; that faculty of making images flow in a fusion with song." Aimé Cesaire. On the translation: "I. . . must admire extravagantly these extra- ordinary translations — I should say trans- formations, mutations, transmutations — by Jack Hirschman who is these days in an absolute pyromantic state as a polyglot linguist — his word-virtuosity is an alchemy turning the 'hidden difficult metal of the originals into a new liquid quicksilver which quivers, pours and runs like a river of light." Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
René Depestre (born 29 August 1926 Jacmel, Haiti) is a Haitian poet and former communist activist. He lived in Cuba as an exile from the Duvalier regime for many years and was a founder of the Casa de las Americas publishing house. He is best known for his poetry. He did his primary studies with the Breton Brothers of Christian Instruction. His father died in 1936, and René Depestre left his mother, his two brothers and his two sisters to go live with his maternal grandmother. From 1940 to 1944, he completed his secondary studies at the Pétion college in Port-au-Prince. His birthplace is often evoked in his poetry and his novels, in particular Hadriana in All My Dreams (1988). Étincelles (Sparks), his first collection of poetry, appeared in 1945, prefaced by Edris Saint-Amand. He was only nineteen years old when the work was published. The poems were influenced by the marvelous realism of Alejo Carpentier, who planned a conference on this subject in Haiti in 1942. Depestre created a weekly magazine with three friends: Baker, Alexis, and Gerald Bloncourt: The Hive (1945–46). ‘One wanted to help the Haitians to become aware of their capacity to renew the historical foundations of their identity’ (quote from Le métier à métisser). The Haitian government at the time seized the 1945 edition which was published in honor of André Breton, which led to the insurrection of 1946. Depestre met with all his Haitian intellectual contemporaries, including Jean Price-Mars, Léon Laleau, and René Bélance, who wrote the preface to his second collection, Gerbe de sang, in 1946. He also met with foreign intellectuals. He took part in and directed the revolutionary student movements of January 1946, which led to the overthrow of President Élie Lescot. The Army very quickly seized power, and Depestre was arrested and imprisoned before being exiled. He pursued his studies in letters and political science at the Sorbonne from 1946 - 1950. In Paris, he met French surrealist poets as well as foreign artists, and intellectuals of the négritude (Black) movement who coalesced around Alioune Diop and Présence Africaine. Depestre took an active part in the decolonization movements in France, and he was expelled from French territory. He left for Prague, from where he was driven out in 1952. He went to Cuba, invited by the writer Nicolás Guillén, where again he was stopped and expelled by the government of Fulgencio Batista. He was denied entry by France and Italy. He left for Austria, then Chile, Argentina and Brazil. He remained in Chile long enough to organize, with Pablo Neruda and Jorge Amado, the Continental Congress of Culture. After Brazil, Depestre returned to Paris in 1956 where he met other Haitians, including Jacques-Stephen Alexis. He took part in the first Pan-African congress organized by Présence Africaine in September 1956. He wrote in Présence Africaine and other journals of the time such as Esprit, and Lettres Francaises. He returned to Haiti in (1956–57). Refusing to collaborate with the Duvalierist regime, he called on Haitians to resist, and was placed under house arrest. Depestre left for Cuba in 1959, at the invitation of Che Guevara. Convinced of the aims of the Cuban Revolution, he helped with managing the country (Ministry for Foreign Relations, National Publishing, National Council of Culture, Radio Havana-Cuba, Las Casas de las Américas, The Committee for the Preparation of the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1967). Depestre travelled, taking part in official activities (the USSR, China, Vietnam, etc.) and took part in the first Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969), where he met the Congolese writer Henri Lopes, with whom he would work later, at UNESCO. During his various travels and his stay in Cuba, Rene Depestre continued working on a major piece of poetry. His most famous collection of poetry is undoubtedly Un arc-en-ciel pour l'Occident chrétien (Rainbow for the Christian Occident) (1967), a mix of politics, eroticism, and Voudoo, topics that are found in all of his works. Poet in Cuba (1973) is a reflection on the evolution of the Cuban revolution. Pushed aside by the Castrist régime in 1971, Depestre broke with the Cuban experiment in 1978 and went back to Paris where he worked at the UNESCO Secretariat. In 1979, in Paris, he published Le Mat de Cocagne, his first novel. In 1980, he published Alléluia pour une femme-jardin, for which he was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle in 1982. Depestre left UNESCO in 1986 and retired in the Aude region of France. In 1988, he published Hadriana in All My Dreams, which received many literary awards, including the Prix Théophraste Renaudot, the Prix de la Société des Gens de Lettres, the Prix Antigone of the town of Montpellier, and the Belgian Prix du Roman de l'Académie royale de la langue et de la littérature françaises. He obtained French citizenship in 1991. He continued to receive awards and honors, in particular the Prix Apollinaire de poésie for his personal Anthology (1993) and the Italian Grisane Award for the theatrical adaptation of Mat de Cocagne in 1995, as well as bursaries (Bourse du Centre National du Livre, in 1994, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995). He was the subject of a documentary film by Jean-Daniel Lafond, Haiti in All Our Dreams, filmed in Montreal (1996). Depestre also published major essays. Bonjour et adieu à la négritude (Hello and Good-bye to Négritude) presents a reflexion on his ambivalent position regarding the négritude movement started by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Leon-Gontran Damas. Impressed by Aime Césaire, who came to Haiti to speak about surrealism and négritude, he was fascinated by créole life, or the créolo-francophonie, which did not stop him from questioning the concept of négritude. Rebellious of the concept since his youth, which he associated with ethnic essentialism, he measured the historical range and situated the movement in the world history of ideas. He revisited this topic (critical re-situation of the movement) in his two collections, Ainsi parle le fleuve noir (1998) and Le Métier à métisser (1998). He paid homage to Césaire and his visionary work within the context of the créole movement in Martinique: ‘Césaire with only one word ended this empty debate: at the start of historical decolonization, In Haiti and around the world, there is the genius of Toussaint Louverture’ (Le Métier à métisser 25). His experience in Cuba - his fascination and his falling out with the ‘castrofidelism’ ideology and its constraints - is also examined in these two texts, as well as marvelous realism, the role of the erotic, Haitian history and the very contemporary topic of globalization. Far from seeing himself as an exile, Depestre prefers being described as a nomad with multiple roots, a ‘banyan‘ man - in reference to the tree which he so often evokes right down to its rhizomic roots - even described as a ‘géo-libertin’. Rene Depestre lives today in a small village in the Aude, Lézignan-Corbières, with his second wife, who is Cuban. He writes every morning, looking at the vineyards, just as he used to devour the view of Jacmel Bay from his grandmother's veranda. His work has been published in the United States, the former Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy, Cuba, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, the former German Democratic Republic (East-Germany), Argentina, and Mexico. His first volume of poetry, Sparks (Etincelles) was published in Port-au-Prince in 1945. Other publications include Gerbe de sang (Port-au-Prince, 1946), Végétation de clartés, preface by Aimé Césaire, (Paris, 1951), Traduit du grand large, poème de ma patrie enchainée, (Paris, 1952), Minerai noir, (Paris, 1957), Journal d'un animal marin (Paris, 1964), Un arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chrétien poeme mystère vaudou, (Paris, 1966). His poetry has appeared in many French, Spanish and German anthologies and collections. More current works include Anthologie personnelle (1993) and Actes sud, for which he received the Prix Apollinaire. He has spent many years in France, and was awarded the French literary prize, the prix Renaudot, in 1988 for his work Hadriana dans Tous mes Rêves. He lives in Lézignan-Corbières. He is a special envoy of UNESCO for Haiti. He is the uncle of Michaëlle Jean, the Governor General of Canada from 2005 to 2010.
This book examines in an exciting and authoritative form the folk beliefs and rituals of the people of Haiti. Maya Deren writes from inside knowledge of her subject, having lived for more than three years as an accepted member of a small Haitian community, during which time she took part herself in many of the native ceremonies. The Haitians are a people without a written tradition. Their gods, brought with them from their original home in West Africa, appear in living form by Taking possession of the devotees and behaving as teachers, doctors and whimsically imperious friends. One of the most fascinating parts of the book is the study of how Haitians have borrowed certain features from Christianity, modified and then incorporated them into their own native religion. The publishers believe this to he a very unusual book; here for almost the first time the much-publicized ‘voodoo’ religion of the Haitians is both fully understood and vitally described by a profoundly perceptive writer. It is illustrated with a number of attractive line reproductions of vever drawings and a selection of remarkable photos. graphs of Haitian ritual taken by the author, who is a well-known maker of films; she was aided in her work by a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Maya Deren (April 29, 1917 – October 13, 1961), born Eleanora Derenkowskaia, was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer. The function of film, Deren believed, like most art forms, was to create an experience; each one of her films would evoke new conclusions, lending her focus to be dynamic and always-evolving. She combined her interests in dance, voodoo and subjective psychology in a series of surreal, perceptual, black and white short films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump cutting, superimposition, slow-motion and other camera techniques to her fullest advantage, Deren creates continued motion through discontinued space, while abandoning the established notions of physical space and time, with the ability to turn her vision into a stream of consciousness. Perhaps one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema was her collaboration with Alexander Hammid on Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). She continued to make several more films of her own, including At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) – writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them with help from only one other person, Hella Heyman, as camerawoman. She also appeared in a few of her films but never credited herself as an actress, downplaying her roles as anonymous figures rather than iconic deities.
Maya Deyen was a pioneer in developing the non-fiction film beyond the traditional limits of the documentary. DIVINE HORSEMEN is the outgrowth of her trip to Haiti in 1947 to shoot a film on Haitian dance, but Voodoo – the religion, the reality of it – overwhelmed her artistic intentions. The film was never finished. Instead she spent a total of eighteen months over a three-year period living as an accepted member of a Haitian village and writing this book.
Maya Deren (April 29, 1917 – October 13, 1961), born Eleanora Derenkowskaia, was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer. The function of film, Deren believed, like most art forms, was to create an experience; each one of her films would evoke new conclusions, lending her focus to be dynamic and always-evolving. She combined her interests in dance, voodoo and subjective psychology in a series of surreal, perceptual, black and white short films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump cutting, superimposition, slow-motion and other camera techniques to her fullest advantage, Deren creates continued motion through discontinued space, while abandoning the established notions of physical space and time, with the ability to turn her vision into a stream of consciousness. Perhaps one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema was her collaboration with Alexander Hammid on Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). She continued to make several more films of her own, including At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) – writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them with help from only one other person, Hella Heyman, as camerawoman. She also appeared in a few of her films but never credited herself as an actress, downplaying her roles as anonymous figures rather than iconic deities.
A long-overdue critical appreciation of the West Indian historian and political activist who played a towering role in the cause of Pan-Africanism in the twentieth century. Born In Trinidad in 1901, Cyril Lionel Robert James was a precocious polymath all his life. By the time he was a teenager and already a certified teacher, he had embarked on a lifelong advocacy for the Trinidadian oppressed. He embraced Marxism while living in England during the 1930s, during which time he published, among other works, The Case for West Indian Self Government and his masterpiece, THE BLACK JACOBINS. James lived in the United States from 1939 until he was expelled during the McCarthy terror for his political activities, Thereafter he divided his time between London and Trinidad (where he served as Secretary of the West Indies Federal Labor Party) and, until his death in 1989, wrote works of both fiction and nonfiction that would profoundly influence the Black Power movement in the United States and independence movements in Africa and the West Indies. Farrukh Dhondy knew James personally and was given access to his papers. The result is a biography that is a revelation of the life and work of this legendary intellect and revolutionary.
Farrukh Dhondy (born Poona, India, in 1944) is an Indian-born British writer, playwright, screenwriter and left-wing activist of Parsi descent, who resides in the United Kingdom. He is well known not only for his writing, but also for his film and TV work. Dhondy did his schooling at The Bishop's School, Pune, and obtained a BSc degree from the University of Pune in India. He won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge where he read Natural Sciences before switching to English. After graduating he studied for a master's degree at Leicester University and was later a lecturer at Leicester College of Further Education and Archbishop Temples school in Lambeth in London. In Leicester, Dhondy became involved with the Indian Workers' Association and later, in London, with the British Black Panther movement, joining the publication Race Today in 1970, along with his close friend Darcus Howe, and former, later deceased, partner Mala Sen, and discovering his calling as a writer. In his role as a race activist and academic, he came to be associated with black and left-wing intellectuals and activists such as Stuart Hall and Trevor Phillips. Uncharacteristically, it is also from this period that his close friendship with the conservative author Sir V. S. Naipaul dates. Dhondy's literary output is vast, including books for children, textbooks and biographies, as well as plays for theatre and scripts film and television. He is also a columnist, a biographer (of C. L. R. James; 2001), and media executive (Channel Four Commissioning Editor 1984–97). During his time with Channel Four, he wrote the comedy series Tandoori Nights (1985–87) for the channel, which concerned the rivalry of two curry house owners. His children's stories include KBW (Keep Britain White), a study of a young white boy's response to anti-Bengali racism. In 2011 Dhondy published his translation of selections from the Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi, Rumi: a New Translation. He also wrote the screenplay for the Bollywood historical blockbuster Mangal Pandey, starring Aamir Khan and Toby Stephens. In 2012, he scripted a short film called The K File. This film dealt with a fictional take on the judgement of Ajmal Kasab and was directed by Oorvazi Irani. In 2013 his critically acclaimed play Devdas was premiered in London and was subsequently replayed globally. 2013 also saw the publication of the novel, Prophet Of Love (HarperCollins). Dhondy was lauded in the respected political magazine The New Internationalist, in its prestigious 'final page' which led to the resurgence of his lifelong campaign to recruit more BME talent at the BBC, with an article subsequently printed in the New Statesman (covered in The Voice newspaper), which was later taken over by actor and comedian Lenny Henry. In 2015 Dhondy interviewed Nobel Laureate Sir V. S. Naipaul in India and in London as part of the Jaipur Literature Festival and his publishers produced a collection of his greatest works in an anthology.
Haiti is only three hours from New York by air, but it is a moot point whether Haiti is five hundred years behind any one of the West's democracies, or one thousand. And this once-richest of all the New World colonies is drifting ever backward under the megalomaniac misguidance of Francois Duvalier, a tyrant known as "Papa Doc." A physician by profession, Duvalier did work hand-in-glove with a team of American medical experts to rid his island of the crippling disease of yaws. Before he assumed the Presidency, he did seem the very man his country had been needing for all too long a time. But Duvalier established dominion over Haiti as a very different sort of doctor - a witch doctor. Trading on the credulity of his people, Papa Doc - Father and Healer of his country's ills - has made himself President for Life and virtually inviolable. His reign is a terrifying mixture of voudou legend and gangster-style brutality. The Golden Rule of his administration: A good Duvalierist stands ready to kill his children, or children to kill their parents. Here for the first time is the extraordinary factual account of Papa Doc, the Haitian people and Haitian politics since that day in 1957 when Duvalier came into power. The story this book puts forth is not a pretty one, but it is the truth as only insiders can know it and political exiles dare tell it.
Bernard Diederich (born 1926), is a New Zealand-born author, journalist, and historian, who currently resides in Miami. Diederich studied in England in the early postwar years after having participated in World War II in the Pacific. In 1949, Diederich started a sailing trip with two friends that brought him to Haiti, a country that since stayed close to his heart. He stayed and settled down, while his partners continued their trip. In Port-au-Prince, he founded and edited the Haiti Sun, a weekly English newspaper about Haitian events. As a journalist he also became a non-staff correspondent for a number of news media including the Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Daily Telegraph. In 1961 he covered the assassination of Rafael Trujillo in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Two years later, after having displeased Haiti’s dictator Papa Doc Duvalier, he was imprisoned and expelled. In the Dominican Republic he established himself as a foreign staff correspondent for Time-Life News. In 1966 Diederich moved to Mexico working for Time Magazine covering Caribbean affairs. In 1981 the office was moved to Miami, and he worked there until his retirement in 1989. The author continued to publish after retirement with the focus on the political and historical developments in the Caribbean, notably in Haiti. In 1954 Diederich met Graham Greene and the two became friends; later, as a result of their travel along the Haitian border Diederich wrote The Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene's Adventures in Haiti and Central America 1954–1983, while Greene published The Comedians. Diederich published a detailed account of Trujillo’s assassination in Trujillo: Death of the Goat in 1978. After Mario Vargas Llosa published The Feast of the Goat, a fictionalized novel about Trujillo’s death, in 2000, Diederich accused Vargas Llosa of plagiarism. Al Burt or, more fully, Alvin Victor Burt (September 11, 1927 – November 29, 2008) was a Florida author and longtime journalist with The Miami Herald. He served as a sports writer, news reporter, editor, editorial writer and columnist. Burt reported from Washington to Latin America and the Caribbean and throughout Florida. Before working with the Miami Herald he had positions with the Atlanta Journal and the Jacksonville Journal. He was seriously wounded by "friendly fire" while covering the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. For many years he wrote a back-page column for The Miami Herald Sunday magazine on interesting people and places around Florida that drew him quite a following. Florida author David Nolan said he used to buy the Herald just so he could read Al Burt's column. Many of those columns were collected in book form in Becalmed in the Mullet Latitudes (1984), Al Burt's Florida (1997), and Tropic of Cracker (1999). A scholar and advocate of the Florida Cracker, Burt was a longtime trustee of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society—an organization that celebrated the life and work of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist who gave the Crackers dignity in American literature. He lived for many years in the picturesque historic town of Melrose, Florida, until declining health dictated a move to the larger city of Jacksonville not long before his death.
"A fascinating enquiry in depth into the background of Trujillo's murder - a natural for the biographer of that other monster of the Caribbean, Papa Doc." - Graham Greene. Trujillo: The Death of the Goat is a riveting, minute- by-minute account of the plot to assassinate the Western Hemisphere's most ruthless dictator, the violent killing itself, and the ferocious wave of revenge that ensued before Trujillo's regime finally collapsed. Bernard Diederich also reveals, for the first time, the vacillating role of the United States - and the CIA - initially in propping up the dictator, then in supplying weapons to slay him. On May 30, 1961, a hail of bullets ended the life of Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, known to his countrymen as "The Goat" for his many revolting excesses, after thirty-one years of brutal rule over the Dominican Republic - an absolute dictatorship enforced by Trujillo's secret police, the dreaded SIM. Before The Goat's bloody slaughter on a deserted coastal highway, the tentacles of the SIM had crept over the Western Hemisphere, employing kidnapping, torture, murder - even a flagrant assassination attempt on another head of state - with a viciousness to rival the Gestapo's. It was the abduction from Manhattan, in 1956, of Jesus Galindez, a lecturer at Columbia University who had written a study criticizing Trujillo's dictatorship, that doomed The Goat. For Trujillo's agents had hired two pilots to deliver Galindez to Trujillo, and both pilots would be murdered within months to keep the professor's monstrous fate a secret. One was a young American, the other a member of a close-knit, affluent old Dominican family, the de la Mazas, renowned for their volatile behavior. It was Antonio de la Maza who, incensed by Trujillo's butchery, gathered the band of patriots and disaffected Dominicans to avenge his slain brother and redeem their country from The Goat. With the pace and detail of a superlative thriller, Bernard Diederich recreates a true story of almost over-whelming suspense and danger, of heroism and tragic coincidence: how the conspirators moved from hollow threats and patio planning to methodical deliberations of murder; how they stalked their target and amassed their own weapons in a country where civilian firearms were forbidden; how contact was made with the CIA and, after long, frustrating negotiations, a promise of help from the U.S.A. was secured. That "help " - in the end only two M-1 rifles - became just one part of an ominous pattern that saw the assassins carry out their plot without any contingency plan to cover unexpected events, miscalculate the resistance of the dead dictator's family and supporters, and have their coup betrayed by a weak general who failed to lead the armed forces against the surviving Trujillistas. For these and other incredible omissions and blunders, the conspirators, their families, and friends paid. a hideous price in the torture chambers of the SIM. (International revulsion at the reprisals, and nationwide unrest, toppled the Trujillo government several years later.) Bernard Diederich was the first journalist outside the Dominican Republic to report the rumor from the Dominican Republic that Trujillo had been assassinated. In the years since, he has tracked down and interviewed scores of Dominicans about their involvement in the assassination. He also has talked with former CIA agents and contract men, as well as with former SIM agents who spoke for the first time about the manhunt for the killers. The result, Trujillo: The Death of the Goat, is at once masterful reportage and chilling, cautionary history. The first comprehensive account, it is a gripping book that reads like a novel ... and lingers like a nightmare.
Bernard Diederich (born 1926), is a New Zealand-born author, journalist, and historian, who currently resides in Miami. Diederich studied in England in the early postwar years after having participated in World War II in the Pacific. In 1949, Diederich started a sailing trip with two friends that brought him to Haiti, a country that since stayed close to his heart. He stayed and settled down, while his partners continued their trip. In Port-au-Prince, he founded and edited the Haiti Sun, a weekly English newspaper about Haitian events. As a journalist he also became a non-staff correspondent for a number of news media including the Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Daily Telegraph. In 1961 he covered the assassination of Rafael Trujillo in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Two years later, after having displeased Haiti’s dictator Papa Doc Duvalier, he was imprisoned and expelled. In the Dominican Republic he established himself as a foreign staff correspondent for Time-Life News. In 1966 Diederich moved to Mexico working for Time Magazine covering Caribbean affairs. In 1981 the office was moved to Miami, and he worked there until his retirement in 1989. The author continued to publish after retirement with the focus on the political and historical developments in the Caribbean, notably in Haiti. In 1954 Diederich met Graham Greene and the two became friends; later, as a result of their travel along the Haitian border Diederich wrote The Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene's Adventures in Haiti and Central America 1954–1983, while Greene published The Comedians. Diederich published a detailed account of Trujillo’s assassination in Trujillo: Death of the Goat in 1978. After Mario Vargas Llosa published The Feast of the Goat, a fictionalized novel about Trujillo’s death, in 2000, Diederich accused Vargas Llosa of plagiarism.
An imaginative small boy leaves his childhood behind in the course of a school holiday. People puzzle Christopher. His father, an unsuccessful sugar planter, resents his own dependence on his wife’s family and includes Christopher in his resentment. His mother, though she loves her husband, is also frightened of him and of losing the baby she is carrying - which is what happens. However, the central character in Christopher’s life is his black nanny Gip, through whom he comes to know the villagers with their colourful customs and superstitions. Because of a succession of experiences, only partially understood and therefore arousing unreasonable fears and ecstatic hopes, he begins to grow up and to realise that even pain and sadness are necessary stages on the road to maturity.
Geoffrey Drayton (born 13 February 1924) is a Barbadian novelist, poet and journalist. Geoffrey Drayton was born in Barbados, and received his early education there. In 1945 he went to Cambridge University, where he read economics, after which he spent some years teaching in Ottawa, Canada, returning to England in 1953. He worked as a freelance journalist in London and Madrid. From 1954 to 1965 he worked for Petroleum Times, becoming its editor. In 1966 he became a petroleum consultant for the Economist Intelligence Unit. Drayton is the author of one volume of poetry, Three Meridians (1950), and two novels: Christopher (1959), which was first published in part in Bim magazine, and Zohara (1961). He has also written short stories, such as 'Mr Dombie the Zombie', which was broadcast on the BBC programme Caribbean Voices.
The first and only successful slave revolution in the Americas began in 1791 when thousands of brutally exploited slaves rose up against their masters on Saint-Domingue, the most profitable colony in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Within a few years, the slave insurgents forced the French administrators of the colony to emancipate them, a decision ratified by revolutionary Paris in 1794. This victory was a stunning challenge to the order of master/slave relations throughout the Americas, including the southern United States, reinforcing the most fervent hopes of slaves and the worst fears of masters. But, peace eluded Saint-Domingue as British and Spanish forces attacked the colony. A charismatic ex-slave named Toussaint Louverture came to France’s aid, raising armies of others like himself and defeating the invaders. Ultimately Napoleon, fearing the enormous political power of Toussaint, sent a massive mission to crush him and subjugate the ex-slaves. After many battles, a decisive victory over the French secured the birth of Haiti and the permanent abolition of slavery from the land. The independence of Haiti reshaped the Atlantic world by leading to the French sale of Louisiana to the United States and the expansion of the Cuban sugar economy. Laurent Dubois weaves the stories of slaves, free people of African descent, wealthy whites, and French administrators into an unforgettable tale of insurrection, war, heroism, and victory. He establishes the Haitian Revolution as a foundational moment in the history of democracy and human rights.
Laurent Dubois (PhD. University of Michigan) is associate professor of history at Michigan State University. His book "A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804" (2004) won the American Historical Association Prize in Atlantic History and the John Edwin Fagg Award. He is also the author of "Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution" (2004), which was a "Christian Science Monitor" Noteworthy Book of 2004 and a "Los Angeles Times" Best Book of 2004, and "Les esclaves de la Republique: l'histoire oubliee de la premiere emancipation, 1787-1794" (1998).
Dangerous Neighbors shows how the Haitian Revolution permeated early American print culture and had a profound impact on the young nation's domestic politics. Focusing on Philadelphia as both a representative and an influential vantage point, it follows contemporary American reactions to the events through which the French colony of Saint Domingue was destroyed and the independent nation of Haiti emerged. Philadelphians made sense of the news from Saint Domingue with local and national political developments in mind and with the French Revolution and British abolition debates ringing in their ears. In witnessing a French colony experience a revolution of African slaves, they made the colony serve as powerful and persuasive evidence in domestic discussions over the meaning of citizenship, equality of rights, and the fate of slavery. Through extensive use of manuscript sources, newspapers, and printed literature, Dun uncovers the wide range of opinion and debate about events in Saint Domingue in the early republic. By focusing on both the meanings Americans gave to those events and the uses they put them to, he reveals a fluid understanding of the American Revolution and the polity it had produced, one in which various groups were making sense of their new nation in relation to both its own past and a revolution unfolding before them. Zeroing in on Philadelphia--a revolutionary center and an enclave of antislavery activity--Dun collapses the supposed geographic and political boundaries that separated the American republic from the West Indies and Europe. 'Dangerous Neighbors elegantly shows how Philadelphians absorbed, debated, and channeled the news of insurrection, emancipation, and independence in the Caribbean. Dun foregrounds the vitality and complexity of print culture as a forum that at once circulated, interpreted, and framed the transformations brought about by the actions of revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue. And he richly shows how engagement with the challenges posed by these events shaped debates about freedom, race, and nation in the United States.'--Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. 'While offering a deep, nuanced history of the Haitian Revolution, Dangerous Neighbors is first and foremost a study of early American political culture. James Alexander Dun argues the American people defined their own revolution, figured the place of slavery and African-descended people in their new nation, and determined their national identity through the lens of events in the French colony and, later, the black republic.'--Matthew J. Clavin, University of Houston. 'With this fine book, James Alexander Dun joins a burgeoning and important scholarship reassessing the long-ignored impact of the Haitian Revolution on early America. Based on monumental research, it offers the most comprehensive account we have of Philadelphia's newspaper coverage and indeed of a broad spectrum of public opinion on the Haitian Revolution as it unfolded. The result shows us not silence but cacophony: a striking portrait of a rich, multifaceted, and contested range of debate. Dangerous Neighbors will make a lasting contribution to the field.'--François Furstenberg, Johns Hopkins University.
James Alexander Dun teaches history at Princeton University.
Set in Belize, BEKA LAMB is the record of a few months in the life of Beka and her family. The story of Beka’s victory over her habit of lying, which she conquers after deceiving her father about a disgrace at school, is told in flashback. Her reminiscences begin when she wins an essay prize at her convent school, and they stand in lieu of a wake for her friend Toycie. The politics of the small colony, the influence of the matriarchal society and the dominating presence of the Catholic Church are woven into the fabric of the story to provide a compelling portrait of ordinary life in Belize.
Zee Edgell grew up in Belize in the early 1950s. Her first job was as a reporter on the Daily Gleaner in Kingston, Jamaica. From 1966—8 she taught at St Catherine Academy in Belize, during which period she was also editor of a small newspaper in Belize City. After travelling widely - apart from Jamaica, Zee Edgell has lived in Britain, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and the USA - she has returned to Belize to teach at St Catherine Academy. She has recently been appointed Director of the Womens’ Bureau in Belize.
Luz Marina, cleared of murdering her brutal husband, is released from prison on a three-year probation. Determined to rebuild her life and gain custody of her children, she perseveres, sustained by mother love and her faith in God in her battle against the poverty, guilt, vanity, and vengeance that threaten to overwhelm her. In this novel, set in the Mestizo community in Belize, Zee Edgell explores with sensitivity and understanding the contradictory and secret territory that is domestic violence.
Zelma I. Edgell, better known as Zee Edgell, (born 21 October 1940 in Belize City, Belize) is a writer. She has had four of her novels published. She was an associate professor of English at Kent State University.
A PAPERBACK ORIGINAL. Times of joy, times of grief... the time it takes for the shine of youthful hope to be tarnished by the compromise of experience. Yet Pavana Leslie has not lost sight of the ideals of her student self, fashioned in sixties London far from her homeland of Belize. Resolved to make her contribution to the land of her birth, she returns home with her fatherless children, where the unwitting father IS now influential in the government. Private emotion twists with public crisis: Pavana strives to reconcile her personal and professional life, while the country itself is in turmoil as Independence approaches and rival factions battle for supremacy. Just as Belize will shake off colonial dependency, so, by the end of this enthralling saga, will Pavana achieve a new confidence, a new vision.
Zelma I. Edgell, better known as Zee Edgell, (born 21 October 1940 in Belize City, Belize) is a writer. She has had four of her novels published. She was an associate professor of English at Kent State University.
Since the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, Fanon's work has been deeply significant for generations of intellectuals and activists from the 60s to the present day. Alienation and Freedom collects together unpublished works comprising around half of his entire output – which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take centre stage. These writings provide new depth and complexity to our understanding of Fanon's entire oeuvre revealing more of his powerful thinking about identity, race and activism which remain remarkably prescient. Shedding new light on the work of a major 20th-century philosopher, this disruptive and moving work will shape how we look at the world.
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer. He was the author of classic works such as Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). He was one of the most significant anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist and anti-racist thinkers of the 20th Century. Jean Khalfa is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Trinity College Cambridge, UK. He is the editor of the first complete edition of Michel Foucault's History of Madness (2006) and author of Poetics of the Antilles (2016) and an upcoming work on Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. Robert J. C. Young, FBA, is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University, USA. He is the author of White Mythologies (1990), Colonial Desire (1995), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001), The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008), Empire, Colony, Postcolony (2015).
This is Fanon’s first book. At the time of its original publication in France, Fanon said: ‘This book should have been written three years ago. . . . But these truths were a fire in me then. Now I can tell them without being burned.’ Written out of his experiences and observations as a Negro and a psychiatrist in the Antilles, this book is concerned with the warping of the Negro psyche by a ‘superior’ white culture. Fanon believed that it is a e senseless undertaking for the black man in today’s world to deny his blackness; that to do so is at the cost of refusing to know that others see it, and that for many it is the mark of an inferiority. ‘I believe that the fact of the juxtaposition of the white and black races has created a massive psychoexistential complex. I hope by analyzing it to destroy it.’ In this book, Fanon begins with the fact of blackness, and the fact that white men consider themselves superior. He first deals with the modern Negro and his attitudes in the white world — he thus clarifies and exposes the Negro to himself. He then analyzes and criticizes the work of others, such as O. Mannoni, who have dealt with the problem of the Negro and colonization. The core of the book is devoted to a psychopathological and philosophical explanation of the state of being a Negro. Exploring literature, dreams, case histories, the myth of the man of color and the white woman, and the deep inferiority complex which develops as the black man is overwhelmed by the desire to be white, Fanon portrays the Negro face to face with his race, the fact of blackness. Fanon’s impassioned revolt, his fight for a new humanism where independence is not just a word, but an indispensable condition for the existence of a truly liberated people moves this book far beyond a psychoanalytical study of racism and colonialism: it is a remarkable personal narrative of his life as a Negro in a white world which he wrote to further the fight for equality and dignity of all black peoples.
Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique. He studied medicine in France, and later specialized in psychiatry. Out of his experiences in a hospital in Algeria during the French-Algerian war, his sympathies turned toward the rebels. He joined the revolution and became its most articulate spokesman. His book, THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, has become a manifesto for the Third World.
Written in 1959, during ‘the Fifth Year of the Algerian Revolution,’ its title in the original French edition, this book has lost none of its timeliness, despite the fact that its focus is very specifically on the Algerian people and the Algerian Revolution. STUDIES IN A DYING COLONIALISM has much to say to a world dominated by revolutionary movements in the underdeveloped countries. For Fanon portrays the contagious dynamism of a people’s struggle for national liberation and the transformations that occur both in the personality of individuals and in society as a whole during the course of that struggle. To the disinherited of the world, the book is a message of hope. For the rest of us it offers insights into the social and psychological conflicts of an oppressed people — and those of their oppressors. It also offers us, if we will accept it, a challenge — to lend our support to the underdeveloped nations of the world in their struggle to break the chains of colonial and neo-colonial domination. For, as Adolfo Gilly points out in his introduction, only thus will we find the door to the future and only thus can our action be effective. STUDIES IN A DYING COLONIALISM is the second book by Fanon to be published in the United States this year. The first was THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH (Les Damnés de la Terre), a book which has served as a revolutionary bible for dozens of emerging African and Asian nations.
Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique. He studied medicine in France, and later specialized in psychiatry. Out of his experiences in a hospital in Algeria during the French-Algerian war, his sympathies turned toward the rebels. He joined the revolution and became its most articulate spokesman. His book, THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, has become a manifesto for the Third World.
THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH (French: Les Damnés de la Terre, first published 1961), Frantz Fanon's seminal work on the trauma of colonization made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the twentieth century. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule, it analyses the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. Fanon, himself a psychotherapist, explored the psychological effect of colonization on the psyche of a nation as well as its broader implications for building a movement for decolonization. Showing how decolonization must be combined with building a national culture, this passionate analysis of relations between the West and the Third World is still illuminating about the world today. A controversial introduction to the text by Jean-Paul Sartre presents the thesis as an advocacy of violence (which Sartre had also examined in his voluminous Critique of Dialectical Reason). This focus derives from the book's opening chapter 'Concerning Violence' which is a caustic indictment of colonialism and its legacy. It discusses violence as a means of liberation and a catharsis to subjugation. Homi K. Bhabha argues that Sartre's opening comments have led to a limited approach to the text that focuses on the promotion of violence. Further reading reveals a thorough critique of nationalism and imperialism which also develops to cover areas such as mental health and the role of intellectuals in revolutionary situations. Fanon goes into great detail explaining that revolutionary groups should look to the lumpenproletariat for the force needed to expel colonists. The lumpenproletariat in traditional Marxist theories are considered the lowest, most degraded stratum of the proletariat, especially criminals, vagrants, and the unemployed, who lacked class consciousness. Fanon uses the term to refer to those inhabitants of colonized countries who are not involved in industrial production, particularly peasants living outside the cities. He argues that only this group, unlike the industrial proletariat, has sufficient independence from the colonists to successfully make a revolution against them. Also important is Fanon's view of the role of language and how it molds the position of ‘natives‘, or those victimized by colonization. The original title of the book is an allusion to the opening words of The Internationale.
Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique. He studied medicine in France, and later specialized in psychiatry. Out of his experiences in a hospital in Algeria during the French-Algerian war, his sympathies turned toward the rebels. He joined the revolution and became its most articulate spokesman. His book, THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, has become a manifesto for the Third World.
Paul Farmer, a physician with over a decade of experience in rural Haiti, brings into stark relief the myriad forces that have long kept the majority of Haitians poor, sick and silenced. "The Uses of Haiti tells the truth about uncomfortable matters—uncomfortable, that is, for the structures of power and the doctrinal framework that protects them from critical scrutiny. It tells the truth about what has been happening in Haiti, and the U.S. role in its bitter fate.' —Noam Chomsky, from the introduction. From THE USES OF HAITI: "There were covert operations to undermine Haitian democracy, but these were not exposed until long after Aristide was over- thrown. The overt efforts, however, were not subtle. Aristide's attempt to raise the minimum daily wage to 25 gourdes a day— about $3.00—did not please the U.S. Agency for International Development, which had invested millions in keeping Haitian wages low... "What, then, is to be done? The first order of business, for citizens of the United States, might be a candid and careful assessment of our ruinous policies towards Haiti. The Haitian people are asking not for charity, but for justice." Paul Farmer, author of AIDS and Accusation (1992), is assistant professor at the Harvard Medical School and a fellow at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital. He conducts his research and medical practice in rural Haiti, where he specializes in com- munity-based efforts to improve the health of the poor.
Paul Farmer is Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School, Chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Founding Director of Partners In Health. Among his books are Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (California, 1999), The Uses of Haiti (1994), and AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (California, 1992). Farmer is the winner of a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ award and the Margaret Mead Award for his contributions to public anthropology. Amartya Sen, whose work challenges conventional market-driven economic paradigms, is the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics. He teaches at Trinity College, Cambridge University.
This collection of essays provides a critique of C. L. R. James's contribution to a broad range of intellectual pursuits. The Trinidadian-born James was a political activist in the Caribbean, the US and Britain, as well as being one of the leading figures in the early Pan-African movement. He also wrote extensively on literature, culture, cricket, and Marxism. This book engages all these aspects of James's life to demonstrate his centrality to the current debates around the issues of postcoloniality and popular culture. James, for too long unavailable to readers, is presented as an intellectual who participated in several key historical developments of the twentieth century. The book locates him in the history of the earliest struggles against colonialism, but it also clearly shows how his thinking - particularly his interest in nineteenth-century British literature - was shaped by the experience of growing up as a colonial subject in Port-of-Spain. The collection grapples with the paradoxes, the tensions, and ironies that characterized James as much as it shows how creatively he applied the lessons of those ambiguities and contradictions.
Grant Farred, a native of South Africa, is a professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. He has previously taught at Williams College, the University of Michigan, and Duke University. He has written several books and served for eight years as editor of South Atlantic Quarterly, and is a leading figure in contemporary African-American Studies, Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.
‘The traveller's tree,’ says the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘like all the human beings who now inhabit the Antilles, was originally a stranger to these regions.’ Patrick Leigh Fermor was a stranger too, when, prompted by pleasure and inexhaustible curiosity, he came to the Caribbean Islands to embark on the leisurely, fascinating journey of which this book is the superb report. He went by steamer, plane and sailing ship through the long chain of islands extending from Venezuela to the tip of Florida. He explored the jungles, spoke to the natives and learned much curious lore, customs and history. Four and a half centuries ago the forebears of the people who now throng the Vest Indies began converging there. The early Caribs, the Spanish Conquistadors, the French and English filibusterers, buccaneers and planters, and the endless shiploads of African slaves contributed to a chaotic history. Economic, industrial and social burgeoning brought an incredible melange of nationalities, religions and races. Today, one finds the cosmopolitan sophistication of the European expatriate side by side with the warmth and flamboyance of a people who are addicts of the occult and practice its rites with atavistic and sometimes sinister implications. Mr. Leigh Fermor explored with gusto all the aspects of Caribbean life, from architecture to voodoo rites. Today, when the Caribbean attracts new thousands of visitors every year, this perceptive report is more than ever appealing. PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR, of English and Irish descent, was educated at King's School, Canterbury. His interest in remote places began when, at the age of 18, he walked from Rotterdam to Constantinople. Subsequently, he lived and traveled extensively in the Balkans and in the Greek Archipelago. During World War II, he served with the Irish Guards in the halo-Greek War in Albania and fought in the battles of Greece and Crete, returning to the latter three times to organize the Cretan resistance movement. He was awarded the D.S.O. and O.B.E., and was made Honorary Citizen of Herakleion for his services during the war. In addition to The Traveller's Tree, winner of the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature and the Kernsley Prize, Mr. Fermor's books include The Violins of Saint Jacques and Mani.
Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor (also known as Paddy Fermor), DSO, OBE (11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011) was a British author, scholar and soldier who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during World War II. He was widely regarded as ‘Britain's greatest living travel writer’ during his lifetime, based on books such as A Time of Gifts (1977). A BBC journalist once described him as ‘a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene.’ He was born in London, the son of Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, a distinguished geologist, and Muriel Aeyleen (née Ambler). Shortly after his birth, his mother and sister left to join his father in India, leaving the infant Patrick in England with a family in Northamptonshire. He did not meet his family in person until he was four years old. As a child, Leigh Fermor had problems with academic structure and limitations. As a result, he was sent to a school for ‘difficult children’. He was later expelled from The King's School, Canterbury, when he was caught holding hands with a greengrocer's daughter. His last report from The King's School noted that the young Leigh Fermor was ‘a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness.’ He continued learning by reading texts on Greek, Latin, Shakespeare and History, with the intention of entering the Royal Military College Sandhurst. Gradually he changed his mind, deciding to become an author instead, and in the summer of 1933 relocated to Shepherd Market in London, living with a few friends. Soon, faced with the challenges of an author's life in London and rapidly draining finances, he set upon leaving for Europe. At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He set off on 8 December 1933, shortly after Hitler had come to power in Germany, with a few clothes, several letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's Odes. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but also was invited by landed gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe. He experienced hospitality in many monasteries along the way. Two of his later travel books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), were about this journey. The final part of his journey was unfinished at the time of Leigh Fermor's death, but will be published as The Broken Road: Travels from Bulgaria to Mount Athos in September 2013 by John Murray. The book draws on Leigh Fermor's diary at the time and an early draft he wrote in the 1960s. Leigh Fermor arrived in Constantinople on 1 January 1935, then continued to travel around Greece. In March, he was involved in the campaign of royalist forces in Macedonia against an attempted Republican revolt. In Athens, he met Balasha Cantacuzène (Balasa Cantacuzino), a Romanian Phanariote noblewoman, with whom he fell in love. They shared an old watermill outside the city looking out towards Poros, where she painted and he wrote. They moved on to Baleni, Galati, the Cantacuzène house in Moldavia, where they were living at the outbreak of World War II. As an officer cadet, Leigh Fermor trained alongside Derek Bond and Iain Moncreiffe, and later joined the Irish Guards. Due to his knowledge of modern Greek, he was commissioned in the General List and became a liaison officer in Albania. He fought in Crete and mainland Greece. During the German occupation, he returned to Crete three times, once by parachute. He was one of a small number of Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers posted to organise the island's resistance to German occupation. Disguised as a shepherd and nicknamed Michalis or Filedem, he lived for over two years in the mountains. With Captain Bill Stanley Moss as his second in command, Leigh Fermor led the party that in 1944 captured and evacuated the German commander General Heinrich Kreipe. There is a memorial commemorating Kreipe's abduction near Archanes in Crete. Moss featured the events of the Cretan capture in his book Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe (1950). It was later adapted in a film by the same name. It was directed/produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and released in 1957. In the film, Leigh Fermor was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde. In 1950, Leigh Fermor published his first book, The Traveller's Tree, about his post-war travels in the Caribbean. The book won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature and established his career path, although it has received negative attention for its approach to racial issues. It was quoted extensively in Live and Let Die, by Ian Fleming. He went on to write several further books of his journeys, including Mani and Roumeli, of his travels on mule and foot around remote parts of Greece. Leigh Fermor translated the manuscript The Cretan Runner written by George Psychoundakis, the dispatch runner on Crete during the war, and helped Psychoundakis get his work published. Fermor also wrote a novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, which was adapted as an opera by Malcolm Williamson. After many years together, Leigh Fermor was married in 1968 to the Honourable Joan Elizabeth Rayner (née Eyres Monsell), daughter of the 1st Viscount Monsell. She accompanied him on many of his travels until her death in Kardamyli in June 2003, aged 91. They had no children. They lived part of the year in their house in an olive grove near Kardamyli in the Mani Peninsula, southern Peloponnese, and part of the year in Gloucestershire. Leigh Fermor was knighted in the 2004 New Years Honours. In 2007, he said that, for the first time, he had decided to work using a typewriter - having written all his books longhand until then. After his death the house at Kardamyli featured in the 2013 film Before Midnight. Leigh Fermor was noted for his strong physical constitution, even though he smoked 80 to 100 cigarettes a day. Although in his last years he suffered from tunnel vision and wore hearing aids, he remained physically fit up to his death and dined at table on the last evening of his life. For the last few months of his life he suffered from a cancerous tumour, and in early June 2011 he underwent a tracheotomy in Greece. As death was close, he expressed a wish to die in England and returned there on 9 June 2011. He died the following day, aged 96.
Patrick Leigh Fermor’s only novel displays the same lustrous way with words as his beloved travel trilogy (A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and The Broken Road), the memoir of his youthful walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. This slim book starts with the meeting of an English traveler and an enigmatic elderly Frenchwoman on an Aegean island. He is captivated by her painting of a busy Caribbean port in the shadow of a volcano, which leads her to tell him the story of her childhood in that town back at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tale she unfolds, set in the tropical luxury of the island of Saint-Jacques, is one of romantic intrigue and decadence involving the descendants of slaves and a fading French aristocracy. Then, on the night of the annual Mardi Gras ball, a whole world comes to a catastrophic and haunting end.
Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor (also known as Paddy Fermor), DSO, OBE (11 February 1915 – 10 June 2011) was a British author, scholar and soldier who played a prominent role behind the lines in the Cretan resistance during World War II. He was widely regarded as ‘Britain's greatest living travel writer’ during his lifetime, based on books such as A Time of Gifts (1977). A BBC journalist once described him as ‘a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene.’ He was born in London, the son of Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, a distinguished geologist, and Muriel Aeyleen (née Ambler). Shortly after his birth, his mother and sister left to join his father in India, leaving the infant Patrick in England with a family in Northamptonshire. He did not meet his family in person until he was four years old. As a child, Leigh Fermor had problems with academic structure and limitations. As a result, he was sent to a school for ‘difficult children’. He was later expelled from The King's School, Canterbury, when he was caught holding hands with a greengrocer's daughter. His last report from The King's School noted that the young Leigh Fermor was ‘a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness.’ He continued learning by reading texts on Greek, Latin, Shakespeare and History, with the intention of entering the Royal Military College Sandhurst. Gradually he changed his mind, deciding to become an author instead, and in the summer of 1933 relocated to Shepherd Market in London, living with a few friends. Soon, faced with the challenges of an author's life in London and rapidly draining finances, he set upon leaving for Europe. At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor decided to walk the length of Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. He set off on 8 December 1933, shortly after Hitler had come to power in Germany, with a few clothes, several letters of introduction, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace's Odes. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but also was invited by landed gentry and aristocracy into the country houses of Central Europe. He experienced hospitality in many monasteries along the way. Two of his later travel books, A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), were about this journey. The final part of his journey was unfinished at the time of Leigh Fermor's death, but will be published as The Broken Road: Travels from Bulgaria to Mount Athos in September 2013 by John Murray. The book draws on Leigh Fermor's diary at the time and an early draft he wrote in the 1960s. Leigh Fermor arrived in Constantinople on 1 January 1935, then continued to travel around Greece. In March, he was involved in the campaign of royalist forces in Macedonia against an attempted Republican revolt. In Athens, he met Balasha Cantacuzène (Balasa Cantacuzino), a Romanian Phanariote noblewoman, with whom he fell in love. They shared an old watermill outside the city looking out towards Poros, where she painted and he wrote. They moved on to Baleni, Galati, the Cantacuzène house in Moldavia, where they were living at the outbreak of World War II. As an officer cadet, Leigh Fermor trained alongside Derek Bond and Iain Moncreiffe, and later joined the Irish Guards. Due to his knowledge of modern Greek, he was commissioned in the General List and became a liaison officer in Albania. He fought in Crete and mainland Greece. During the German occupation, he returned to Crete three times, once by parachute. He was one of a small number of Special Operations Executive (SOE) officers posted to organise the island's resistance to German occupation. Disguised as a shepherd and nicknamed Michalis or Filedem, he lived for over two years in the mountains. With Captain Bill Stanley Moss as his second in command, Leigh Fermor led the party that in 1944 captured and evacuated the German commander General Heinrich Kreipe. There is a memorial commemorating Kreipe's abduction near Archanes in Crete. Moss featured the events of the Cretan capture in his book Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe (1950). It was later adapted in a film by the same name. It was directed/produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and released in 1957. In the film, Leigh Fermor was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde. In 1950, Leigh Fermor published his first book, The Traveller's Tree, about his post-war travels in the Caribbean. The book won the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature and established his career path, although it has received negative attention for its approach to racial issues. It was quoted extensively in Live and Let Die, by Ian Fleming. He went on to write several further books of his journeys, including Mani and Roumeli, of his travels on mule and foot around remote parts of Greece. Leigh Fermor translated the manuscript The Cretan Runner written by George Psychoundakis, the dispatch runner on Crete during the war, and helped Psychoundakis get his work published. Fermor also wrote a novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, which was adapted as an opera by Malcolm Williamson. After many years together, Leigh Fermor was married in 1968 to the Honourable Joan Elizabeth Rayner (née Eyres Monsell), daughter of the 1st Viscount Monsell. She accompanied him on many of his travels until her death in Kardamyli in June 2003, aged 91. They had no children. They lived part of the year in their house in an olive grove near Kardamyli in the Mani Peninsula, southern Peloponnese, and part of the year in Gloucestershire. Leigh Fermor was knighted in the 2004 New Years Honours. In 2007, he said that, for the first time, he had decided to work using a typewriter - having written all his books longhand until then. After his death the house at Kardamyli featured in the 2013 film Before Midnight. Leigh Fermor was noted for his strong physical constitution, even though he smoked 80 to 100 cigarettes a day. Although in his last years he suffered from tunnel vision and wore hearing aids, he remained physically fit up to his death and dined at table on the last evening of his life. For the last few months of his life he suffered from a cancerous tumour, and in early June 2011 he underwent a tracheotomy in Greece. As death was close, he expressed a wish to die in England and returned there on 9 June 2011. He died the following day, aged 96.
Philip Sherlock in the Foreword of this book has described the feeling of deprivation he experienced in his youth: 'l belonged to a people without a literature. There was beauty; my island, like Prospero's, was full of sweet sounds; but why were there no voices?' No longer is this true, as this book so amply testifies; the islands of the Caribbean are full of voices, distinctive in their range of tones and diction, and in the sounds they sing. Few anthologies could show more variety in language, subject and concern; Caribbean Voices is a tribute to the success of the poets of the Caribbean in achieving a distinctively West Indian mode of poetic expression in their unique and full language environment. This combined edition of Caribbean Voices contains poems from many islands of the Caribbean, and represents the work of over 75 poets. The two parts of this book, Dreams and Visions and The Blue Horizons were conceived by the editor, Professor Figueroa, as one work: the second volume complements the first and leads on to a deeper critical appreciation. Contributions from - Barnabas J. Ramon-Fortune, Roger Mais, K.E. Ingram, Gilbert Gratiant, Evan Jones, Basil McFarlane, William Arthur, Jan Carew, E.M. Roach, Frank Collymore, Claude McKay, Cecil Herbert, George Campbell, and others.
John Joseph Maria Figueroa (4 August 1920 – 5 March 1999) was a Jamaican poet and educator. He played a significant role in the development of Anglophone Caribbean literature both as a poet and an anthologist. He contributed to the development of the University College of the West Indies as an early member of staff, and had a parallel career as a broadcaster, working for various media organizations including the BBC. He also taught in Jamaica, Britain, the United States, Africa and Puerto Rico. Figueroa was born in Jamaica, where he was educated at St George's College. He won a scholarship to attend Holy Cross College, Massachusetts, graduating in 1942, after which he taught at St George's College and at Wolmer Boys' College in Jamaica. In 1946 he went on a British Council fellowship to London University to study for a teaching diploma and a master's degree in education. He subsequently taught in some London schools, and spent six years as an English and philosophy lecturer at the Institute of Education. He also contributed criticism, stories and poetry to the BBC's Caribbean Voices radio programme produced by Henry Swanzy In Jamaica Figueroa became the first West Indian to be appointed to a chair at the University College of the West Indies, and the first Dean of the Faculty of Education. Between 1964 and 1966 he was a visiting professor first at Rhode Island University and then Indiana University. In the early 1970s he became Professor of Humanities leading the Department of Education of the Centro Caribeno de Estudios Postgraduados, Puerto Rico. He later spend time as a professor at the University of Jos in Nigeria. In the 1980s he moved to the UK, where he worked for the Open University, was a Fellow at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick, and an adviser in multicultural education in Manchester. He edited the pioneering two-volume anthology Caribbean Voices (vol 1: Dreams and Visions and vol 2: The Blue Horizons, 1966 and 1970 respectively), comprehensive landmark collections of West Indian poetry. He was also the first general editor of the Heinemann Caribbean Writers Series. He also played an important role in the development of Caribbean studies as a founder member of the Caribbean Studies Association and the Society for Caribbean Studies. His own poetry "reflects his origins as a Jamaican of [Hispanic] descent and a Catholic who, whilst deeply committed to the Caribbean, was concerned to maintain [the diversity of its] heritage without apology. He insisted that drums were not the only Caribbean musical instrument (no doubt a dig at Kamau Brathwaite) and championed Derek Walcott's relationship to the classical and European literary tradition. Ironically, one of Figueroa's most effective poems is in Nation language." In the words of Andrew Salkey, "The phrase 'cosmopolitan poet' does not really adequately describe him or the impact that he has had on Anglophone Caribbean poetry, but it certainly goes some way in defining a part of his concern in not being tagged as regional or provincial. This is so because he is absolutely free from national limitations."
MODERNITY DISAVOWED is a pathbreaking study of the cultural, political, and philosophical significance of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). Revealing how the radical antislavery politics of this seminal event have been suppressed and ignored in historical and cultural records over the past two hundred years, Sibylle Fischer contends that revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal are central to the formation and understanding of Western modernity. She develops a powerful argument that the denial of revolutionary antislavery eventually became a crucial ingredient in a range of hegemonic thought, including Creole nationalism in the Caribbean and G. W. F. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Fischer draws on history, literary scholarship, political theory, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory to examine a range of material, including Haitian political and legal documents and nineteenth-century Cuban and Dominican literature and art. She demonstrates that at a time when racial taxonomies were beginning to mutate into scientific racism and racist biology, the Haitian revolutionaries recognized the question of race as political. Yet, as the cultural records of neighboring Cuba and the Dominican Republic show, the story of the Haitian Revolution has been told as one outside politics and beyond human language, as a tale of barbarism and unspeakable violence. From the time of the revolution onward, the story has been confined to the margins of history: to rumors, oral histories, and confidential letters. Fischer maintains that without accounting for revolutionary antislavery and its subsequent disavowal, Western modernity-including its hierarchy of values, depoliticization of social goals having to do with racial differences, and privileging of claims of national sovereignty-cannot be fully understood.
Sibylle Fischer is Associate Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University.
A handful of sea stories define the American maritime narrative. Stories of whaling, fishing, exploration, naval adventure, and piracy have always captured our imaginations, and the most colorful of these are the tales of piracy. Called America's real-life Robinson Crusoe, the true story of Philip Ashton--a nineteen-year-old fisherman captured by pirates, impressed as a crewman, subjected to torture and hardship, who eventually escaped and lived as a castaway and scavenger on a deserted island in the Caribbean--was at one time as well known as the tales of Cooper, Hawthorne, and Defoe. Based on a rare copy of Ashton's 1725 account, Gregory N. Flemming's vivid portrait recounts this maritime world during the golden age of piracy. Fishing vessels and merchantmen plied the coastal waters and crisscrossed the Atlantic and Caribbean. It was a hard, dangerous life, made more so by both the depredations and temptations of piracy. Chased by the British Royal Navy, blown out of the water or summarily hung when caught, pirate captains such as Edward Low kidnapped, cajoled, beat, and bribed men like Ashton into the rich--but also vile, brutal, and often short--life of the pirate. In the tradition of Nathaniel Philbrick, At the Point of a Cutlass expands on a lost classic narrative of America and the sea, and brings to life a forgotten world of ships and men on both sides of maritime law.
GREGORY N. FLEMMING is a former journalist who holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He lives with his family in New England.
It is 1964. The small island protectorate of Barbados crackles with the spark of independence. Although poverty is everywhere, the promise of a better future, always denied to its children, may yet be fulfilled. In this beautiful, poignant, and ultimately hopeful novel, the fate of one Bajan family rests in the hands of change - change that only liberation and knowledge can bring. Howard Prescod, his brothers, his two aunts, and his grandmother live a hand-to-mouth existence in their tiny, exhausted shack. Every day is a supreme struggle to stay alive, as they cook what food they can get over an open fire. Howard's parents left for England long ago and, more than anything, he and his brothers want their parents to send for them. Still, Howard and his extraordinary grandmother share a fierce love, which sustains them both through the harsh beatings he suffers daily at school and the cruelties inflicted upon the defenseless family by the local bullies because there is no man in the house to protect them. But their lives change forever when Mr. Bradshaw, the island's first black headmaster, is hired for Howard's school. As Howard begins to blossom under Bradshaw's guidance, he learns that neither freedom nor knowledge comes without sacrifice and that even battles that are won leave victims. The living symbol of the power of education and self-rule, Howard becomes the harbinger of a new future for all. In No Man In the House, Cecil Foster brilliantly captures the light and sound of Barbados with an exquisite portrait of its character, its energy, and its people, especially the strong women, who are both desperate and hopeful in the face of change. His is a rich new voice in contemporary fiction. Barbados in 1964 is the scene of this powerful, evocative novel - highly acclaimed in its American debut. Against the backdrop of the island's bid for independence from Great Britain unfolds the story of a young boy's struggle. Eight-year-old Howard faces a life robbed of hope, but from his grandmother he learns strength and pride.
Cecil Foster was born in Barbados and moved to Canada in 1978. His first novel, NO MAN IN THE HOUSE, was published to critical acclaim in the United States and Canada. Since leaving his position of senior editor at the Financial Post, Foster has worked for CBC radio and television and has written for several leading magazines.
These are the men of Edgecliff, a farm just outside Toronto in cold, unforgiving Canada. For ten months of the year, they pick tobacco from dawn to dusk, living in a ramshackle cabin with broken-down furniture and questionable plumbing. They all talk about leaving the Program, of taking the chance of living illegally in Canada. Yet year after year they get back on that plane to Barbados, unprepared for the changes that may have occurred in their absence. Weaving Bajan folklore into the fabric of his tale, Cecil Foster once again celebrates the resilience of the human spirit with a deeply moving glimpse into a world that few of us will ever encounter.
Cecil Foster was born in Barbados and moved to Canada in 1978. His first novel, NO MAN IN THE HOUSE, was published to critical acclaim in the United States and Canada. Since leaving his position of senior editor at the Financial Post, Foster has worked for CBC radio and television and has written for several leading magazines.
When Cecil Foster's NO MAN IN THE HOUSE was published, E. Annie Proulx proclaimed that ‘he shows the brave characters of West Indian women as no one else has.’ Now, in Sleep On, Beloved, Foster tells the moving story of a Caribbean immigrant woman who leaves behind everything in order to build a better life for her family. Ona Morgan is a passionate, determined woman who leaves her Jamaican home, her friends and traditions, and her newborn daughter, Suzanne, to come to North America. Thwarted by the demons of bad luck, lack of money, and an unfortunate marriage, Ona is plunged into an alien culture and a painful struggle against racism. As her young daughter grows up in Jamaica, devotedly cared for by her beloved grandmother, Ona must defer her plans to bring Suzanne to Toronto again and again. It takes twelve long years before Suzanne and Ona are reunited. But Suzanne cannot warm to this mother who left her behind, and who never prepared her for the harsh realities of life in North America. Now Ona is left to struggle with the rebelliousness of her beloved daughter. Ona and Suzanne find themselves locked in battle, each too proud and too damaged to ask for help. Suzanne punishes her mother by hiding the obedient, devout Suzanne of Jamaica and creating a new urban Suzanne—hard, rebellious, and detached. It is only when Ona, overwhelmed by worldly pressures, becomes utterly lost that Suzanne allows her true self to emerge—strong, resourceful, and able to rebuild her mother's shattered hopes.
Cecil Foster was born in Barbados and moved to Canada in 1978. His first novel, NO MAN IN THE HOUSE, was published to critical acclaim in the United States and Canada. Since leaving his position of senior editor at the Financial Post, Foster has worked for CBC radio and television and has written for several leading magazines.
Jacques Roumain lived only 37 years, but during that short time he evolved from scion of the Haitian elite to idealistic nationalist to committed Communist. And, while he evolved, he wrote: essays, editorials, letters, poems and novels. Dr. Carolyn Fowler traces this complex man through his writing, published and unpublished. From his well-known works - La Proie et L'Ombre, Les Fantoches, La Montagne Ensorcelée, Le Champ du Potier and Gouverneurs de la Rosée - and from original manuscripts and letters, Dr. Fowler weaves an insightful text. When he died in 1944, Roumain was mourned for both his lyrical literary works and his hard-won political convictions. During his lifetime he was a journalist, poet, politician, diplomat, professor, novelist, short story writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary. In all these incarnations, he searched for tools to help the cause of human solidarity, in literature and in life. All French and Spanish passages are translated in a paginated appendix.
Dr. Carolyn Fowler, associate professor of black literature at Atlanta University, was the recipient of the Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Award (1971) and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1975). She has recently completed further research in Haiti on a Fulbright Fellowship.
Ready to Burst tells the tale of a young man’s efforts to navigate the challenges of a deeply troubled society. The novel moves fluidly between his experiences and those of his alter ego, opening a window onto the absurd realities of a dictatorship. First published in 1968, Ready to Burst presents a sensitive critique of François Duvalier’s suffocating regime and its consequences for a generation of young people in Haiti. The novel offers at once an exquisite verbal painting of life within a specific context of terror and a vivid exploration of love, hope, and the delicate membrane between reality and dream.
Considered by many to be the ‘father of Haitian letters,’ Frankétienne is a prolific poet, novelist, visual artist, playwright, musician, and ‘spiraliste.’ He writes in both French and Haitian Creole and often juggles the two. His paintings have been exhibited internationally. An outspoken challenger of political oppression, Frankétienne was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009 and, in 2010, was named a Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Frankétienne (born Franck Étienne on April 12, 1936 in Ravine-Sèche, Haiti) is a writer, poet, playwright, painter, musician, activist and intellectual, is recognized as one of Haiti's leading writers and playwrights of both French and Haitian Creole. He has been recently called The father of Haitian letters by The New York Times (April 29, 2011). As a painter, he is known for his colorful abstract works, often emphasizing the colors blue and red. He was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, and was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres (Order of the Arts and Letters) and was named UNESCO Artist for Peace in 2010. Frankétienne was born in Ravine-Sèche, a small village in Haiti. He was abandoned by his father, a very rich American industrialist, at a young age and was raised by his mother in the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, where she worked as a street merchant to support her eight children, managing to send him, who was the eldest, to school.
Since V. S. Naipaul left his Caribbean birthplace at the age of seventeen, his improbable life has followed the global movement of peoples, whose preeminent literary chronicler he has become. In THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS, Patrick French offers the first authoritative biography of the controversial Nobel laureate, whose only stated ambition was greatness as a writer, in pursuit of which goal nothing else was sacred. Beginning with a richly detailed portrait of Naipaul's childhood in colonial Trinidad, French gives us the boy born to an Indian family, the displaced soul in a displaced community, who by dint of talent and ambition finds the only imaginable way out: a scholarship to Oxford. London in the 1950s offers hope and his first literary success, but homesickness and depression almost defeat Vidia, his narrow escape aided by Patricia Hale, an Englishwoman who will devote herself to his work and well-being. She will stand by him, sometimes tenuously, for more than four decades, even as Naipaul embarks on a twenty-four-year affair, which will awaken half-dead passions and feed perhaps his greatest wave of dizzying creativity. Amid this harrowing emotional life, French traces the course of the fierce visionary impulse underlying Naipaul's singular power, a gift to produce masterpieces of fiction and nonfiction. Informed by exclusive access to V. S. Naipaul's private papers and personal recollections, and by great feeling for his formidable body of work, French's revelatory biography does full justice to an enigmatic genius.
Patrick French (born 1966) is a British writer, historian and academician. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh where he studied English and American literature, and received a PhD in South Asian Studies. He was appointed as the inaugural Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University in July 2017.
As a black child, born in present-day London, Tyrone has always been encircled by the loving arms of his family, keeping him safe, sandwiched-in. But this secure world begins to fragment when his grandparents are evicted to an institution. Its callousness and cupidity make it a mockery of ‘home,’ and for the old people Tyrone is the only lifeline. When a horrifying act of violence shatters the heart of a black community the bread turns stale. What encloses Tyrone now is fear, confusion, frustration. Family ties begin to chafe - he feels an insistent need to find and assert his own identity. Could some kind of answer lie in the far-off island that had nurtured his parents and grandparents? Beryl Gilroy has drawn deeply on her personal and professional experience. As a sequel to FRANGIPANI HOUSE this is a story that recognises human differences - in age, in race, in history, in place - and triumphantly transcends them.
Beryl Agatha Gilroy (née Answick) (30 August 1924 – 4 April 2001) was a novelist and teacher, and ‘one of Britain's most significant post-war Caribbean migrants’. Born in what was then British Guiana (now Guyana), she moved in the 1950s to the United Kingdom, where she became the first black headteacher in London. She was the mother of academic Paul Gilroy. Beryl Gilroy was born in Skeldon, Berbice, Guyana. She grew up in a large, extended family, largely under the influence of her maternal grandmother, Sally Louisa James (1868–1967), a herbalist, manager of the family small-holding, keen reader, imparter to the young Beryl of the stories of ‘Long Bubbies’, Cabresses and Long Lady and a treasury of colloquial proverbs. Gilroy did not enter full-time schooling until she was twelve. From 1943 to 1945, she attended teacher training college in Georgetown, gaining a first-class diploma. She subsequently taught and lectured on a Unicef nutrition programme. In 1951, at the age of 27, she was selected to attend university in the United Kingdom. Between 1951 and 1953 she attended the University of London pursuing a Diploma in Child Development. Although Gilroy was a qualified teacher, racism prevented her getting a post for some time, and she had to work as a washer, a factory clerk and maid. She taught for a couple of years, married and spent the next twelve years at home bringing up and educating her children, furthering her own higher education, reviewing and reading for a publisher. In 1968 she returned to teaching and eventually became the first Black headteacher in London. Her experiences of those years are told in Black Teacher (1976). Later she worked as a researcher at the Institute of Education, University of London, and developed a pioneering practice in psychotherapy, working mainly with Black women and children. She gained a PhD in counselling psychology from an American university in 1987 while working at the Institute of Education. In 2000 she was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the Institute ‘in recognition of her services to education’. She died of a heart attack at the age of 76 on 4 April 2001. As noted by Roxann Bradshaw: ‘Two days later over one hundred Anglopjone women writers from around the world gathered at Goldsmith College in London, where Dr Gilroy had been scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the 4th annual Caribbean Women Writers Association conference. The news of her death was received with great sorrow for the passing of one of the first wave of Anglophone women writers, whose contribution to Caribbean women's literature is invaluable.’ An orange skirt suit worn by Beryl Gilroy was included in an exhibition entitled Black British Style at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2004. Gilroy's creative writing began in childhood, as a teacher for children and then in the 1960s when she began writing what was later published by Peepal Tree Press as In Praise of Love and Children. Between 1970 and 1975 she wrote the pioneering children’s series Nippers, which contain probably the first reflection of the Black British presence in UK writing for children. It was not until 1986 that her first novel, the award-winning Frangipani House was published (Heinemann). It won a GLC Creative Writing Prize in 1982. Set in an old person’s home in Guyana, it reflects one of her professional concerns: the position of ethnic minority elders and her persistent emphasis on the drive for human freedom. Boy Sandwich (Heinemann) was published in 1989, followed by Stedman and Joanna: A Love in Bondage (Vantage, 1991), and a collection of poems, Echoes and Voices (Vantage, 1991). Then came Sunlight and Sweet Water (Peepal Tree, 1994), Gather the Faces, In Praise of Love and Children and Inkle and Yarico (all Peepal Tree, 1994). Her last novel, The Green Grass Tango (Peepal Tree) was published in 2001, sadly after Beryl Gilroy’s death in April of that year. Gilroy's early work examined the impact of life in Britain on West Indian families and her later work explored issues of African and Caribbean diaspora and slavery. In 1998, a collection of her non-fiction writing, entitled Leaves in the Wind, came out from Mango Publishing. It included her lectures, notes, essays, dissertations and personal reviews.
FRANGIPANI HOUSE, Beryl Gilroy’s first novel, won a prize in the GLC Black Literature Competition even before it was published. Set in Guyana, it is the story of Mama King, trapped by age and infirmity, but ultimately indomitable. She becomes too much for her family who send her away to Frangipani House, a dreary claustrophobic rest home - but Mama King does not give in. She makes her mark—first-through anguish, then near madness, and finally by escape to the dangerous, dirty, vital world of the poor. FRANGIPANI HOUSE is a beautifully written protest at institutions that isolate, and a way of life that denies respect and responsibility for the weak.
Beryl Agatha Gilroy (née Answick) (30 August 1924 – 4 April 2001) was a novelist and teacher, and ‘one of Britain's most significant post-war Caribbean migrants’. Born in what was then British Guiana (now Guyana), she moved in the 1950s to the United Kingdom, where she became the first black headteacher in London. She was the mother of academic Paul Gilroy. Beryl Gilroy was born in Skeldon, Berbice, Guyana. She grew up in a large, extended family, largely under the influence of her maternal grandmother, Sally Louisa James (1868–1967), a herbalist, manager of the family small-holding, keen reader, imparter to the young Beryl of the stories of ‘Long Bubbies’, Cabresses and Long Lady and a treasury of colloquial proverbs. Gilroy did not enter full-time schooling until she was twelve. From 1943 to 1945, she attended teacher training college in Georgetown, gaining a first-class diploma. She subsequently taught and lectured on a Unicef nutrition programme. In 1951, at the age of 27, she was selected to attend university in the United Kingdom. Between 1951 and 1953 she attended the University of London pursuing a Diploma in Child Development. Although Gilroy was a qualified teacher, racism prevented her getting a post for some time, and she had to work as a washer, a factory clerk and maid. She taught for a couple of years, married and spent the next twelve years at home bringing up and educating her children, furthering her own higher education, reviewing and reading for a publisher. In 1968 she returned to teaching and eventually became the first Black headteacher in London. Her experiences of those years are told in Black Teacher (1976). Later she worked as a researcher at the Institute of Education, University of London, and developed a pioneering practice in psychotherapy, working mainly with Black women and children. She gained a PhD in counselling psychology from an American university in 1987 while working at the Institute of Education. In 2000 she was also awarded an honorary doctorate from the Institute ‘in recognition of her services to education’. She died of a heart attack at the age of 76 on 4 April 2001. As noted by Roxann Bradshaw: ‘Two days later over one hundred Anglopjone women writers from around the world gathered at Goldsmith College in London, where Dr Gilroy had been scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the 4th annual Caribbean Women Writers Association conference. The news of her death was received with great sorrow for the passing of one of the first wave of Anglophone women writers, whose contribution to Caribbean women's literature is invaluable.’ An orange skirt suit worn by Beryl Gilroy was included in an exhibition entitled Black British Style at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2004. Gilroy's creative writing began in childhood, as a teacher for children and then in the 1960s when she began writing what was later published by Peepal Tree Press as In Praise of Love and Children. Between 1970 and 1975 she wrote the pioneering children’s series Nippers, which contain probably the first reflection of the Black British presence in UK writing for children. It was not until 1986 that her first novel, the award-winning Frangipani House was published (Heinemann). It won a GLC Creative Writing Prize in 1982. Set in an old person’s home in Guyana, it reflects one of her professional concerns: the position of ethnic minority elders and her persistent emphasis on the drive for human freedom. Boy Sandwich (Heinemann) was published in 1989, followed by Stedman and Joanna: A Love in Bondage (Vantage, 1991), and a collection of poems, Echoes and Voices (Vantage, 1991). Then came Sunlight and Sweet Water (Peepal Tree, 1994), Gather the Faces, In Praise of Love and Children and Inkle and Yarico (all Peepal Tree, 1994). Her last novel, The Green Grass Tango (Peepal Tree) was published in 2001, sadly after Beryl Gilroy’s death in April of that year. Gilroy's early work examined the impact of life in Britain on West Indian families and her later work explored issues of African and Caribbean diaspora and slavery. In 1998, a collection of her non-fiction writing, entitled Leaves in the Wind, came out from Mango Publishing. It included her lectures, notes, essays, dissertations and personal reviews.
BLACK SALT brings together three books of poetry by Edouard Glissant written during the period 1947-79. It was first published as a single volume by Gallimard in Collection ‘Poésie,’ a famous paperback series devoted to the most significant work of the major French-language poets, particularly those of modern times (such as Ponge, Char, Michaux, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé). Although Glissant wrote and published other poetry during this period, the Black Salt grouping remains most clearly representative of his poetic project and its evolution, representing important moments in Glissant’s trajectory as a writer. Glissant works, and reworks, in many fields at once so he is almost always engaged in writing simultaneously a novel, philosophical/political essays, and poetry. The subject matter of one emerges with different modulations in another and later will reemerge in other texts, not quite repeated. Glissant’s own description of this practice, with its inherent notion of the fragility, the erasability of words and their enduring power, is ‘a spiral retelling.’ All of his writing is undertaken as a process of knowledge, where the knowledge-always possible and always incomplete-would be a ‘thorough, thick (opaque) experience of the world.
Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928 – 3 February 2011) was a Martinican writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.
Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse is both a discourse on the Caribbean and a provocative analysis of the cultural and linguistic discourse of the Caribbean. An accomplished poet and novelist, Glissant uses the essay form to continue his scrutiny of the problems of post-plantation society, economic dependency, cultural nationalism, folk culture, Creole, and literary creation. His essays focus on Martinique as an example of a community whose history is one of missed opportunities and whose present is one of self-denial. Caught in the web of nonproductivity, cultural amnesia, and empty consumerism, Martinique has no sense of its identity. It is only by discovering what it means to be Martinican that Martinique can assume its Caribbean and American heritage. Despite the gloomy picture painted of Martinique, Glissant’s work is not a pessimistic one. He repeats his faith in the future of small societies where the pace of social and cultural transformation is dynamic. The Caribbean is made up of a number of small societies that attest to this process of constant metamorphosis, or metissage. To this extent the Caribbean offers a rare insight into the process of cultural creolization, which is acute in the Americas. This selection of essays concentrates on literary, linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic issues. In them, Glissant, the epitome of the writer as wanderer across cultures, offers his vision of the poetics of the cross-cultural imagination and the fragile reality of a new civilization emerging in the Caribbean.
Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928 – 3 February 2011) was a Martinican writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.
In 1989, while teaching literature in Louisiana, the Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant visited Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home in Oxford, Mississippi. His visit spurred him to an original and powerful reappraisal of Faulkner's work. Like Faulkner's literary descendants in the United States, Glissant is fascinated by the stories of Yoknapatawpha County and disturbed by the author's equivocations about the racism there. Glissant, however, stands in a distinctive relation to Faulkner and his fictional county: as a black Martinican, Glissant is descended from slaves; as a native French speaker, he first encountered the great novelist's work in translation. FAULKNER, MISSISSIPPI is a revealing look at an American icon by a writer deeply involved in the issues of Faulkner's work. Glissant sees the racial complexities of Faulkner as the key to his influence in the next century, and presents Faulkner as the progenitor of Flannery O'Connor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Toni Morrison, all of them authors of fiction in which the characters are implicated in a single multiracial calamity. Glissant exhorts the reader to ‘look him straight in the eyes, the son of the slave and the son of the slave owner’ – and Glissant's own clear-eyed gaze makes this book a revelation about the work of one of our greatest but still least understood writers.
EDOUARD GLISSANT, born in Martinique, was a pivotal figure in modern Caribbean literature and one of the most esteemed writers working in French today. Among his more than two dozen works are MONSIEUR TOUSSAINT (a play), CARIBBEAN DISCOURSE (an essay), and THE INDIES (a collection of poetry).
Edouard Glissant can rightfully claim a place of preeminence among Caribbean men of letters. Hailing from Martinique, like Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, Glissant seeks to elucidate in his work the experience of the blacks in the New World. His first volumes of poetry and essays already established him as a writer of original sensibilities and profundity of thought. In his four novels published so far, of which the first, La Lézarde, received the prestigious Renaudot Prize, Glissant retraces the collective history of his people in order to accord a new relevance of meaning to the traumatic past. Monsieur Toussaint projects the tragic destiny of Toussaint Louverture, the charismatic leader of the first successful slave revolt that led to the independence of Haiti. The French critic Robert Kanters wrote in L ‘Express: ‘It is Shakespeare redone from life: grandeur of subject matter, tragic sense of build-up, flash of a poetic language cast in strong and original forms.’
Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928 – 3 February 2011) was a Martinican writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.
This marks the publication of the first English-language translation of Poetic Intention, Glissant's classic meditation on poetry and art. In this wide-ranging book, Glissant discusses poets, including Stephane Mallarme and Saint-John Perse, and visual artists, such as the Surrealist painters Matta and Wilfredo Lam, arguing for the importance of the global position of art. He states that a poem, in its intention, must never deny the ‘way of the world.’ Capacious, inventive, and unique, Glissant's Poetic Intention creates a new landscape for understanding the relationship between aesthetics and politics.
Born in Martinique in 1928, influenced by poet/politician Aime Cesaire, and educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, EDOUARD GLISSANT has emerged as one of the most influential postcolonial theorists, novelists, playwrights, and poets not only in the Caribbean but also in contemporary French literature. He has twice been a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His works include Poetics of Relation, Caribbean Discourse, Faulkner Mississippi, Collected Poems, and the novel The Ripening. He is currently Distinguished Professor of French at the Graduate Center, CUNY and lives in New York, Paris, and Martinique. NATHALIE STEPHENS, author of 16 books, translates between French and English.
The first English- language translation of a leading Caribbean writer’s debut volume. Soleil de la Conscience (Sun of Consciousness), Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant’s first published essay, is characterized by its exploratory, intimate character, and introduces Glissant’s concerns with creolization, worldliness (as opposed to globalization), and opacity, inscribing his work within a refusal of colonialism and inverted exoticism. By positioning himself as both different and same, Glissant opens a space for the writing of a(nother) history: that of the Caribbean. REVIEWS: ‘Sun of Consciousness is decolonizing in the basic sense of that term. Glissant tries to peel layers off of his consciousness to arrive at a balance of forces. Decolonization is not simply the departure of a colonial political power — former colonial subjects must also work to decolonize the mind… Sun of Consciousness is suggestive — potently suggestive — of global futures.’ - Matt Reeck, LARB. ‘From Glissant I am learning how to stand between two worlds: the beauty of nature and the darkness of history. Sometimes the rift between them looks endless, but the important thing is the present. That’s my personal insight into Sun of Consciousness. In Western ideology, it’s crucial to have definitions. As he says, Who hasn’t dreamt of the poem that explains everything, of the philosophy whose last word illumines the universe, of the novel that organizes all the truths, all the passions, and conducts and enlightens them? I believe Glissant understands how fragile that need for definition is.’ - Miho Hatori, BOMB.
Born in Martinique in 1928, influenced by poet/politician Aime Cesaire, and educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, EDOUARD GLISSANT has emerged as one of the most influential postcolonial theorists, novelists, playwrights, and poets not only in the Caribbean but also in contemporary French literature. He has twice been a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His works include Poetics of Relation, Caribbean Discourse, Faulkner Mississippi, Collected Poems, and the novel The Ripening. He is currently Distinguished Professor of French at the Graduate Center, CUNY and lives in New York, Paris, and Martinique. NATHALIE STEPHENS, author of 16 books, translates between French and English.
The complete poems of the two-time finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature, available in English for the first time. This volume collects and translates-most for the first time-the nine volumes of poetry published by Édouard Glissant, a poet, novelist, and critic increasingly recognized as one of the great writers of the twentieth century. The poems bring to life what Glissant calls ‘an archipelago-like reality,’ partaking of the exchanges between Europe and its former colonies, between humans and their geographies, between the poet and the natural world. Reciting and re-creating histories of the African diaspora, Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the New World, the slave trade, and the West Indies, Glissant underscores the role of poetic language in changing both past and present irrevocably. As translator Jeff Humphries writes in his introduction, Glissant’s poetry embraces the aesthetic creed of the French symbolists Mallarmé and Rimbaud (‘The poet must make himself into a seer’) and aims at nothing less than a hallucinatory experience of imagination in which the differences among poem, reader, and subject dissolve into one immediate present. . Born in Martinique in 1928, influenced by the controversial Martinican poet/politician Aimé Césaire, and educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, Édouard Glissant has emerged as one of the most influential postcolonial theorists, novelists, playwrights, and poets not only in the Caribbean but also in contemporary French letters. He has twice been a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature as well as the recipient of both the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Charles Veillon in France. His works include Poetics of Relation, Caribbean Discourse, Faulkner Mississippi, and the novel The Ripening. He currently serves as Distinguished Professor of French at City University of New York, Graduate Center. . Jeff Humphries is Louisiana State University Foundation Distinguished Professor of French, English, and Comparative Literature. He has published several books of poetry, fiction, essays, and literary criticism, including Borealis (2002). . .
Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928 – 3 February 2011) was a Martinican writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.
‘Originally published in 1964, this award-winning novel by a noted Caribbean author explores the history, culture, and myth of his native Martinique. In the mid-1940s, ancient medicine man Papa Longoue, the last of his family line, traces the history of the Longoues and Beluzes to young Mathieu Beluze, the youngest of his line. Even as they were delivered to the island by slave ship in 1789, Longoue and Beluze hated each other. Yet despite the different paths of their lives--Beluze as a plantation slave and Longoue, who escapes to the wild, as a maroon--their families become intertwined through friendship, marriage, even murder. Glissant is a poet as well, and his prose often borders on poetry, with long passages virtually devoid of capitalization and punctuation. The tale, while generally chronologically true, sometimes leaps ahead or doubles back; Mathieu complains to Papa, Can’t you announce the dates one after the other and quit spinning around back and forth? Still, the result is a richly textured novel with vivid images.’ - Michele Leber.
Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928 – 3 February 2011) was a Martinican writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.
‘Originally published in 1964, this award-winning novel by a noted Caribbean author explores the history, culture, and myth of his native Martinique. In the mid-1940s, ancient medicine man Papa Longoue, the last of his family line, traces the history of the Longoues and Beluzes to young Mathieu Beluze, the youngest of his line. Even as they were delivered to the island by slave ship in 1789, Longoue and Beluze hated each other. Yet despite the different paths of their lives--Beluze as a plantation slave and Longoue, who escapes to the wild, as a maroon--their families become intertwined through friendship, marriage, even murder. Glissant is a poet as well, and his prose often borders on poetry, with long passages virtually devoid of capitalization and punctuation. The tale, while generally chronologically true, sometimes leaps ahead or doubles back; Mathieu complains to Papa, Can’t you announce the dates one after the other and quit spinning around back and forth? Still, the result is a richly textured novel with vivid images.’ - Michele Leber.
Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928 – 3 February 2011) was a Martinican writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.
With Édouard Glissant’s THE FOURTH CENTURY, the Village Voice observed, ‘we get the full effect of his overarching project: a literary exorcism of Martinique’s scarred psyche and past, a lingering cry against the ‘black hole of time and forgetting.’’ Glissant, ‘one of the most significant figures in Caribbean literature’ (Washington Post), continues that project in The Overseer’s Cabin, conjuring in one woman’s story centuries knotted together by unknown blood, voiceless suffering, and death without echo. Beginning with the birth in 1928 of Mycea, the last of the intertwining ancestral families introduced in THE FOURTH CENTURY, and ending with her release from an asylum in 1978, the novel moves back and forth across a framework that weaves the story of Mycea’s family against the legacy of Martinique as an island whose history and indigenous people have all but been erased. From the beginnings of Mycea’s family in the tale of two blood brothers, both named Odono, to its ending with the fate of her two sons, the novel encapsulates the island’s destiny in one Martinican woman’s plight. With the past irretrievable and the future in doubt, Mycea journeys inward, finding in her connection to the land of Martinique, and to the seafloor littered with drowned slaves, a reality, and a possibility, uncolonized by others’ history. Edouard Glissant (born 1928) is a Martinican playwright, critic, essayist, and novelist.
Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928 – 3 February 2011) was a Martinican writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary. Betsy Wing’s previous translations include Paule Constant’s White Spirit, Glissant’s The Fourth Century, and Hélène Cixous’s The Book of Promethea, all available from the University of Nebraska Press.
This extraordinary novel tells the story of the rise to political maturity of eight young Martinicans, and their plans to stage a political murder. Concerned for the justice of the forthcoming elections, they fix upon a government agent who stands in the way of the people. They determine to kill him and, as their instrument, they choose Thael, an unsophisticated shepherd from the hills. THE RIPENING is set in Martinique, on a rich landscape full of life and death. It is one of the most accomplished works by any French Caribbean writer. Edouard Glissant was born in 1928 in Martinique, and is well known as a poet, and a novelist. THE RIPENING won the Prix Renaudot on its first publication in 1958.
Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928 – 3 February 2011) was a Martinican writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.
From the moment when Thaël, the young man from the mountains, is summoned to join a group of revolutionaries in the town in order to perform a political murder, to his tragic return to mountain savagery, we are enveloped in the seething tropical atmosphere of the Caribbean. THE RIPENING is much more than the story of a murder or of a political uprising. In microcosm, it is the saga of a whole people on their Caribbean island - their past, their future, the interweaving of the magic spells of old and the far-reaching potentialities of the future. Complementing and, in effect, shaping their destiny, is the vital force of the tropical island itself, the dark mountains, the sweltering plains, the surging sea, and the river Lizard, leading to the outside world. In this climate, conviction and passion take on an earthy taste and are as tangible as the landscape. It is against this background that the young Martinique author, Edouard Glissant, introduces his group of youthful conspirators. Their search for a synthesis of past and present, over their aspirations for the future, and their gradual development of self-awareness and self-expression, are interwoven with the drama of the birth of an entire people. THE RIPENING, a first novel, was awarded the Renaudot Prize in 1958. It has been acclaimed by French critics as a masterpiece’, a novel of ‘epic stature.’ . EDOUARD GLISSANT was born in 1928 in Sainte-Marie, Martinique. He now lives in France, where he studied at the Sorbonne and the Musee. de l’Homme. He had already made his name as a poet before publication of THE RIPENING, which was titled La Lézarde in the French edition. . (original title: La Lezarde, 1958 - Editions du Seuil).
Édouard Glissant (21 September 1928 – 3 February 2011) was a Martinican writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.
In this brilliantly evocative ethnography, Francio Guadeloupe probes the ethos and attitude created by radio disc jockeys on the binational Caribbean island of Saint Martin/Sint Maarten. Examining the intersection of Christianity, calypso, and capitalism, Guadeloupe shows how a multiethnic and multireligious island nation, where livelihoods depend on tourism, has managed to encourage all social classes to transcend their ethnic and religious differences. In his pathbreaking analysis, Guadeloupe credits the island DJs, whose formulations of Christian faith, musical creativity, and capitalist survival express ordinary people's hopes and fears and promote tolerance.
Francio Guadeloupe is Assistant Professor at the Radboud University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, Research Fellow at the Royal Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, and Extraordinary Research Fellow at the University of Saint Martin.
The first full biography of one of the greatest figures of eighteenth-century Europe, known in his time as the ‘Black Mozart’. Virtually forgotten until now, his life is the stuff of legend. Born in 1739 in Guadeloupe to a slave mother and a French noble father, he became the finest swordsman of his age, an insider at the doomed court of Louis XVI, and, most of all, a virtuosic musician. A violinist, he directed the Olympic Society of Concerts, which was considered the finest in Europe in an age of great musicians, including Haydn, from whom he commissioned a symphony, and Mozart, to whom he was often compared. He also became the first Freemason of color, embracing the French Revolution with the belief that it would end the racism against which-despite his illustrious achievements-he struggled his whole life. This is the life of Joseph Bologne, known variously as Monsieur de Saint-George, the ‘Black Mozart,’ and, because of his origins, ‘the American.’ Alain Guédé offers a fascinating account of this extraordinary individual, whose musical compositions are at long last being revived and whose story will never again be forgotten.
Alain Guédé is a journalist for the French newspaper Le canard enchaine. A leading expert on the life and music of Saint-George, Guédé has organized a website that follows developments in Saint-George’s rediscovery.
In this polyglot nation that we call the United States, an almost unimaginable number of immigrant groups have grown and prospered, each adding in its own way to the culture of our nation. One such group is Harlem’s Danish-American West Indians. Although they are a very active presence in their community, few outsiders are aware of them. In HARLEM’S DANISH-AMERICAN WEST INDIANS, 1899—1964, Geraldo Guirty provides a brief overview of these interesting people. Mr. Guirty begins with the history of these people, tracing their origins in the Virgin Islands, originally owned by Denmark and then transferred to the United States. He continues to write of prominent West Indians, including Ashley L. Totten, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Mr. Guirty then examines the roles of Harlem’s West Indians both in preserving their culture and contributing to their new community. Scholarly and yet entertaining. HARLEM’S DANISH-AMERICAN WEST INDIANS will enlighten anyone with little knowledge of this diversified group of people and those who are familiar with them but seek more knowledge.
Geraldo Guirty is a four-generation Saint Thomian. He was born January 16, 1906, a subject of Denmark, and witnessed the transfer of his island country, Saint Thomas, to Uncle Sam. Guirty began his education at Saint Thomas’s Catholic School, finished high school with Rhodes Preparatory, New York City, and graduated from Long Island University. Post-graduate courses were taken at Columbia, the City University, and New York Law School. Guirty has traveled the Orient, the United States, South America, Europe, and the Caribbean. The author has written for the New York Amsterdam News, the Jamaica (West Indies) Daily Gleaner, and the Guyana (South America) Chronicle. Presently he writes for the Virgin Islands Daily News. Guirty is married to Louise Blake. They celebrated their golden anniversary in January 1989.
Essays by young African-Americans reflecting on the turbulent decade of the Sixties and how it affected them.
Rosa Cuthbert Guy (September 1, 1922 – June 3, 2012) was a Trinidad-born American writer, acclaimed for her books of fiction for adults and young people. She died of cancer on Sunday, June 3, 2012. Born in Diego Martin, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Rosa and her sister Ameze were left with relatives when their parents, Audrey and Henry Cuthbert, emigrated in 1927 to the United States. The children joined their parents in Harlem in 1932. However, the following year their mother became ill, and Rosa and her sister were sent to Brooklyn to live with a cousin, whose espousal of Garveyism and black nationalistic politics deeply affected Rosa. On their mother's death in 1934 they returned to Harlem to live with their father, who remarried, but he too died in 1937. Subsequently Rosa and her sister lived in foster homes. Rosa left school at the age of fourteen and took a job in a garment factory to support herself and her sister. In 1941, when she was nineteen, Rosa met and married Warner Guy. While her husband was serving in the Second World War she continued working in the factory, and a co-worker introduced her to the American Negro Theatre, where she studied acting; other graduates included Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. In 1942, her son Warren Guy, Jr, was born. After the war, Rosa Guy moved to Connecticut with her husband and son, but five years later, on the dissolution of her marriage, she returned to New York. In 1950, along with John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy formed a workshop that was to become the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG), whose aim was ‘to develop and aid in the publication of works by writers of the African Diaspora’. Its members and participants included Willard Moore, Walter Christmas, Maya Angelou, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Alice Childress, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Douglas Turner Ward. More than half of all successful African-American writers were associated with the workshop between 1950 and 1971. Guy also belonged to the Black nationalist literary organization On Guard for Freedom, founded by Calvin Hicks on the Lower East Side of New York City. Among On Guard's other members were LeRoi Jones, Sarah E. Wright and Harold Cruse. Rosa Guy's work has received The New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year citation, and the American Library Association’s Best Book Award. In 1954, Rosa Guy wrote and performed in her first play, Venetian Blinds, which was successfully produced Off-Broadway at the Tropical Theater. Most of Guy's books are about the dependability of family members that care and love each other. Her 1985 novel, My Love, My Love: Or, The Peasant Girl - commonly described as a Caribbean re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Little Mermaid‘, but ‘with a dash of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet‘ - was the basis for the Broadway musical Once on This Island, which ran for a year from 1990 to 1991.
Rosa Guy, award-winning author of many novels for young adults and ‘recognized as one of today’s most expressive and perceptive authors building on the lives of blacks in America’ (Pub1ishers Weekly), presents an important adult novel of twentieth-century American history. A MEASURE OF TIME traces the pell-mell life of one brash, sassy woman from her escape from Alabama to her blitz on Harlem in the l920s. The Montgomery Dorine Davis leaves is one of rigid slave-master relations between black and white; the Harlem she takes by storm is a kingdom of broad, tree-lined avenues, glittering nightclubs, and luxury doorman buildings, ruled by gentlemen ‘policy-makers’ and intellectuals of its Renaissance Era. ‘Ordinary folks,’ Dorine insists from the outset, are not for her. Her lovers are the dream and schemers who are Harlem: her adventures in a gang of boosters reap wealth enough to support herself in high style and her family back home in comfort; her rags-to-riches life witnesses Lindbergh, Bessie Smith, Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement, the Depression, World War II and the problems black soldiers faced on returning home, Harlem’s invasion by armed white gangster and drugs, and the awakening civil rights movement of the 1950s. Rosa Guy chronicles the loves and adventures of this extraordinary woman with historical accuracy and electrifying life. The result is a rich, poignant, unforgettable novel.
Prize-winning author of eight previous novels - BIRD AT MY WINDOW, CHILDREN OF LONGING, THE FRIENDS, RUBY, EDITH JACKSON, THE DISAPPEARANCE, MOTHER CROCODILE, and MIRROR OF HER OWN, Rosa Guy was West Indian by birth and lived for many years in New York. She was also the co-founder of the Harlem Writers Guild.
Young adult novel set in Brooklyn, NY, which follows the story of Imamu Jones as he ventures into a world of mystery and a whole new life. Eighteen-year-old Imamu's newly-found contentment, with his job and the apartment he shares with his frail mother, is shattered when he is inadvertently drawn into the sinister events taking place in a wealthy household where he has been delivering groceries.
Rosa Cuthbert Guy (September 1, 1922 – June 3, 2012) was a Trinidad-born American writer, acclaimed for her books of fiction for adults and young people. She died of cancer on Sunday, June 3, 2012. Born in Diego Martin, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Rosa and her sister Ameze were left with relatives when their parents, Audrey and Henry Cuthbert, emigrated in 1927 to the United States. The children joined their parents in Harlem in 1932. However, the following year their mother became ill, and Rosa and her sister were sent to Brooklyn to live with a cousin, whose espousal of Garveyism and black nationalistic politics deeply affected Rosa. On their mother's death in 1934 they returned to Harlem to live with their father, who remarried, but he too died in 1937. Subsequently Rosa and her sister lived in foster homes. Rosa left school at the age of fourteen and took a job in a garment factory to support herself and her sister. In 1941, when she was nineteen, Rosa met and married Warner Guy. While her husband was serving in the Second World War she continued working in the factory, and a co-worker introduced her to the American Negro Theatre, where she studied acting; other graduates included Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. In 1942, her son Warren Guy, Jr, was born. After the war, Rosa Guy moved to Connecticut with her husband and son, but five years later, on the dissolution of her marriage, she returned to New York. In 1950, along with John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy formed a workshop that was to become the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG), whose aim was ‘to develop and aid in the publication of works by writers of the African Diaspora’. Its members and participants included Willard Moore, Walter Christmas, Maya Angelou, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Alice Childress, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Douglas Turner Ward. More than half of all successful African-American writers were associated with the workshop between 1950 and 1971. Guy also belonged to the Black nationalist literary organization On Guard for Freedom, founded by Calvin Hicks on the Lower East Side of New York City. Among On Guard's other members were LeRoi Jones, Sarah E. Wright and Harold Cruse. Rosa Guy's work has received The New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year citation, and the American Library Association’s Best Book Award. In 1954, Rosa Guy wrote and performed in her first play, Venetian Blinds, which was successfully produced Off-Broadway at the Tropical Theater. Most of Guy's books are about the dependability of family members that care and love each other. Her 1985 novel, My Love, My Love: Or, The Peasant Girl - commonly described as a Caribbean re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Little Mermaid‘, but ‘with a dash of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet‘ - was the basis for the Broadway musical Once on This Island, which ran for a year from 1990 to 1991.
There have been many books out of Harlem in the last few years, but none like this one: the story of a man whose whole life is directed against the forces that created him. Wade Williams has been exposed to the harshest aspects of ghetto life when it comes upon him, quite by accident, that he is a brilliant child. Although from birth he has been condemned to a life of poverty, chance offers him a way out; and when he muffs that, the "violence of World War Il provides another: it frees him from the moral fear of killing. With no wasted words and no special pleas, the author makes us see, hear, smell, feel the world that Wade Williams grew up in and to which he always returns: the heat, the reeking hallways, the drifters and drunks, the lure of Lenox Avenue, the poverty—and also the intelligence, the indomitable courage, the patches of happiness. So powerful is the empathy that Mrs. Guy sets up between her characters and the reader that we know them with an almost painful intimacy: Wade's half-white father, whose rage kept him alive for a year after a bullet had entered his heart . his mother, who having been forced to her knees years ago deep in cotton country never got up off them . . . brother Willie Earl, tight of fist and small of heart sister Faith, as close to Wade as his own skin. But this is Wade's story, first and last; and it is Wade himself, a "family man," as he says, committed to a course he has not charted, who holds us rapt with compassion and terror as he unknowingly approaches the tragic fulfillment of his life.
Rosa Cuthbert Guy (September 1, 1922 – June 3, 2012) was a Trinidad-born American writer, acclaimed for her books of fiction for adults and young people. She died of cancer on Sunday, June 3, 2012. Born in Diego Martin, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Rosa and her sister Ameze were left with relatives when their parents, Audrey and Henry Cuthbert, emigrated in 1927 to the United States. The children joined their parents in Harlem in 1932. However, the following year their mother became ill, and Rosa and her sister were sent to Brooklyn to live with a cousin, whose espousal of Garveyism and black nationalistic politics deeply affected Rosa. On their mother's death in 1934 they returned to Harlem to live with their father, who remarried, but he too died in 1937. Subsequently Rosa and her sister lived in foster homes. Rosa left school at the age of fourteen and took a job in a garment factory to support herself and her sister. In 1941, when she was nineteen, Rosa met and married Warner Guy. While her husband was serving in the Second World War she continued working in the factory, and a co-worker introduced her to the American Negro Theatre, where she studied acting; other graduates included Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. In 1942, her son Warren Guy, Jr, was born. After the war, Rosa Guy moved to Connecticut with her husband and son, but five years later, on the dissolution of her marriage, she returned to New York. In 1950, along with John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy formed a workshop that was to become the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG), whose aim was ‘to develop and aid in the publication of works by writers of the African Diaspora’. Its members and participants included Willard Moore, Walter Christmas, Maya Angelou, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Alice Childress, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Douglas Turner Ward. More than half of all successful African-American writers were associated with the workshop between 1950 and 1971. Guy also belonged to the Black nationalist literary organization On Guard for Freedom, founded by Calvin Hicks on the Lower East Side of New York City. Among On Guard's other members were LeRoi Jones, Sarah E. Wright and Harold Cruse. Rosa Guy's work has received The New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year citation, and the American Library Association’s Best Book Award. In 1954, Rosa Guy wrote and performed in her first play, Venetian Blinds, which was successfully produced Off-Broadway at the Tropical Theater. Most of Guy's books are about the dependability of family members that care and love each other. Her 1985 novel, My Love, My Love: Or, The Peasant Girl - commonly described as a Caribbean re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Little Mermaid‘, but ‘with a dash of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet‘ - was the basis for the Broadway musical Once on This Island, which ran for a year from 1990 to 1991.
Edith Jackson lived in Peekskill, New York, with her three sisters, two foster brothers, and her foster mother, Mother Peters. Soon she would be eighteen, and when she left high school, she swore, she would take her sisters and give them a home of their own. But then she met Mrs. Bates, a retired lawyer, who laughed at Edith's ambition and gave her the reasons she felt Edith would fail. Edith hated Mrs. Bates for her "preaching" and wanted to stop visiting her comfortable, disheveled home. But if she did, she would lose her chance to see ' 'Mr. Brown" again, Mrs. Bates's handsome nephew. Meanwhile, Edith's sisters were making plans of their own—and they were not the same as Edith's. Bessie with the mussy eyes had begun to cuddle up to Uncle Daniels, Mother Peters' friend, and bright Minnie was hoping Mrs. Cramer, the mother of her best friend, would adopt her. Only Suzy, like Edith herself, seemed to have nowhere to go. Finally "Mr. Brown" gave Edith the loving she wanted, and she set her sights on marriage and a real home for her sisters. With insight and sensitivity, Rosa Guy tells the moving story of Edith's search for and security. Her compassion for the abandoned ones among us overwhelms this realistic novel about the failures of the institutions of America, whether church, school, or welfare. Ultimately, Edith learns, people must take the responsibility for shaping their own destinies, as the structure of caste and class in society leaves each of us on our own.
Rosa Cuthbert Guy (September 1, 1922 – June 3, 2012) was a Trinidad-born American writer, acclaimed for her books of fiction for adults and young people. She died of cancer on Sunday, June 3, 2012. Born in Diego Martin, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Rosa and her sister Ameze were left with relatives when their parents, Audrey and Henry Cuthbert, emigrated in 1927 to the United States. The children joined their parents in Harlem in 1932. However, the following year their mother became ill, and Rosa and her sister were sent to Brooklyn to live with a cousin, whose espousal of Garveyism and black nationalistic politics deeply affected Rosa. On their mother's death in 1934 they returned to Harlem to live with their father, who remarried, but he too died in 1937. Subsequently Rosa and her sister lived in foster homes. Rosa left school at the age of fourteen and took a job in a garment factory to support herself and her sister. In 1941, when she was nineteen, Rosa met and married Warner Guy. While her husband was serving in the Second World War she continued working in the factory, and a co-worker introduced her to the American Negro Theatre, where she studied acting; other graduates included Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. In 1942, her son Warren Guy, Jr, was born. After the war, Rosa Guy moved to Connecticut with her husband and son, but five years later, on the dissolution of her marriage, she returned to New York. In 1950, along with John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy formed a workshop that was to become the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG), whose aim was ‘to develop and aid in the publication of works by writers of the African Diaspora’. Its members and participants included Willard Moore, Walter Christmas, Maya Angelou, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Alice Childress, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Douglas Turner Ward. More than half of all successful African-American writers were associated with the workshop between 1950 and 1971. Guy also belonged to the Black nationalist literary organization On Guard for Freedom, founded by Calvin Hicks on the Lower East Side of New York City. Among On Guard's other members were LeRoi Jones, Sarah E. Wright and Harold Cruse. Rosa Guy's work has received The New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year citation, and the American Library Association’s Best Book Award. In 1954, Rosa Guy wrote and performed in her first play, Venetian Blinds, which was successfully produced Off-Broadway at the Tropical Theater. Most of Guy's books are about the dependability of family members that care and love each other. Her 1985 novel, My Love, My Love: Or, The Peasant Girl - commonly described as a Caribbean re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Little Mermaid‘, but ‘with a dash of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet‘ - was the basis for the Broadway musical Once on This Island, which ran for a year from 1990 to 1991.
Coming of age novel set in the African American upper class social world of Oak Bluff on Martha's Vineyard, an island off Cape Cod. Having lived in her older sister's shadow all her life, Mary Abbot comes into the spotlight the summer she turns 18.
Rosa Cuthbert Guy (September 1, 1922 – June 3, 2012) was a Trinidad-born American writer, acclaimed for her books of fiction for adults and young people. She died of cancer on Sunday, June 3, 2012. Born in Diego Martin, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Rosa and her sister Ameze were left with relatives when their parents, Audrey and Henry Cuthbert, emigrated in 1927 to the United States. The children joined their parents in Harlem in 1932. However, the following year their mother became ill, and Rosa and her sister were sent to Brooklyn to live with a cousin, whose espousal of Garveyism and black nationalistic politics deeply affected Rosa. On their mother's death in 1934 they returned to Harlem to live with their father, who remarried, but he too died in 1937. Subsequently Rosa and her sister lived in foster homes. Rosa left school at the age of fourteen and took a job in a garment factory to support herself and her sister. In 1941, when she was nineteen, Rosa met and married Warner Guy. While her husband was serving in the Second World War she continued working in the factory, and a co-worker introduced her to the American Negro Theatre, where she studied acting; other graduates included Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. In 1942, her son Warren Guy, Jr, was born. After the war, Rosa Guy moved to Connecticut with her husband and son, but five years later, on the dissolution of her marriage, she returned to New York. In 1950, along with John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy formed a workshop that was to become the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG), whose aim was ‘to develop and aid in the publication of works by writers of the African Diaspora’. Its members and participants included Willard Moore, Walter Christmas, Maya Angelou, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Alice Childress, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Douglas Turner Ward. More than half of all successful African-American writers were associated with the workshop between 1950 and 1971. Guy also belonged to the Black nationalist literary organization On Guard for Freedom, founded by Calvin Hicks on the Lower East Side of New York City. Among On Guard's other members were LeRoi Jones, Sarah E. Wright and Harold Cruse. Rosa Guy's work has received The New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year citation, and the American Library Association’s Best Book Award. In 1954, Rosa Guy wrote and performed in her first play, Venetian Blinds, which was successfully produced Off-Broadway at the Tropical Theater. Most of Guy's books are about the dependability of family members that care and love each other. Her 1985 novel, My Love, My Love: Or, The Peasant Girl - commonly described as a Caribbean re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Little Mermaid‘, but ‘with a dash of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet‘ - was the basis for the Broadway musical Once on This Island, which ran for a year from 1990 to 1991.
The Washington Post called Rosa Guy ‘one of that rare and wonderful breed, a storyteller. May her tribe increase.’ And once again, Ms. Guy brings her spellbinding storytelling talents to this, her tenth novel, MY LOVE, MY LOVE tells the tragic yet lyrical tale of an impossible love - that of a poor peasant girl for a rich boy from the city. Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fable ‘The Little Mermaid,’ it is set on a lush and beautiful Caribbean island, a place where the tempers of the gods loom large in the daily lives of the people and where differences in color and class loom equally as large. Into this world of contrasts, of sensuality and self-indulgence, poverty and exhausting labor, passion and cunning, Ms. Guy tells of a young orphan girl possessed by a love for a mulatto boy whose life she saves. Bargaining with the gods for his life, she pledges her own. What follows is foreordained. Awash with the voluptuousness of this tropical island, filled with the rich spirituality of voodoo and the heartbreaking simplicity of a fairy tale, MY LOVE, MY LOVE is a novel of universal themes, elemental power, and total enchantment.
Rosa Cuthbert Guy (September 1, 1922 – June 3, 2012) was a Trinidad-born American writer, acclaimed for her books of fiction for adults and young people. She died of cancer on Sunday, June 3, 2012. Born in Diego Martin, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Rosa and her sister Ameze were left with relatives when their parents, Audrey and Henry Cuthbert, emigrated in 1927 to the United States. The children joined their parents in Harlem in 1932. However, the following year their mother became ill, and Rosa and her sister were sent to Brooklyn to live with a cousin, whose espousal of Garveyism and black nationalistic politics deeply affected Rosa. On their mother's death in 1934 they returned to Harlem to live with their father, who remarried, but he too died in 1937. Subsequently Rosa and her sister lived in foster homes. Rosa left school at the age of fourteen and took a job in a garment factory to support herself and her sister. In 1941, when she was nineteen, Rosa met and married Warner Guy. While her husband was serving in the Second World War she continued working in the factory, and a co-worker introduced her to the American Negro Theatre, where she studied acting; other graduates included Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. In 1942, her son Warren Guy, Jr, was born. After the war, Rosa Guy moved to Connecticut with her husband and son, but five years later, on the dissolution of her marriage, she returned to New York. In 1950, along with John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy formed a workshop that was to become the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG), whose aim was ‘to develop and aid in the publication of works by writers of the African Diaspora’. Its members and participants included Willard Moore, Walter Christmas, Maya Angelou, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Alice Childress, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Douglas Turner Ward. More than half of all successful African-American writers were associated with the workshop between 1950 and 1971. Guy also belonged to the Black nationalist literary organization On Guard for Freedom, founded by Calvin Hicks on the Lower East Side of New York City. Among On Guard's other members were LeRoi Jones, Sarah E. Wright and Harold Cruse. Rosa Guy's work has received The New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year citation, and the American Library Association’s Best Book Award. In 1954, Rosa Guy wrote and performed in her first play, Venetian Blinds, which was successfully produced Off-Broadway at the Tropical Theater. Most of Guy's books are about the dependability of family members that care and love each other. Her 1985 novel, My Love, My Love: Or, The Peasant Girl - commonly described as a Caribbean re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Little Mermaid‘, but ‘with a dash of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet‘ - was the basis for the Broadway musical Once on This Island, which ran for a year from 1990 to 1991.
Lone, Alone. Lonely. Ruby is all of these. Ruby is desperately, self-absorbedly alone. Her mother has been dead for a year - her mother, whose grace and strength and devotion to Ruby had sustained her when the family first arrived on the mean, crowded streets of Harlem from the sun and blue seas of the West Indies.
Rosa Cuthbert Guy (September 1, 1922 – June 3, 2012) was a Trinidad-born American writer, acclaimed for her books of fiction for adults and young people. She died of cancer on Sunday, June 3, 2012. Born in Diego Martin, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Rosa and her sister Ameze were left with relatives when their parents, Audrey and Henry Cuthbert, emigrated in 1927 to the United States. The children joined their parents in Harlem in 1932. However, the following year their mother became ill, and Rosa and her sister were sent to Brooklyn to live with a cousin, whose espousal of Garveyism and black nationalistic politics deeply affected Rosa. On their mother's death in 1934 they returned to Harlem to live with their father, who remarried, but he too died in 1937. Subsequently Rosa and her sister lived in foster homes. Rosa left school at the age of fourteen and took a job in a garment factory to support herself and her sister. In 1941, when she was nineteen, Rosa met and married Warner Guy. While her husband was serving in the Second World War she continued working in the factory, and a co-worker introduced her to the American Negro Theatre, where she studied acting; other graduates included Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. In 1942, her son Warren Guy, Jr, was born. After the war, Rosa Guy moved to Connecticut with her husband and son, but five years later, on the dissolution of her marriage, she returned to New York. In 1950, along with John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy formed a workshop that was to become the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG), whose aim was ‘to develop and aid in the publication of works by writers of the African Diaspora’. Its members and participants included Willard Moore, Walter Christmas, Maya Angelou, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Alice Childress, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Douglas Turner Ward. More than half of all successful African-American writers were associated with the workshop between 1950 and 1971. Guy also belonged to the Black nationalist literary organization On Guard for Freedom, founded by Calvin Hicks on the Lower East Side of New York City. Among On Guard's other members were LeRoi Jones, Sarah E. Wright and Harold Cruse. Rosa Guy's work has received The New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year citation, and the American Library Association’s Best Book Award. In 1954, Rosa Guy wrote and performed in her first play, Venetian Blinds, which was successfully produced Off-Broadway at the Tropical Theater. Most of Guy's books are about the dependability of family members that care and love each other. Her 1985 novel, My Love, My Love: Or, The Peasant Girl - commonly described as a Caribbean re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Little Mermaid‘, but ‘with a dash of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet‘ - was the basis for the Broadway musical Once on This Island, which ran for a year from 1990 to 1991.
Phyllisia Cathy is a young West Indian girl who has moved with her parents and her sister to Harlem, New York. Rejected by her classmates because she "talks funny" and is the teacher's pet, Phyl is forced to become friends with the only one who will have her—a poor, frazzled girl named Edith. The distance between the carpeted, comfortable existence of the Cathy's and the gnawing poverty that dominates Edith's life is one that Phyl is intent on maintaining. She sneaks short visits to Edith's apartment where rags are stuffed in broken walls and where a listless father bides his time before deserting his hungry children. When Phyl finally invites Edith to visit her dying mother, the girl is driven from the house by Mr. Cathy's dizzying insults which are silently cheered by Phyl's misdirected pride. How Phyllisia grows to need Edith's special love and how she learns to give something of herself in return makes a powerful and deeply moving story.
Rosa Cuthbert Guy (September 1, 1922 – June 3, 2012) was a Trinidad-born American writer, acclaimed for her books of fiction for adults and young people. She died of cancer on Sunday, June 3, 2012. Born in Diego Martin, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, Rosa and her sister Ameze were left with relatives when their parents, Audrey and Henry Cuthbert, emigrated in 1927 to the United States. The children joined their parents in Harlem in 1932. However, the following year their mother became ill, and Rosa and her sister were sent to Brooklyn to live with a cousin, whose espousal of Garveyism and black nationalistic politics deeply affected Rosa. On their mother's death in 1934 they returned to Harlem to live with their father, who remarried, but he too died in 1937. Subsequently Rosa and her sister lived in foster homes. Rosa left school at the age of fourteen and took a job in a garment factory to support herself and her sister. In 1941, when she was nineteen, Rosa met and married Warner Guy. While her husband was serving in the Second World War she continued working in the factory, and a co-worker introduced her to the American Negro Theatre, where she studied acting; other graduates included Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. In 1942, her son Warren Guy, Jr, was born. After the war, Rosa Guy moved to Connecticut with her husband and son, but five years later, on the dissolution of her marriage, she returned to New York. In 1950, along with John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy formed a workshop that was to become the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG), whose aim was ‘to develop and aid in the publication of works by writers of the African Diaspora’. Its members and participants included Willard Moore, Walter Christmas, Maya Angelou, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Alice Childress, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Douglas Turner Ward. More than half of all successful African-American writers were associated with the workshop between 1950 and 1971. Guy also belonged to the Black nationalist literary organization On Guard for Freedom, founded by Calvin Hicks on the Lower East Side of New York City. Among On Guard's other members were LeRoi Jones, Sarah E. Wright and Harold Cruse. Rosa Guy's work has received The New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year citation, and the American Library Association’s Best Book Award. In 1954, Rosa Guy wrote and performed in her first play, Venetian Blinds, which was successfully produced Off-Broadway at the Tropical Theater. Most of Guy's books are about the dependability of family members that care and love each other. Her 1985 novel, My Love, My Love: Or, The Peasant Girl - commonly described as a Caribbean re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Little Mermaid‘, but ‘with a dash of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet‘ - was the basis for the Broadway musical Once on This Island, which ran for a year from 1990 to 1991.
Zesty, flavorful, and easy to prepare, Caribbean-style barbecue dishes are fast becoming an American favorite. From Rum Barbecue Sauce to Jerked Baby Back Ribs, Island Barbecue offers a sizzling collection of over 60 recipes for delicious sauces and marinades; breads, salads, and side dishes; fish, poultry, meat, and vegetable entrees; and tropical beverages and desserts to revitalize the standard barbecue repertoire. Complete with vibrant, full-color illustrations, invaluable information on grilling techniques, and a source list of Caribbean ingredients, Island Barbecue will spice up any table with the rich culinary heritage of the Caribbean.
Dunstan A. Harris is a Jamaican-born native and has devoted his life to an appreciation of the islands' distinctive cuisines. The author of Island Cooking: Recipes from the Caribbean and a manufacturer for Island Cooking Kitchen, Inc. -- a developer of Caribbean marinades and sauces -- he lives and works in New York City.
Some of the themes that have preoccupied Mr. Harris throughout his oeuvre find in this novel their most challenging and complex imaginative expression. In exploring the relationship between Victor (a man in some ways reminiscent of Fenwick of The Secret Ladder or Stevenson of Heartland) and his father, the author explores, by means of brilliant and daringly conceived technical devices, a whole tract of history, the entire development of a civilization; and his handling of time, place and 'character' reveals the essential unity of these disparate concepts. Wilson Harris’s ninth novel, first published in 1970, is a work of the most revolutionary and far-reaching kind of science or speculative fiction. In it time and space are truly elastic, so that events in recent time become part of remote geological time and the boundaries between events and remembering, individual persons and different locations are fluid and permeable. Victor is in search of his father, Adam, once a revolutionary worker who was sent to prison many years ago for burning down the factory he worked in. Since then Victor has lost touch with him, but suspects he is living as a pork-knocker (gold prospector) in the remote Cuyuni-Mazaruni district of Guyana – now the site of one of the largest open-cast goldmines in the world and the site of immense environmental degradation. Prophetically, the clash between the material/technological and the primordial/spiritual is one of the intercutting themes of the novel, connecting to the El Doradean myth so central to the Guyanese imagining. As he climbs in search of his father, Victor both revisits his past relationship with him and replays his father’s trial, which also becomes his own, in a way that echoes the "Nighttown" episode of Ulysses, though unlike Bloom’s. Victor’s offences are not sexual, but represent blockages in the openness of his thinking. Victor’s search is for spiritual grace, for the compensations of love and the glimmerings of a true understanding of the world he exists in, though Harris refuses to impose a false coherency upon material one had to digest and the reader is invited to share in Victor’s struggling ascent to consciousness, knowing that it can never be other than provisional.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
A modern 'gentleman of leisure' meets in the ruined Dunfermline Abbey a hypnotically charismatic figure whom he invites back to stay with him in his house in Edinburgh; before long other mysterious strangers - among them a beautiful girl - join the ménage To all appearances, then, this novel marks a considerable departure for Wilson Harris, not least in its setting, for hitherto his work has mainly exploited the real and psychic landscapes of his native Guyana. Those who know his writings will nevertheless recognize his uniquely imaginative sense of place powerfully at work in new surroundings; those who know Edinburgh will be fascinated by Mr. Harris's response to the character and history of one of the oldest and most beautiful cities in Europe. The handling of theme and character, too, shows a new humour and tightness of touch (the novel is, indeed, a comedy), but its preoccupation with time, place and identity and the quality of its expression are unmistakably of its author. Wilson Harris's tenth novel, first published in 1972, is set in Edinburgh but, like much of his subsequent work, bridges continents by its imaginative reach. ''Doctor Black Marsden', tramp, shaman, and conjurer, is an ambivalent Merlin-figure representing both the hero's personal (and archetypal) shadow, and the creative, magus-like activity of the author himself.' Michael Gilkes, Journal of Commonwealth Literature.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
'Soon I was to perceive in the complex loves and sorrows of Masters' life that I was as much a character (or character- mask) in Carnival as he was. Indeed in a real and unreal sense he and other character-masks were the joint authors of Carnival and I was their creation. They drew me to surrender myself to them.’ The speaker is narrator of Wilson Harris's new fiction, and biographer of its leading character, Everyman Masters. His enquiries into his subject's life lead him into a Dantesque spiritual journey through time and space in which the Caribbean carnival of masks acquires a transcendental resonance. 'Wilson Harris seems to me one of the most genuinely original talents at work in the field today... for what [he] is doing... is to extend the boundaries of our very conception of fiction; and this is likely to be recognized increasingly by readers who require more of fiction than mere skilful figure-skating over the surface of life.’ - Robert Nye.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
Wilson Harris's new novel further develops the tabula rasa theme that fan through Black Marsden. During a sojourn in Mexico lasting both days and centuries, a faceless and many-faced narrator records in diary form various encounters and episodes, which shade into elements from the country's past, creating a vivid dream-sequence with the strangely hypnotic power characteristic of Wilson Harris's writing.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
The first of these two novels is about a painter, Brazilian by birth and British by adoption, living and working in London with his wife, whose equally varied spiritual and cultural inheritance complements his. Wilson Harris evokes with vividness and characteristic imaginative power the daily life and landscape of the city. The setting of "Genesis of the Clowns" returns to the jungle hinterland of its author's native Guyana. A government surveyor and his gang, for whose work and well-being he is responsible, are exploring and recording the course and currents of the remote upper reaches of the ancient rivers. Unexpected incidents and tensions in the formal and personal relationships between the surveyor and his men have mysterious consequences with effects and implications far beyond the immediate time and place.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
Essays written between 1966 and 1981 by this highly acclaimed Guyanese novelist and critic between 1966 and 1981. "Together they represent an imaginative writer's effort to express theoretically the vision to which he has intuitively given shape in his fiction."
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
PALACE OF THE PEACOCK (1960) is the first of seven novels published to date by Wilson Harris. The author (b. 1921) now lives in London where his works are written, but his novels grow out of his responsiveness to the brooding continental landscape and the fabulous fragmented history of his native Guyana (formerly British Guiana). The declaration of the dreaming, half-blinded narrator of PALACE OF THE PEACOCK might well serve as an epigraph: ‘They were an actual stage, a presence, however mythical they seemed to the universal and the spiritual eye. They were as close to me as my ribs, the rivers and the flatland, the mountains and heartland I intimately saw. I could not help cherishing my symbolic map, and my bodily prejudice like a well-known room and house of superstition within which I dwelt. I saw this kingdom of man turned a colony and battleground of spirit, a priceless tempting jewel I dreamed I possessed’ (p. 20). Harris's fiction brings imperial/slave history and the aftermath into its field, but the author's way of seeing the world around him and kind of fiction which it expresses itself challenge us to see with new eyes. – from the Preface by Kenneth Ramchand.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (born 24 March 1921) is a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but has since become a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
PALACE OF THE PEACOCK (1960) is the first of seven novels published to date by Wilson Harris. The author (b. 1921) now lives in London where his works are written, but his novels grow out of his responsiveness to the brooding continental landscape and the fabulous fragmented history of his native Guyana (formerly British Guiana). The declaration of the dreaming, half-blinded narrator of PALACE OF THE PEACOCK might well serve as an epigraph: ‘They were an actual stage, a presence, however mythical they seemed to the universal and the spiritual eye. They were as close to me as my ribs, the rivers and the flatland, the mountains and heartland I intimately saw. I could not help cherishing my symbolic map, and my bodily prejudice like a well-known room and house of superstition within which I dwelt. I saw this kingdom of man turned a colony and battleground of spirit, a priceless tempting jewel I dreamed I possessed’ (p. 20). Harris's fiction brings imperial/slave history and the aftermath into its field, but the author's way of seeing the world around him and kind of fiction which it expresses itself challenge us to see with new eyes. – from the Preface by Kenneth Ramchand.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
The image of a perilous voyage up-river, portaging past rapids deep into the heart of the South American rain-forest, will be a sign to Wilson Harris’s readers that his new novel encompasses artistic concerns which have preoccupied him throughout his writing life, from the dazzling Palace of the Peacock onwards. His story is one of exploration, quest, danger, adultery, breakdown and violent death and the location the Guyana of the Quartet. Of that work the critic Wilfred Cartey has written: ‘Harris imbues the immediate landscape with a quality of the marvellous, transforming history into fable, fable into myth and legend. Thus, the whole novelistic canvas takes on emblematic qualities and, trembling through the transformative process, merges together the real, the marvellous, the mythic and the legendary.’ The same applies here and throughout his oeuvre.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (born 24 March 1921) is a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but has since become a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
In the four ‘fables’, as he calls them, which make up this book Wilson Harris draws on the history and legend, anthropological fact and native myth, the landscape and the people of Guyana as it exists now and as it did before it had a name. The dazzling technical skill with which he combines and puts to use these elements will be familiar to readers of his novels, and will be accessible to new readers attracted by his reputation as one of the most important writers of his own (or any other) country. The mode of this volume develops further that of THE SLEEPERS OF RORAIMA, published in 1970. .
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
Here are people who inhabit one another's dreams - who inhabit and are one another. Here are the streets of West London and the realities of our time - resolved into stranger avenues, greater realities, other times. As her child creates continents from a rumpled bed-sheet, a woman discovers new worlds within herself - worlds populated by Khublall the philosopher, mildly paranoid Jackson, Mack the Knife - worlds like Planet Bale. Over these worlds leans the figure of Father Marsden - and on Marsden leans the great Spirit. Wilson Harris has drawn together the threads of Mary Stella Holiday's automatic writings and Marsden's notes to weave a multi-dimensional tapestry of arresting images - images that shift and recur and overlap. From their pattern emerges a truth of great compassion: to be whole we must endure the traffic of many souls. 'Wilson Harris seems to me one of the most genuinely original talents at work in the field of fiction today, for what Harris is doing is to extend the boundaries of our very conception of fiction; and this is likely to be recognised increasingly by readers who require more of fiction than mere skilful figure-skating over the surface of life.’ - Robert Nye.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
Mr Harris’s new novel opens with a hauntingly powerful evocation of childhood: the age when the whole world of sensation - even the day-to-day dealings with family and friends - has a hallucinating freshness. Events in the narrator’s early life in a Guyanese seaport town - death in the family, the strange apparent betrayals in childhood relationships-are counterpointed with events years later in the depths of the hinterland, where the tensions between past and present manifest themselves in terms both personal and universal. The mechanized acquisitiveness of the twentieth century and the hidden riches of the immemorial jungle are the cause of conflicts whose destructiveness is more than merely material and transitory. Although the growing number of those who have come to value Mr Harris’s writings will recognize his theme, they will discover new and unsuspected facets revealed by the intensity of his vision.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
Mr Harris’s new novel opens with a hauntingly powerful evocation of childhood: the age when the whole world of sensation - even the day-to-day dealings with family and friends - has a hallucinating freshness. Events in the narrator’s early life in a Guyanese seaport town - death in the family, the strange apparent betrayals in childhood relationships-are counterpointed with events years later in the depths of the hinterland, where the tensions between past and present manifest themselves in terms both personal and universal. The mechanized acquisitiveness of the twentieth century and the hidden riches of the immemorial jungle are the cause of conflicts whose destructiveness is more than merely material and transitory. Although the growing number of those who have come to value Mr Harris’s writings will recognize his theme, they will discover new and unsuspected facets revealed by the intensity of his vision. . .
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
Set like his first novel, PALACE OF THE PEACOCK, in British Guiana, FAR JOURNEY OF OUDIN is further proof of the intensity and originality of Wilson Harris’s imaginative power and literary skill. Against a background of swamp, jungle and savannah a strange drama is played out in which the chief characters are the moneylender Ram-an evil, presiding genius, the illegitimate Beti whom all men desire, and Oudin the beggar who works for several masters and belongs to none. Reviewing Palace of the Peacock in the Spectator, Ronald Bryden hailed ‘the arrival of what looks like the most striking Caribbean imagination since George Lamming’s’. The Times Literary Supplement compared the book with Rimbaud’s Le Bateau lyre and added, ‘it can stand the comparison’.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
Writing this novel Wilson Harris completes the trilogy which began with Carnival and The Infinite Rehearsal. As in those books his narrator may be seen as an alter ego of his creator. Anselm is Guyanese by birth (born in Georgetown in 1912) with intimate artistic, professional and family connections with British Guyana and the South American continent. In his 'book of dreams' , time and space — history and geography — are transfigured and universalized. Of Carnival Valentine Cunningham said in the Observer: 'an exposition of post- Shandyesque fabulism at its most captivating, but also an earnestly questioning, postcolonialist novel of painful, accusing force.' Of The Infinite Rehearsal Brian Morton wrote in the TLS: 'If he has dared to write more densely, he has certainly never written better.' This is a novel about the complexities of memory, Wilson Harris's The Four Banks of the River of Space is a return to the writer's childhood haunts. Shunning what he calls sterile realism, Harris digs under the reality of perception and language to find the hidden music or pattern which gives significance to apparently desperate situations. Memory thus becomes a form of creation which follows the Odyssean metaphor of the quest naturalized here in the author's original Guyana heartland. This journey into the past does not limit itself to the reassertion of the protagonist's multiculturalism. It states that poetic language can only progress through erasure leading to the opening out of new doors or windows into essential reality, where polarities melt away. The Four Banks of the River of Space fragments the epic figure of Ulysses into several personalities who conduct self-analyses to redefine the nature and function of myth.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
The Guyana Quartet is Wilson Harris's collection of novels comprising Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder. In Palace of the Peacock, a tale of a doomed crew beating their way up-river through the jungles of Guyana, can be traced the poetic vision, themes and designs of Harris's subsequent work. It was described in The Times as displaying 'that staggering ebullience of language we have begun to recognize in West Indian writers'.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English. Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam in what was then called British Guiana, where his father worked at an insurance company. After studying at Queen's College in the capital of Guyana, Georgetown, he became a government surveyor, before taking up a career as lecturer and writer. The knowledge of the savannas and rain forests he gained during his time as a surveyor formed the setting for many of his books, with the Guyanese landscape dominating his fiction. Between 1945 and 1961, Harris was a regular contributor of stories, poems and essays to Kyk-over-Al literary magazine and was part of a group of Guyanese intellectuals that included Martin Carter and Ivan Van Sertima. Harris came to England in 1959 and published his first novel Palace of the Peacock in 1960. This became the first of a quartet of novels, The Guyana Quartet, which includes The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963). He subsequently wrote the Carnival trilogy: Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990). His most recent novels include Jonestown (1996), which tells of the mass-suicide of followers of cult leader Jim Jones, The Dark Jester (2001), his latest semi-autobiographical novel, The Mask of the Beggar (2003), and The Ghost of Memory (2006). Harris also writes non-fiction and critical essays and has been awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liège (2001). He has twice won the Guyana Prize for Literature. Harris was created a Knight Bachelor in June 2010, in the Queen Elizabeth II Birthday Honours. In 2014, Sir Wilson Harris won a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Literary critics have stated that although reading Harris's work is challenging, it is rewarding in many ways. Harris has been admired for his exploration of the themes of conquest and colonization as well as the struggles of colonized peoples. Readers have commented that his novels are an attempt to express truths about the way people experience reality through the lens of the imagination. Harris has been faulted for his novels that have often nonlinear plot lines, and for his preference of internal perceptions over external realities. Critics have described Harris's abstract, experimental narratives as difficult to read, dense, complex, or opaque. Many readers have commented that Harris's essays push the boundaries of traditional literary criticism, and that his fiction pushes the limits of the novel genre itself. Harris's writing has been associated with many different literary genres by critics, including: surrealism, magic realism, mysticism and modernism. Over the years, Harris has used many different concepts to define his literary approach, including: cross-culturalism, modern allegory, epic, and Quantum Fiction. One critic described Harris's fictions as informed by "quantum penetration where Existence and non-existence are both real. You can contemplate them as if both are true." His writing has been called ambitiously experimental and his narrative structure is described as "multiple and flexible." Wilson Harris categorized his innovations and literary techniques as quantum fiction. He uses the definition in The Carnival Trilogy and in the final novel, The Four Banks of the River of Space. Harris noted in an interview that "in describing the world you see, the language evolves and begins to encompass realities that are not visible". Harris attributed his innovative literary techniques as a development that was the result of being witness to the physical world behaving as quantum theory. To accommodate his new perceptions, Harris said he realized he was writing "quantum fiction". The technique of Wilson Harris has been called experimental and innovative. Harris describes that conventional writing is different from his style of writing in that "conventional writing is straightforward writing" and "My writing is quantum writing. Do you know of the quantum bullet? The quantum bullet, when it's fired, leaves not one hole but two." The use of nonlinear events and metaphor is a substantive component of his prose. Another technique employed by Harris is the combination of words and concepts in unexpected, jarring ways. Through this technique of combination, Harris displays the underlying, linking root that prevents two categories from ever really existing in opposition. The technique exposes and alters the power of language to lock in fixed beliefs and attitudes, "freeing" words and concepts to associate in new ways. Harris sees language as the key to social and human transformations. His approach begins with a regard of language as a power to both enslave and free. This quest and understanding underlies his narrative fiction themes about human slavery. Harris cites language as both, a crucial element in the subjugation of slaves and indentures, and the means by which the destructive processes of history could be reversed. In Palace of the Peacock, Harris seeks to expose the illusion of opposites that create enmities between people. A crew on a river expedition experiences a series of tragedies that ultimately bring about each member's death. Along the way, Harris highlights as prime factor in their demise their inability to reconcile binarisms in the world around them and between each other. With his technique of binary breakdowns, and echoing the African tradition of death not bringing the end to a soul, Harris demonstrates that they find reconciliation only in physical death, pointing out the superficiality of illusions of opposites that separated them. Mr.Harris died on 8 March 2018, at his home in Chelmsford, England, of natural causes.
‘My grandfather’s FAUST possesses roots as much in the modem age as in the pre-Columbian workshop of the gods and therefore addresses a European myth from a multi-faceted and partly non-European standpoint.’ In this ‘fictional autobiography’, the narrator is indeed fictional, but readers of Wilson Harris’s recent work will recognize both him and his relationship to his creator. The characters who inhabit this book as family and friends are both individuals and archetypes, vividly alive both in the present and in history. Drawing on his usual wide range of imagery, including on this occasion, sources both maritime and theatrical, Wilson Harris’s new allegorical fiction uses some of the elements of auto- biography to present a version of the Faust legend which shares the visionary intensity and vividness of language of all his work, most recently CARNIVAL . From reviews of CARNIVAL: ‘An exposition of post-Shandyesque fabulism at its most captivating . . . an earnestly questioning, post-colonialist novel of painful, accusing force . . .’ – Observer. ‘Gifted and Extraordinary’ – Guardian.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (born 24 March 1921) is a Guyanese writer. He first wrote poetry, but since has become a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be quite abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter very wide-ranging. Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam in the then British Guiana. After studying at Queen's College in the capital of Guyana, Georgetown, Harris became a government surveyor, before taking up a career as lecturer and writer. The knowledge of the savannas and rain forests he gained during his time as a surveyor has formed the setting for many of his books, with the Guyanese landscape dominating his fiction. He came to England in 1959 and published his first novel PALACE OF THE PEACOCK in 1960. This became the first of a quartet of novels, THE GUYANA QUARTET, WHICH ALSO INCLUDES THE FAR JOURNEY OF OUDIN (1961), THE WHOLE ARMOUR (1962), and THE SECRET LADDER (1963). He later wrote the Carnival trilogy consisting of CARNIVAL (1985), THE INFINITE REHEARSAL (1987), and THE FOUR BANKS OF THE RIVER OF SPACE (1990). His most recent novels are JONESTOWN (1996), which tells of the mass-suicide of a thousand followers of cult leader Jim Jones; THE DARK JESTER (2001), his latest semi-autobiographical novel, THE MASK OF THE BEGGAR (2003), and one of his most accessible novels in decades, THE GHOST OF MEMORY (2006). Wilson Harris also writes non-fiction and critical essays and has been awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liège (2001). He has twice been winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature.
Russell Fenwick, a young land-surveyor, is charting the upper reaches of the Canje river deep in the Guiana hinterland, in preparation for a new irrigation scheme. The tedium of the work, rivalries and resentments among the men of whom he is in charge, suspicion and hostility from the local population of poverty-stricken farmers and fishermen - all these combine to make Fenwick’s position a precarious one in an atmosphere of powerful tensions in uneasy equilibrium. He stands at the point where the modern, the scientific and the benign meet the primitive and the mysterious. This is the last volume in Mr Harris’s ‘Guiana Quartet’ and, as readers of the others - THE PALACE OF THE PEACOCK, THE FAR JOURNEY OF OUDIN, THE WHOLE ARMOUR - have come to expect, the narrative carries with it an imaginative charge as richly suggestive as that of myth, and employs a highly individual and evocative mode of expression. Now that the sequence is complete, the correspondences and interdependence of its elements begin to become apparent, revealing an ambitious design whose achieved brilliance makes a unique contribution to Caribbean literature.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
Until the coming of the Spanish invader the Carib warriors were masters of the sea which bears their name. Now they have virtually disappeared as a people, though remnants of their mythology can be traced deep into the South American continent. It is in the myths and history of this vanished tribe that Harris has found the inspiration for the tales in this book. In each of them the central character is a young boy, through whom the ancestral mysteries begin to reveal their meaning —a meaning enriched by a unique and encompassing vision, which adds new (and sometimes overwhelming) dimensions to our notions of time, place and people. all its imaginative rich- ness, this book is one of the most immediately attractive and engaging Mr Harris has written: it will not only delight his existing readers but provide those previously unfamiliar with his work with a haunting and memorable experience.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
This new novel is a sequel to Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness. Jen, da Silva's wife, has conceived after eight years of marriage and the Brazilian- born painter is moved by the knowledge of his wife's pregnancy to recall a painting that he started on the very morning that they slept together and she conceived. This becomes the evolving foetus of imagination through which to relate himself to his and Jen's masked antecedents in the womb of history and to previous tenants, of mixed ancestry, who lived a long time ago in the flat they now occupy in the Kensington area, London. Those previous tenants, Julia and Francis Cortez, have deposited papers and letters that address da Silva and Jen with an intimacy and force to do not only with the nature of the community, in an open sense, but with Julia's private desires and her great longing to have a child, a longing that is never fulfilled and that shakes Francis to the core in a secret novel he begins to write of her illnesses and of her great beauty. The Tree of the Sun sets out by various strategies of imagination to imply a resurrection of others in and through ourselves. It seeks to do so within complexes and motivations that can never be wholly explicit. There is therefore an element of carnival in the simultaneous and parallel expeditions in art and industry - in the imperial splendours at home and half-forgotten plantations established abroad - that occurred in the building of societies in Europe and in her possessions and conquests around the globe. Values of survival are threaded into a comedy of inner spectres of history that are native to civilization.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
With his first two novels, PALACE OF THE PEACOCK and THE FAR JOURNEY OF OUDIN, Wilson Harris has established a unique place for himself among West Indian writers. Profoundly imaginative, richly evocative, splendidly and passionately written, his books explore a strange and fascinating world derived from the myths and landscapes of his native British Guiana. THE WHOLE ARMOUR tells the story of Cristo and Sharon, of Magda and Abram; a story of passion and violence, of crime and punishment. It will more than consolidate Mr. Harris's reputation as a gifted and entirely original artist whose work seems likely to endure.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
THE WHOLE ARMOUR tells the story of Cristo and Sharon, of Magda and Abram; a story of passion and violence, of crime and punishment. It will more than consolidate Mr. Harris's reputation as a gifted and entirely original artist whose work seems likely to endure. In THE SECRET LADDER Russell Fenwick, a young land-surveyor, is charting the upper reaches of the Canje river deep in the Guiana hinterland, in preparation for a new irrigation scheme. The tedium of the work, rivalries and resentments among the men of whom he is in charge, suspicion and hostility from the local population of poverty-stricken farmers and fishermen - all these combine to make Fenwick’s position a precarious one in an atmosphere of powerful tensions in uneasy equilibrium. He stands at the point where the modern, the scientific and the benign meet the primitive and the mysterious.
Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.
Authentic West Indian ghost stories brim with unusual characters, including duppies, restless spirits who haunt the living; angels, a mermaid, a witch doctor, a bush doctor, and a menacing poisonous toad. By the author of Turtle Island Alphabet.
Gerald Andrews Hausman (born October 13, 1945) is a storyteller and award-winning author of books about Native America, animals, mythology, and West Indian culture. Hausman comes from a long line of storytellers and educators, and has published over seventy books for both children and adults.
YARDIE is, quite simply, a literary sensation in England. Originally published by X Press, a two-man operation, the book was produced on a desktop computer and distributed through unusual channels: it was sold at clothing shops, hairdressers, and even on top of over-turned dumpsters outside of nightclubs. On word of mouth alone, YARDIE has sold over twelve thousand copies. Victor Headley has written a tight, fast-paced narrative that brings us into the previously unexplored territory of Yardies: West Indian gangsters who know that the only route to success available to them is through the dangerous, violent world of drugs. YARDIE introduces us to D., a tough, streetwise man from Jamaica who, using a falsified passport, enters London to deliver a kilo of cocaine to the Spicers, the ruling operation in cocaine distribution. D., knowing it could be his only chance for a break, steals half a kilo and runs out into a city he is entirely unfamiliar with, having only vague contacts from the life he left behind. D. recruits soldiers, sets up his own operation, and quickly establishes himself as a main force in the drug wars of East End London. Soon he is ensconced in a life of crack, cash, guns, and power, fighting to keep his turf from the Spicers, who are plotting their imminent revenge. Written with style and intensity, YARDIE is the first book to come out of this subculture defined by music, dancing, drugs, violence, and, perhaps most of all, anger. Beneath the action lies the unavoidable fact of economic survival faced by a community struggling to make its way in a hostile urban environment. .
Victor Headley (born 1959) is a Jamaican-born British author. He is the author of the bestselling novel Yardie (1992), which gained cult status upon publication and was heralded a new wave of black British pulp fiction". Other books by Headley included Excess (1993) Yush (1994), Fetish (1995), Here Comes the Bride (1997), Off Duty (2001) and Seven Seals (2003).
The Times Literary Supplement says of LAND OF THE LIVING: ‘Turning to a map of the Caribbean, one wonders at the carelessness of the cartographer who has left Cayuna out of the archipelago. Here are the ecstatic sea and the exultant sun and the opulent landscape, here is an organic and self-contained community, lazy, gossipy, cheerful, self-important, whose mishmash of colors indicates nothing more barbaric than social differences. Here a young Jewish refugee scientist, emotionally neutered by his past experiences so that for the rest of his life he feels he is doomed to be an onlooker, is drawn back into midstream as much by the pressures of a live and affirmative society as by two women and a remarkable old man, leader of an apocalyptic native freedom movement. Mr. Hearne writes very well both about love (married at that) and about honest and affectionate lust. Also he writes very well.’ Mr. Hearne is a born storyteller. There is no need, any longer, to speak of his promise; his reputation is firmly established. This moving and deeply felt story of Stefan Mahler’s return to the land of the living is Mr. Hearne’s finest achievement to date. John Hearne writes of himself in 1962: ‘I was born in Montreal about thirty years ago, but grew up in Jamaica, where both sides of my family have been settled since the early part of the eighteenth century. For the most part we have been planners, soldiers, civil servants and churchmen; but writing probably came into the family a generation or so before the French Revolution when two journalist brothers who had played too close to the encyclopaedist fringe were forced to choose between prison or exile, and decided that the British West Indies offered more freedom if less scope. ‘The Hearnes were originally an Irish family but since about 1750 the main stream has received generous tributary strains of Scottish, African, English, French, Jewish, Spanish and American Indian blood.’
John Edgar Colwell Hearne (4 February 1926, Montreal, Canada - 12 December 1994, Stony Hill, Jamaica) was a white Jamaican novelist, journalist, and teacher. Hearne was born in Montreal, Canada, of Jamaican parents and attended Jamaica College in Kingston. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War, he read English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. He trained as a teacher at London University and from 1950 to 1952 taught in a Jamaican school. He also worked as a journalist. He then travelled in Europe for some years (part of the time with novelist Roger Mais, before returning to Jamaica in 1957. He was subsequently on the staff of the Extra-Mural Department of the University of the West Indies, Mona. Hearne's first published work was the novel Voices under the Window, issued in 1955. Set in Jamaica in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it uses the framing device of a progressive politician's injury and death in a riot to narrate the story of a man who, born into racial and economic privilege, decided to cast his lot with the underprivileged. Hearne followed this with four novels written between 1956 and 1961 -- The Faces of Love, Stranger at the Gate, The Autumn Equinox and Land of the Living—set in the imaginary island of Cayuna which is a fictionalized Jamaica (the map of Cayuna included with the novels bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamaica), and which referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the bauxite industry and the Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the Cuban Revolution. He also wrote a number of short stories, one of which, 'At the Stelling', set in Guyana, was included in the Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature. Hearne then turned to the academy and journalism—writing a regular column for the Gleaner newspaper, first under the pseudonym 'Jay Monroe', and later under his own name, and administering the Creative Arts Centre (now the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) at the University of the West Indies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he collaborated with planter and journalist Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers -- Fever Grass, The Candywine Development, and The Checkerboard Caper—involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym 'John Morris'. In 1985 he published his last novel, The Sure Salvation, set on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. The voyage ends in the imaginary British South American colony of Abari, also mentioned in The Checkerboard Caper.
The explosive interaction of political and private passion, the dark crosscurrents of race and history, the clash of loyalties in conflict, all combine to charge John Hearne’s second novel with pace and concentrated power. Only a narrow stretch of Caribbean water divides Cayuna from St Pierre: the first solid, settled, British for centuries; the second a black republic under the left-wing dictatorship of Henri Etienne. And when Etienne’s government is overthrown and he himself driven to Cayuna for clandestine refuge his coming is a catalyst which precipitates violence and disaster - and love and heroism - in several different lives. In the life of Carl Brandt, handsome, generous, universally liked and respected, owner of Brandt’s Pen and head of the Brandts who for two centuries have been among the island’s leading families; of his best friend, Roy Mackenzie, lawyer and left-wing politician, brilliant, ambitious, unstable, fanatical in his devotion both to causes and to people; of Sheila Pearce who disorients both their lives; of Hector Slade, the decent, likeable man and devoted amateur scholar who is the tough and efficient head of the island’s police; of Tiger Johnson, uncrowned king of that pullulating shantytown which everybody calls ‘the jungle’. When John Hearne’s first novel, Voices Under the Window, was published in 1955, it was very widely acclaimed; and was accepted as exciting evidence that a new and outstanding writer had arrived. Stranger at the Gate more than fulfils the promise of its predecessor. In its breadth and scope, in the suppleness and solidity of its characterization, in its narrative and descriptive power, it marks an impressive development in the range of John Hearne’s already impressive powers.
John Edgar Colwell Hearne (4 February 1926, Montreal, Canada - 12 December 1994, Stony Hill, Jamaica) was a white Jamaican novelist, journalist, and teacher. Hearne was born in Montreal, Canada, of Jamaican parents and attended Jamaica College in Kingston. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War, he read English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. He trained as a teacher at London University and from 1950 to 1952 taught in a Jamaican school. He also worked as a journalist. He then travelled in Europe for some years (part of the time with novelist Roger Mais, before returning to Jamaica in 1957. He was subsequently on the staff of the Extra-Mural Department of the University of the West Indies, Mona. Hearne's first published work was the novel Voices under the Window, issued in 1955. Set in Jamaica in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it uses the framing device of a progressive politician's injury and death in a riot to narrate the story of a man who, born into racial and economic privilege, decided to cast his lot with the underprivileged. Hearne followed this with four novels written between 1956 and 1961 -- The Faces of Love, Stranger at the Gate, The Autumn Equinox and Land of the Living—set in the imaginary island of Cayuna which is a fictionalized Jamaica (the map of Cayuna included with the novels bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamaica), and which referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the bauxite industry and the Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the Cuban Revolution. He also wrote a number of short stories, one of which, 'At the Stelling', set in Guyana, was included in the Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature. Hearne then turned to the academy and journalism—writing a regular column for the Gleaner newspaper, first under the pseudonym 'Jay Monroe', and later under his own name, and administering the Creative Arts Centre (now the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) at the University of the West Indies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he collaborated with planter and journalist Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers -- Fever Grass, The Candywine Development, and The Checkerboard Caper—involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym 'John Morris'. In 1985 he published his last novel, The Sure Salvation, set on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. The voyage ends in the imaginary British South American colony of Abari, also mentioned in The Checkerboard Caper.
Cayuna - an island in the West Indies, the product of John Hearne’s imagination, but so real you can feel its hot sun, its verdure, its blazing beaches. So do you enter at once into the passions of three different kinds of love-loves involving the dominating personality of Uncle Nicholas, an old man but full of the strength and character that make old men young; his adopted niece Eleanor, beautiful, with a strange past but a present just awakening to love, and Jim Diver, a young American seeking his fulfillment in revolution. When Diver comes to Cayuna to set up an illegal printing press for an insurgent army-and arrives on Nicholas’ doorstep with a message from the past that cannot be ignored-an explosive situation develops. For to the clandestine and vicious violence of revolution and counter-revolution is added the sudden passion between Jim and Eleanor-a situation resolved in a climax of shattering power. . .
John Edgar Colwell Hearne (4 February 1926, Montreal, Canada - 12 December 1994, Stony Hill, Jamaica) was a white Jamaican novelist, journalist, and teacher. Hearne was born in Montreal, Canada, of Jamaican parents and attended Jamaica College in Kingston. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War, he read English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. He trained as a teacher at London University and from 1950 to 1952 taught in a Jamaican school. He also worked as a journalist. He then travelled in Europe for some years (part of the time with novelist Roger Mais, before returning to Jamaica in 1957. He was subsequently on the staff of the Extra-Mural Department of the University of the West Indies, Mona. Hearne's first published work was the novel Voices under the Window, issued in 1955. Set in Jamaica in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it uses the framing device of a progressive politician's injury and death in a riot to narrate the story of a man who, born into racial and economic privilege, decided to cast his lot with the underprivileged. Hearne followed this with four novels written between 1956 and 1961 -- The Faces of Love, Stranger at the Gate, The Autumn Equinox and Land of the Living—set in the imaginary island of Cayuna which is a fictionalized Jamaica (the map of Cayuna included with the novels bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamaica), and which referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the bauxite industry and the Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the Cuban Revolution. He also wrote a number of short stories, one of which, 'At the Stelling', set in Guyana, was included in the Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature. Hearne then turned to the academy and journalism—writing a regular column for the Gleaner newspaper, first under the pseudonym 'Jay Monroe', and later under his own name, and administering the Creative Arts Centre (now the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) at the University of the West Indies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he collaborated with planter and journalist Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers -- Fever Grass, The Candywine Development, and The Checkerboard Caper—involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym 'John Morris'. In 1985 he published his last novel, The Sure Salvation, set on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. The voyage ends in the imaginary British South American colony of Abari, also mentioned in The Checkerboard Caper.
Among the young West Indian writers who have done so much recently to enliven the literary scene John Hearne has a unique place. Set in the West Indies though his stories are, they depend for their effect not on ‘local colour’ or self-conscious regionalism but on his possession and mastery of the novelist’s essential equipment - narrative power, an ability to bring characters completely and vividly to life, an inborn ease and assurance with dialogue and description. In STRANGER AT THE GATE and THE FACES OF LOVE he created and peopled a West Indian island, Cayuna; and to Cayuna he returns in THE AUTUMN EQUINOX. Nicholas Stacey had come back there in his old age; and though his life had been shot through with passion and violence, it seemed that nothing could disturb the peace and fulfilment which the years had brought and the deep emotional content centred on his love for his adopted daughter, Eleanor, But when Jim Diver and Peter Conroy came to Cayuna to set up an illegal printing press for Castro’s insurgent Cuban army - and arrived on Nicholas’s doorstep with a message from the past which could not be ignored - things changed beyond recognition. To the clandestine and vicious violence of revolution and counter-revolution was added a sudden passion between Jim and Eleanor; an explosive situation was rapidly built up and resolved at last in a climax of shattering power. In his latest novel John Hearne has achieved a new technical mastery; and he has told, as always, a story which is both gripping and unforgettable.
John Edgar Colwell Hearne (4 February 1926, Montreal, Canada - 12 December 1994, Stony Hill, Jamaica) was a white Jamaican novelist, journalist, and teacher. Hearne was born in Montreal, Canada, of Jamaican parents and attended Jamaica College in Kingston. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War, he read English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. He trained as a teacher at London University and from 1950 to 1952 taught in a Jamaican school. He also worked as a journalist. He then travelled in Europe for some years (part of the time with novelist Roger Mais, before returning to Jamaica in 1957. He was subsequently on the staff of the Extra-Mural Department of the University of the West Indies, Mona. Hearne's first published work was the novel Voices under the Window, issued in 1955. Set in Jamaica in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it uses the framing device of a progressive politician's injury and death in a riot to narrate the story of a man who, born into racial and economic privilege, decided to cast his lot with the underprivileged. Hearne followed this with four novels written between 1956 and 1961 -- The Faces of Love, Stranger at the Gate, The Autumn Equinox and Land of the Living—set in the imaginary island of Cayuna which is a fictionalized Jamaica (the map of Cayuna included with the novels bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamaica), and which referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the bauxite industry and the Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the Cuban Revolution. He also wrote a number of short stories, one of which, 'At the Stelling', set in Guyana, was included in the Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature. Hearne then turned to the academy and journalism—writing a regular column for the Gleaner newspaper, first under the pseudonym 'Jay Monroe', and later under his own name, and administering the Creative Arts Centre (now the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) at the University of the West Indies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he collaborated with planter and journalist Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers -- Fever Grass, The Candywine Development, and The Checkerboard Caper—involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym 'John Morris'. In 1985 he published his last novel, The Sure Salvation, set on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. The voyage ends in the imaginary British South American colony of Abari, also mentioned in The Checkerboard Caper.
The West Indian island of Cayuna is the background for THE EYE OF THE STORM, and bears a marked resemblance to the author’s native Jamaica. It is a lush, tropical island of intense colors and strong contrasts, whose complex society is made up of passionate, ambitious people of mixed racial origins. With skill and dramatic force, John Hearne recreates this people and their island in a compelling story that reveals human insight as well as a sense of inevitable tragedy. Three characters predominate: Rachel Ascom, half Negro, half German, handsome. sensual, greedy for power, who came to Queenshaven with "two pairs of cotton drawers and a pair of Japanese silk stockings," and became the driving force behind the island Newsletter; and her two lovers - Michael Lovelace, the new editor from England, cultivated, sensitive; and Jojo Rygin, a native construction-expert of redoubtable force and magnetism, who has just ended a jail term. Two men could not be more sharply contrasted. As the Caribbean summer blazes into drought and searing heat, this explosive power-sex situation mounts in tension, and at last breaks in a climax as violent and terrible as the hurricane that sweeps up over the sea and provides one of the hair-raising scenes of the novel. This is John Hearne’s third book, published in England as The Faces of Love.
John Edgar Colwell Hearne (4 February 1926, Montreal, Canada - 12 December 1994, Stony Hill, Jamaica) was a white Jamaican novelist, journalist, and teacher. Hearne was born in Montreal, Canada, of Jamaican parents and attended Jamaica College in Kingston. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War, he read English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. He trained as a teacher at London University and from 1950 to 1952 taught in a Jamaican school. He also worked as a journalist. He then travelled in Europe for some years (part of the time with novelist Roger Mais, before returning to Jamaica in 1957. He was subsequently on the staff of the Extra-Mural Department of the University of the West Indies, Mona. Hearne's first published work was the novel Voices under the Window, issued in 1955. Set in Jamaica in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it uses the framing device of a progressive politician's injury and death in a riot to narrate the story of a man who, born into racial and economic privilege, decided to cast his lot with the underprivileged. Hearne followed this with four novels written between 1956 and 1961 -- The Faces of Love, Stranger at the Gate, The Autumn Equinox and Land of the Living—set in the imaginary island of Cayuna which is a fictionalized Jamaica (the map of Cayuna included with the novels bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamaica), and which referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the bauxite industry and the Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the Cuban Revolution. He also wrote a number of short stories, one of which, 'At the Stelling', set in Guyana, was included in the Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature. Hearne then turned to the academy and journalism—writing a regular column for the Gleaner newspaper, first under the pseudonym 'Jay Monroe', and later under his own name, and administering the Creative Arts Centre (now the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) at the University of the West Indies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he collaborated with planter and journalist Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers -- Fever Grass, The Candywine Development, and The Checkerboard Caper—involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym 'John Morris'. In 1985 he published his last novel, The Sure Salvation, set on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. The voyage ends in the imaginary British South American colony of Abari, also mentioned in The Checkerboard Caper.
Rachel Ascom was the driving force behind The Newsletter. Without her it would never have been anything much; but with her personality-that explosive compound of ambition and ability and sensuality and unscrupulousness-at its centre, it had become the power it undoubtedly was. Everybody in Cayuna knew it. Andrew Fabricus and Oliver Hyde knew it better than most for they worked for her and knew all there was to know-or nearly all-about Rachel and The .Newsletter. What they wondered about in particular was how long it would take Michael Lovelace to find out when he arrived from England-he was the new editor; and what he would do when he did. And what would happen, too, when Jojo Rygin came out of gaol; for his sentence was nearly up and he would expect for more reasons than one-to find Rachel waiting for him. The fuses were lit. John Hearne’s new novel, set in that West Indian island he brought so vividly to life in Stranger at the Gate, is charged with pace and power. Its mounting tensions are masterfully sustained and heightened-and resolved in a tremendous climax of violence and hurricane. It will maintain and enhance the big reputation he has made for himself as a leading figure among the young Caribbean writers who so notably enliven the literary scene today.
John Edgar Colwell Hearne (4 February 1926, Montreal, Canada - 12 December 1994, Stony Hill, Jamaica) was a white Jamaican novelist, journalist, and teacher. Hearne was born in Montreal, Canada, of Jamaican parents and attended Jamaica College in Kingston. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War, he read English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. He trained as a teacher at London University and from 1950 to 1952 taught in a Jamaican school. He also worked as a journalist. He then travelled in Europe for some years (part of the time with novelist Roger Mais, before returning to Jamaica in 1957. He was subsequently on the staff of the Extra-Mural Department of the University of the West Indies, Mona. Hearne's first published work was the novel Voices under the Window, issued in 1955. Set in Jamaica in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it uses the framing device of a progressive politician's injury and death in a riot to narrate the story of a man who, born into racial and economic privilege, decided to cast his lot with the underprivileged. Hearne followed this with four novels written between 1956 and 1961 -- The Faces of Love, Stranger at the Gate, The Autumn Equinox and Land of the Living—set in the imaginary island of Cayuna which is a fictionalized Jamaica (the map of Cayuna included with the novels bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamaica), and which referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the bauxite industry and the Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the Cuban Revolution. He also wrote a number of short stories, one of which, 'At the Stelling', set in Guyana, was included in the Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature. Hearne then turned to the academy and journalism—writing a regular column for the Gleaner newspaper, first under the pseudonym 'Jay Monroe', and later under his own name, and administering the Creative Arts Centre (now the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) at the University of the West Indies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he collaborated with planter and journalist Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers -- Fever Grass, The Candywine Development, and The Checkerboard Caper—involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym 'John Morris'. In 1985 he published his last novel, The Sure Salvation, set on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. The voyage ends in the imaginary British South American colony of Abari, also mentioned in The Checkerboard Caper.
Empty sea; empty sky; windless sails. The Sure Salvation, surrounded by the growing, glistening stain of its own filth, is helplessly becalmed on the South Atlantic between Africa and Brazil. The crew can only wait; the cargo, being perishable, can only, in the end, perish. William Hogarth, Captain and owner, before returning to the embittered company of his wife, makes regular, immaculate, copperplate entries in the log. For Reynolds, the Second Officer, the calm provides space to exercise a curious, personal, perverted freedom; Alex Delfosse, Ship's Cook and physician, guards his central secret which will, in the end, reserve for him a fate different from that of the rest. John Hearne's novel grips hypnotically from the first page; and the resolution of its deadlocked opening, the revelation of what is battened down in the ship itself and in the human beings aboard her, creates a narrative of mounting power and tension, an ending compounded equally of pity and terror. More than twenty years ago John Hearne, with a series of novels set in the West Indies, built up a reputation as a writer with natural narrative mastery and inborn ability to bring characters, places and situations to vivid and convincing life. The Sure Salvation is triumphant proof that John Hearne, superb creative novelist, has been restored to us.
John Edgar Colwell Hearne (4 February 1926, Montreal, Canada - 12 December 1994, Stony Hill, Jamaica) was a white Jamaican novelist, journalist, and teacher. Hearne was born in Montreal, Canada, of Jamaican parents and attended Jamaica College in Kingston. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War, he read English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. He trained as a teacher at London University and from 1950 to 1952 taught in a Jamaican school. He also worked as a journalist. He then travelled in Europe for some years (part of the time with novelist Roger Mais, before returning to Jamaica in 1957. He was subsequently on the staff of the Extra-Mural Department of the University of the West Indies, Mona. Hearne's first published work was the novel Voices under the Window, issued in 1955. Set in Jamaica in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it uses the framing device of a progressive politician's injury and death in a riot to narrate the story of a man who, born into racial and economic privilege, decided to cast his lot with the underprivileged. Hearne followed this with four novels written between 1956 and 1961 -- The Faces of Love, Stranger at the Gate, The Autumn Equinox and Land of the Living—set in the imaginary island of Cayuna which is a fictionalized Jamaica (the map of Cayuna included with the novels bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamaica), and which referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the bauxite industry and the Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the Cuban Revolution. He also wrote a number of short stories, one of which, 'At the Stelling', set in Guyana, was included in the Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature. Hearne then turned to the academy and journalism—writing a regular column for the Gleaner newspaper, first under the pseudonym 'Jay Monroe', and later under his own name, and administering the Creative Arts Centre (now the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) at the University of the West Indies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he collaborated with planter and journalist Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers -- Fever Grass, The Candywine Development, and The Checkerboard Caper—involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym 'John Morris'. In 1985 he published his last novel, The Sure Salvation, set on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. The voyage ends in the imaginary British South American colony of Abari, also mentioned in The Checkerboard Caper.
When Mark Lattimer was chopped all they could do - Brysie his mistress and Ted his best friend - was to carry him through an open door and up the stairs and try to keep him alive there until the riot was over. On the island Mark was somebody - a lawyer, a politician, a public man - but he was helpless now, cut off from doctors, ambulances, police. He had been born on the island and grown up there, conscious always that although his skin was white, he didn’t count as a white man. And though the war had taken him first to Canada and then to England, though he had married an English wife and had an English child, in the end he had come back to the island. He had come back to discover his gift for oratory; and Ted Burrow and the People’s Party and Brysie Dean; and to bleed his life away in a hot, squalid, airless room, filled unbearably with the yells of the mob outside. VOICES UNDER THE WINDOW is a first novel by a young West Indian writer at present living and working in London. The sharpness and power of its writing, the speed and concentration of its narrative, produce a story which is vivid and memorable; and full of high promise for the future.
John Edgar Colwell Hearne (4 February 1926, Montreal, Canada - 12 December 1994, Stony Hill, Jamaica) was a white Jamaican novelist, journalist, and teacher. Hearne was born in Montreal, Canada, of Jamaican parents and attended Jamaica College in Kingston. After serving in the RAF during the Second World War, he read English and Philosophy at Edinburgh University. He trained as a teacher at London University and from 1950 to 1952 taught in a Jamaican school. He also worked as a journalist. He then travelled in Europe for some years (part of the time with novelist Roger Mais, before returning to Jamaica in 1957. He was subsequently on the staff of the Extra-Mural Department of the University of the West Indies, Mona. Hearne's first published work was the novel Voices under the Window, issued in 1955. Set in Jamaica in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it uses the framing device of a progressive politician's injury and death in a riot to narrate the story of a man who, born into racial and economic privilege, decided to cast his lot with the underprivileged. Hearne followed this with four novels written between 1956 and 1961 -- The Faces of Love, Stranger at the Gate, The Autumn Equinox and Land of the Living—set in the imaginary island of Cayuna which is a fictionalized Jamaica (the map of Cayuna included with the novels bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamaica), and which referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the bauxite industry and the Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the Cuban Revolution. He also wrote a number of short stories, one of which, 'At the Stelling', set in Guyana, was included in the Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature. Hearne then turned to the academy and journalism—writing a regular column for the Gleaner newspaper, first under the pseudonym 'Jay Monroe', and later under his own name, and administering the Creative Arts Centre (now the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) at the University of the West Indies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he collaborated with planter and journalist Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers -- Fever Grass, The Candywine Development, and The Checkerboard Caper—involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym 'John Morris'. In 1985 he published his last novel, The Sure Salvation, set on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic in the mid-nineteenth century. The voyage ends in the imaginary British South American colony of Abari, also mentioned in The Checkerboard Caper.
Heath's first published novel, published in London in 1974. Heath said that his writing was "intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana". His work has been described as "marked by comprehensive social observation, penetrating psychological analysis, and vigorous, picaresque action." A MAN COME HOME is inspired equally by the 'fair- maid' myth of Guyanese folklore and by the realities of George- town 'yard' society. When Bird Foster becomes suddenly and unaccountably rich and disappears for long spells with- out explanation to his woman or his friends, the myth is implicit: once again a 'fair-maid' has fallen in love with a human being and tried to win him with jewels, with money - money, the one way to break out of his confining, one-level Georgetown life. Bird returns to his immensely human woman, and loses all. A MAN COME HOME has a vigour and freshness, a humour and unpatronising sympathy quite of its own. No one has written like this before of the Guyana 'yard', where myth and reality are equally familiar and where a break is the longed-for impossible possibility.
Roy A(ubrey) K(elvin) Heath (13 August 1926 - 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer, most noted for his ‘Georgetown Trilogy’ of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as THE ARMSTRONG TRILOGY, 1994), consisting of FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY (1979), ONE GENERATION (1980), and GENETHA (1981). Heath said that his work was ‘intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana’. Educated at Central High School, Georgetown, he worked as a Treasury clerk (1944-51) before leaving Guyana for England in 1951. He attended the University of London (1952-6), earning a B.A. Honours degree in Modern Languages. He also studied law and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1964 (and the Guyana bar in 1973), although he never practiced as a lawyer, pursuing a career since 1959 as a writer and a schoolteacher in London, where he lived until his death at the age of 81. In 1974 his first novel, A MAN COME HOME, was published. This was followed four years later by THE MURDERER (1978), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize that same year and was described by the Observer as ‘mysteriously authentic, and unique as a work of art’. His other published novels are KWAKU; OR, THE MAN WHO COULD NOT KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT (1982), OREALLA (1984), THE SHADOW BRIDE (1988) and THE MINISTRY OF HOPE (1997). Heath also wrote non-fiction, including SHADOWS ROUND THE MOON: CARIBBEAN MEMOIRS (1990), plays - INEZ COMBRAY was produced in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1972, in which year he won the Guyana Theatre Guild Award - and short stories. He was awarded the Guyana Literature Prize in 1989.
From a writer in full command of his material, here is a devastatingly accurate and unforgettable portrait of an ill-starred marriage - the hopeful beginning, the half- hearted compromises, the estrangement that comes of being locked lovelessly together. They both search for solace - she within herself, he in the easy company of drinking friends and local girls. But they find they have grown into each other like the hundred-year-old trees in the back yard, irrevocably entwined Set against the vividly drawn background of Georgetown, Guyana, this remarkable novel (the first of a projected trilogy) shows all the qualities which won the 1978 GUARDIAN Fiction Prize for Roy Heath's last and widely-acclaimed novel The Murderer.
Roy A(ubrey) K(elvin) Heath (13 August 1926 - 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer, most noted for his ‘Georgetown Trilogy’ of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as THE ARMSTRONG TRILOGY, 1994), consisting of FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY (1979), ONE GENERATION (1980), and GENETHA (1981). Heath said that his work was ‘intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana’. Educated at Central High School, Georgetown, he worked as a Treasury clerk (1944-51) before leaving Guyana for England in 1951. He attended the University of London (1952-6), earning a B.A. Honours degree in Modern Languages. He also studied law and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1964 (and the Guyana bar in 1973), although he never practiced as a lawyer, pursuing a career since 1959 as a writer and a schoolteacher in London, where he lived until his death at the age of 81. In 1974 his first novel, A MAN COME HOME, was published. This was followed four years later by THE MURDERER (1978), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize that same year and was described by the Observer as ‘mysteriously authentic, and unique as a work of art’. His other published novels are KWAKU; OR, THE MAN WHO COULD NOT KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT (1982), OREALLA (1984), THE SHADOW BRIDE (1988) and THE MINISTRY OF HOPE (1997). Heath also wrote non-fiction, including SHADOWS ROUND THE MOON: CARIBBEAN MEMOIRS (1990), plays - INEZ COMBRAY was produced in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1972, in which year he won the Guyana Theatre Guild Award - and short stories. He was awarded the Guyana Literature Prize in 1989.
The publication of Roy Heath's award- winning novel, The Murderer, introduced this distinguished Guyanese writer to the American public. Now here is Heath's tour de force on marital love, From the Heat of the Day. The first book in the acclaimed Armstrong family trilogy, this deft, masterly novel of few pages presents a devastating portrait of a man and a woman tragically entwined. Set in Georgetown, Guyana, the story begins when Sonny Armstrong, from the poorer part of town, comes to court Gladys Davis. The Davis family objects, but Gladys is awed by Sonny's free spirit, attracted by his passion. Sonny is drawn to Gladys by "the phantom of an eventual conquest." With clear and unwavering focus, Heath follows the course of this doomed romance. The couple marry, but eventually become estranged. Then Sonny stops providing even the basic necessities to his family, which now includes a son and a daughter. Yet a powerful force holds the couple together in their tragic union: 'Gladys searched for a reason for this terrible liason, but could not find one. Things were just so. There was a sky and an earth; there was the wind and the sun; and there was marriage." As Gladys grows more and more desperate, Sonny tries to escape the pressures of the family, poverty, and his own failings through his friendship with Doc, a man who has found genuine love with a mistress. In a highly emotional epiphany, he finally comes to understand the woman he has loved and denied.
Roy A(ubrey) K(elvin) Heath (13 August 1926 - 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer, most noted for his ‘Georgetown Trilogy’ of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as THE ARMSTRONG TRILOGY, 1994), consisting of FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY (1979), ONE GENERATION (1980), and GENETHA (1981). Heath said that his work was ‘intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana’. Educated at Central High School, Georgetown, he worked as a Treasury clerk (1944-51) before leaving Guyana for England in 1951. He attended the University of London (1952-6), earning a B.A. Honours degree in Modern Languages. He also studied law and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1964 (and the Guyana bar in 1973), although he never practiced as a lawyer, pursuing a career since 1959 as a writer and a schoolteacher in London, where he lived until his death at the age of 81. In 1974 his first novel, A MAN COME HOME, was published. This was followed four years later by THE MURDERER (1978), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize that same year and was described by the Observer as ‘mysteriously authentic, and unique as a work of art’. His other published novels are KWAKU; OR, THE MAN WHO COULD NOT KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT (1982), OREALLA (1984), THE SHADOW BRIDE (1988) and THE MINISTRY OF HOPE (1997). Heath also wrote non-fiction, including SHADOWS ROUND THE MOON: CARIBBEAN MEMOIRS (1990), plays - INEZ COMBRAY was produced in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1972, in which year he won the Guyana Theatre Guild Award - and short stories. He was awarded the Guyana Literature Prize in 1989.
Tormented by the repressed emotions of her youth, Gentha eventually breaks away from a life of conventional respectability and boredom. She takes up a relationship with a ne'er-do-well called Fingers and realizes that she has "tasted the fruit of depravity and enjoyed it'. But in her efforts to please her lover and keep him, she is tricked into losing much more than his attentions. Destitute and lonely, she faces all the physical and mental symptoms of a life starved of real sustenance, in which she finds that the only pleasures that seem to be offered are those of the flesh.... Roy Heath brilliantly shows a character hounded as much by her own sense of propriety as by the rigid morality and vicious gossip of Georgetown, Guyana. With the story of Genetha, daughter of the ill-starred marriage described in From the Heat of the Day and sister of Rohan who featured in One Generation, he brings his haunting Guyanese trilogy to a powerful ending that would have been unthinkable at its outset.
Roy A(ubrey) K(elvin) Heath (13 August 1926 - 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer, most noted for his ‘Georgetown Trilogy’ of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as THE ARMSTRONG TRILOGY, 1994), consisting of FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY (1979), ONE GENERATION (1980), and GENETHA (1981). Heath said that his work was ‘intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana’. Educated at Central High School, Georgetown, he worked as a Treasury clerk (1944-51) before leaving Guyana for England in 1951. He attended the University of London (1952-6), earning a B.A. Honours degree in Modern Languages. He also studied law and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1964 (and the Guyana bar in 1973), although he never practiced as a lawyer, pursuing a career since 1959 as a writer and a schoolteacher in London, where he lived until his death at the age of 81. In 1974 his first novel, A MAN COME HOME, was published. This was followed four years later by THE MURDERER (1978), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize that same year and was described by the Observer as ‘mysteriously authentic, and unique as a work of art’. His other published novels are KWAKU; OR, THE MAN WHO COULD NOT KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT (1982), OREALLA (1984), THE SHADOW BRIDE (1988) and THE MINISTRY OF HOPE (1997). Heath also wrote non-fiction, including SHADOWS ROUND THE MOON: CARIBBEAN MEMOIRS (1990), plays - INEZ COMBRAY was produced in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1972, in which year he won the Guyana Theatre Guild Award - and short stories. He was awarded the Guyana Literature Prize in 1989.
KWAKU tells of the outrageous adventures of a unique character, part con-man, part Everyman, part Holy Fool, and is by far the best and funniest novel Roy Heath has yet written. It is a picaresque saga that follows Kwaku from his childhood dreams of a glorious destiny to his search for the ideal wife, the ideal job and the easy life. He pursues his dreams of wealth, happiness and position with a fanaticism that is only defeated by his own magnificent failings. Roy Heath is already acknowledged as an outstanding novelist. But in KWAKU his writing really begins to sing and he reaches new heights. It is brilliantly conceived and constructed - but above all, it is hugely enjoyable
Roy A(ubrey) K(elvin) Heath (13 August 1926 - 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer, most noted for his ‘Georgetown Trilogy’ of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as THE ARMSTRONG TRILOGY, 1994), consisting of FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY (1979), ONE GENERATION (1980), and GENETHA (1981). Heath said that his work was ‘intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana’. Educated at Central High School, Georgetown, he worked as a Treasury clerk (1944-51) before leaving Guyana for England in 1951. He attended the University of London (1952-6), earning a B.A. Honours degree in Modern Languages. He also studied law and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1964 (and the Guyana bar in 1973), although he never practiced as a lawyer, pursuing a career since 1959 as a writer and a schoolteacher in London, where he lived until his death at the age of 81. In 1974 his first novel, A MAN COME HOME, was published. This was followed four years later by THE MURDERER (1978), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize that same year and was described by the Observer as ‘mysteriously authentic, and unique as a work of art’. His other published novels are KWAKU; OR, THE MAN WHO COULD NOT KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT (1982), OREALLA (1984), THE SHADOW BRIDE (1988) and THE MINISTRY OF HOPE (1997). Heath also wrote non-fiction, including SHADOWS ROUND THE MOON: CARIBBEAN MEMOIRS (1990), plays - INEZ COMBRAY was produced in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1972, in which year he won the Guyana Theatre Guild Award - and short stories. He was awarded the Guyana Literature Prize in 1989.
This memorable story of domestic passions and jealousy continues the saga of the family Roy Heath first described in FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY. Much is changing in the Armstrong household in Georgetown, Guyana. As one generation inexorably gives way to the next, Rohan supplants his father in his sister's attentions. She resents his growing involvement with Indrani, a married East Indian woman, while finding it hard to form satisfactory relationships of her Plagued by feelings of remorse about the past and displeasure at his sister, Rohan leaves home and takes a job up-river, near where Indrani lives with her in-laws. His presence has an unsettling effect on this tightly-knit community where everybody watches everybody else and the threat of scandal is constant. And out of an atmosphere of charged emotion comes an unexpected and horrifying climax. Roy Heath's sharp eye for place and character and his masterly control of language have enabled him to build up this intimate and compelling picture of a society of richly different individuals (which will be further explored in the last volume of this trilogy, GENETHA). His widely-acclaimed novel THE MURDERER won the 1978 Guardian Fiction Prize, and his other work includes short stories and essays published in his native Guyana and a first novel, A MAN COME HOME (1974), which The Times described as "a concise, unsentimental masterpiece".
Roy A(ubrey) K(elvin) Heath (13 August 1926 - 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer, most noted for his ‘Georgetown Trilogy’ of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as THE ARMSTRONG TRILOGY, 1994), consisting of FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY (1979), ONE GENERATION (1980), and GENETHA (1981). Heath said that his work was ‘intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana’. Educated at Central High School, Georgetown, he worked as a Treasury clerk (1944-51) before leaving Guyana for England in 1951. He attended the University of London (1952-6), earning a B.A. Honours degree in Modern Languages. He also studied law and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1964 (and the Guyana bar in 1973), although he never practiced as a lawyer, pursuing a career since 1959 as a writer and a schoolteacher in London, where he lived until his death at the age of 81. In 1974 his first novel, A MAN COME HOME, was published. This was followed four years later by THE MURDERER (1978), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize that same year and was described by the Observer as ‘mysteriously authentic, and unique as a work of art’. His other published novels are KWAKU; OR, THE MAN WHO COULD NOT KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT (1982), OREALLA (1984), THE SHADOW BRIDE (1988) and THE MINISTRY OF HOPE (1997). Heath also wrote non-fiction, including SHADOWS ROUND THE MOON: CARIBBEAN MEMOIRS (1990), plays - INEZ COMBRAY was produced in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1972, in which year he won the Guyana Theatre Guild Award - and short stories. He was awarded the Guyana Literature Prize in 1989.
When both his parents die, Galton Flood, a man raised in Guyana, leaves Georgetown for the townships of Wismar and Mackenzie, where he meets Gemma and encounters multiracial conflicts, disintegrating tenement blocks, and his own paranoia. 'Against the vague mist-enshrouded riverscape of Georgetown, Guyana, a picture of a lost soul emerges that is mysteriously authentic and unique as a work of art' — Stephen Vaughan, The Observer. 'The Murderer is a tense study of the violence set off in Galton Flood, a young man ruined by his unsuccessful struggle against a dominating and fiercely puritanical mother. The background is vividly rendered and Roy Heath has a fine eye for the significant detail ... in the more realistic tradition, Roy Heath promises much' — Martin Seymour-Smith, Financial Times. 'This haunting tale of a mind falling into madness is taut with suspense' — Eddie Woods, Morning Star. 'Galton —weak, unreliable, unloveable, introspective, pitiable — is a character who might have been created by Dostoievsky; and the fact that that comparison comes to mind suggests the strength and validity of Mr Heath's conception of him .. Few weeks bring a novel in which not a single character is a stereotype and the chief character is unique' — Francis King, Spectator. 'A writer who must surely be ranked with the best of the Caribbean school ... a notable study of paranoia, remarkable for its psychological insight and the restraint of its climax . Observation, tolerance, vivid locale, make it difficult to forget the sombre figure haunting the riverside with his ghosts and delusions' — Christopher Wordsworth, The Guardian.
Roy A(ubrey) K(elvin) Heath (13 August 1926 - 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer, most noted for his ‘Georgetown Trilogy’ of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as THE ARMSTRONG TRILOGY, 1994), consisting of FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY (1979), ONE GENERATION (1980), and GENETHA (1981). Heath said that his work was ‘intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana’. Educated at Central High School, Georgetown, he worked as a Treasury clerk (1944-51) before leaving Guyana for England in 1951. He attended the University of London (1952-6), earning a B.A. Honours degree in Modern Languages. He also studied law and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1964 (and the Guyana bar in 1973), although he never practiced as a lawyer, pursuing a career since 1959 as a writer and a schoolteacher in London, where he lived until his death at the age of 81. In 1974 his first novel, A MAN COME HOME, was published. This was followed four years later by THE MURDERER (1978), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize that same year and was described by the Observer as ‘mysteriously authentic, and unique as a work of art’. His other published novels are KWAKU; OR, THE MAN WHO COULD NOT KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT (1982), OREALLA (1984), THE SHADOW BRIDE (1988) and THE MINISTRY OF HOPE (1997). Heath also wrote non-fiction, including SHADOWS ROUND THE MOON: CARIBBEAN MEMOIRS (1990), plays - INEZ COMBRAY was produced in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1972, in which year he won the Guyana Theatre Guild Award - and short stories. He was awarded the Guyana Literature Prize in 1989.
Human desires, yearnings and mysteries run close to the surface in Orealla, set in the sultry atmosphere of Guyana's capital, Georgetown, where decadence and the promise of excitement flourish among avenues of jacaranda and secret back yards. This is the world of Ben, who is suspended between the poles of two women of contrasting dispositions but is unable to find peace with either. Haunted by a restlessness born of being able and educated yet having to submit to the humiliation of serving a man he does not respect, he glimpses the tantalizing vision of a different way of life through his strange friendship with the aboriginal Indian Carl from Orealla - a village which seems doomed to lose its battle against the advance of an alien civilization. Ben finds his situation increasingly intolerable and his revenge, when it comes, is devastating. But is it revenge on his master and on the world, or on himself? Roy Heath, acknowledged for his skill at portraying human psychology at its most profound, knows his characters on a level where they hardly know themselves, and in this brimming but brilliantly controlled new novel he presents a community of people who respond fervently and with humour to life's ironies and passions.
Roy A(ubrey) K(elvin) Heath (13 August 1926 - 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer, most noted for his ‘Georgetown Trilogy’ of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as THE ARMSTRONG TRILOGY, 1994), consisting of FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY (1979), ONE GENERATION (1980), and GENETHA (1981). Heath said that his work was ‘intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana’. He was awarded the Guyana Literature Prize in 1989.
Roy Heath's novels have established him as not only one of the Caribbean's leading writers, but, in Edward Blishen's words, 'simply one of the most astonishingly good novelists of our time'. Now, in the first volume of his autobiography, Roy describes his early years, whose experiences have supplied a rich basis for much of his fiction. Born in Guyana, when it was still a British colony, into a family whose roots lay far back in the islands of the West Indies, Roy spent his childhood amidst the vibrant culture of pre-war Georgetown. In a glorious panorama of a multicultural society he provides unforgettable portraits of friends and neighbours, and most of all of his family - his widowed mother, struggling to bring up her children; his grandfather, holding sway over a large household; his admired elder brother, Sonny, later to suffer a tragic mental breakdown. Roy describes the ever-changing scenery of his family life, his schooldays and early working years, and draws out the influences that will eventually lead him, in his mid-twenties, to leave Guyana for a new life in Britain. The result, written with the warmth, humour and acute observation that have come to characterize Roy Heath's novels, is a portrayal both of an extended family and a society in transition. Adrift between a failing colonial past and an uncertain future, Heath's Guyana is a memorable compound of brooding landscapes, slowly evolving cultures and social and political restlessness. While its evocation of bygone experience invites comparison with the best of V. S. Naipaul, Roy Heath’s own distinctive voice transforms Shadows Round the Moon inot a classic of its kind.
Roy A(ubrey) K(elvin) Heath (13 August 1926 - 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer, most noted for his ‘Georgetown Trilogy’ of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as THE ARMSTRONG TRILOGY, 1994), consisting of FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY (1979), ONE GENERATION (1980), and GENETHA (1981). Heath said that his work was ‘intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana’. Educated at Central High School, Georgetown, he worked as a Treasury clerk (1944-51) before leaving Guyana for England in 1951. He attended the University of London (1952-6), earning a B.A. Honours degree in Modern Languages. He also studied law and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1964 (and the Guyana bar in 1973), although he never practiced as a lawyer, pursuing a career since 1959 as a writer and a schoolteacher in London, where he lived until his death at the age of 81. In 1974 his first novel, A MAN COME HOME, was published. This was followed four years later by THE MURDERER (1978), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize that same year and was described by the Observer as ‘mysteriously authentic, and unique as a work of art’. His other published novels are KWAKU; OR, THE MAN WHO COULD NOT KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT (1982), OREALLA (1984), THE SHADOW BRIDE (1988) and THE MINISTRY OF HOPE (1997). Heath also wrote non-fiction, including SHADOWS ROUND THE MOON: CARIBBEAN MEMOIRS (1990), plays - INEZ COMBRAY was produced in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1972, in which year he won the Guyana Theatre Guild Award - and short stories. He was awarded the Guyana Literature Prize in 1989.
Kwaku is back; a small-time chiseller and ineffective healer in a village in Guyana but now down in the dumps: his wife has gone blind, his twin sons brutalize him, he is toppled from his perch as a healer and becomes once again the laughing stock of all and sundry. But fate intervenes, and Kwaku's fortunes are resurrected as he makes his way to Georgetown to become a dealer in 'antique' chamber pots. With a recommendation and some borrowed cash from an old woman whose son has become a government minister, he embarks on an odyssey in search of riches, only to find himself a lowly servant of the corrupt minister who steals his ideas and sends him on demeaning errands designed to further the minister's financial scams, sexual peccadillos and political intrigues. Kwaku now faces the dilemma of going under - the fate of so many who migrate from the country to the town - or adapting his character to suit his urban existence. What distinguishes this novel is the closely observed psychological metamorphosis of Kwaku. Just barely escaping from a murderous gang, he finally succeeds in establishing himself as a respected, wealthy citizen - whilst remaining, of course, his own inimitable, infuriating, brilliantly engaging self. In this bright and comic novel, Roy Heath deals vividly with the social and political conflicts and conundrums facing the nouveaux riches in the third world and the staggeringly poor, emerging into independence and unheard-of prospects. The colourful language of the characters is perfectly captured, and their shenanigans and valour are depicted with wit and compassion.
Roy A(ubrey) K(elvin) Heath (13 August 1926 - 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer, most noted for his ‘Georgetown Trilogy’ of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as THE ARMSTRONG TRILOGY, 1994), consisting of FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY (1979), ONE GENERATION (1980), and GENETHA (1981). Heath said that his work was ‘intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana’. He was awarded the Guyana Literature Prize in 1989.
The story begins in the late 1920s with Betta Singh's return from his medical studies in Dublin to Guyana and the opulent chaos of his mother's household. Mrs. Singh, a curiously vulnerable widow and fiercely possessive mother, wears pants and gives orders like a man. She wants her son to stay with her and open a private practice, but Betta is determined to devote his expertise to those who need it most - his own people, the destitute descendants of immigrants from India. He rejects the insulated world of his mother's home and once again leaves her, accepting an appointment as a Government Medical Officer on a sugar plantation run by British expatriates. In the midst of battling both the malaria that is widespread among the workers and the corruption of the plantation manager. Betta marries - a step which further antagonizes his mother, who has now allied herself with the Pujaree, an influential Hindu religious leader. Ultimately, the myriad of family, religious, and racial conflicts escalate, with consequences that are brutal and far-reaching for all.
Roy A(ubrey) K(elvin) Heath (13 August 1926 - 14 May 2008) was a Guyanese writer, most noted for his ‘Georgetown Trilogy’ of novels (also published in an omnibus volume as THE ARMSTRONG TRILOGY, 1994), consisting of FROM THE HEAT OF THE DAY (1979), ONE GENERATION (1980), and GENETHA (1981). Heath said that his work was ‘intended to be a dramatic chronicle of twentieth-century Guyana’. Educated at Central High School, Georgetown, he worked as a Treasury clerk (1944-51) before leaving Guyana for England in 1951. He attended the University of London (1952-6), earning a B.A. Honours degree in Modern Languages. He also studied law and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1964 (and the Guyana bar in 1973), although he never practiced as a lawyer, pursuing a career since 1959 as a writer and a schoolteacher in London, where he lived until his death at the age of 81. In 1974 his first novel, A MAN COME HOME, was published. This was followed four years later by THE MURDERER (1978), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize that same year and was described by the Observer as ‘mysteriously authentic, and unique as a work of art’. His other published novels are KWAKU; OR, THE MAN WHO COULD NOT KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT (1982), OREALLA (1984), THE SHADOW BRIDE (1988) and THE MINISTRY OF HOPE (1997). Heath also wrote non-fiction, including SHADOWS ROUND THE MOON: CARIBBEAN MEMOIRS (1990), plays - INEZ COMBRAY was produced in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1972, in which year he won the Guyana Theatre Guild Award - and short stories. He was awarded the Guyana Literature Prize in 1989.
This book is a complete history of Haiti from 1492 to the end of 1995. The first edition was and remains the most complete history of Haiti ever written in English and one of the most complete in any language. This second edition, revised and expanded by Michael Heinl, contains two more chapters as well as updated information to make it a must read for anyone interested in the history of Haiti and its people.
Robert Debs Heinl, deceased, and Nancy Gordon Heinl, both writers and historians, lived in Haiti from 1959 to 1963. Robert Heinl was Chief of the U.S. Naval Mission to Haiti until he was declared persona non grata by François Duvalier. He retired from the Marine Corps in 1964 and wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column until his death in 1979. Nancy Gordon Heinl was an independent writer and journalist who wrote extensively on black history and voodoo. Born in London, she came to the United States in 1933. She died in 1997.
This anthology of literature, published in commemoration of Jamaica’s achievement of political independence on August 6,1962, covers the whole range of Jamaican prose and poetry from the writers of the early 20th century, Tom Redcam and H. G. de Lisser, to the poets, novelists, historians and short story writers of today. There are 12 short stories, 35 poems (from 28 poets), extracts from five published novels and specimens of autobiography, history, folklore and humour. The introduction is contributed by Peter Abrahams, the South African novelist who has now made his home in Jamaica where he is well known as a radio commentator and editor. Nearly all of the material has already appeared in print — some in distinguished papers and magazines - the New Yorker and. the Christian Science Monitor, for example - and some items are very well known to Jamaicans, such as Claude McKay’s famous ‘Flameheart.’ On the other hand there are a few unpublished items, among them some pages from the autobiography of W. Adolphe Roberts which is now in progress. The first and longest story is by John Hearne, the best known and most prolific of the post-war Jamaican novelist. An adventure story of a man who loved shooting as others loved women, it also portrays vividly the clash of two personalities. The other short stories deal with many subjects including Jamaica’s history, village life and legend. Not forgotten, too, are the children for whom some items are specially included. The poetry section is as varied as the short stories, both in style and subject matter. There is the carefully constructed sonnet form of the Poet Laureate of Jamaica, J. E. Clare McFarlane, and the free verse of younger writers, while the historical poems of W. Adolphe Roberts and Philip Sherlock vie wit4h the more personal evocation of Louis Simpson and the descriptive verse of Vivian Virtue. The novels from which extracts are taken present various aspects of Jamaican life - that of a domestic servant in de Lisser’s ‘Susan Proudleigh,’ that of the last century in Vic Reid’s New Day’ or the underworld of western Kingston in Brother Man’ of Roger Mais. Humour, too, is not omitted and Louise Bennett is represented both by a tale of Anancy and by one of her humorous verses. Also in this section is an example of a humorist of a different type, A. E. T. Henry, who used to bring many a laugh to Jamaican lips through a weekly newspaper column some twenty years ago. The variety of Jamaican literature included herein is wide-ranging in subject matter, style and treatment. There is something to suit all tastes.
A ravishingly beautiful modern-day illuminated manuscript created by a brilliant young Jamaican artist who weaves together in words and paintings the story of her mother’s life and death. Anna Ruth Henriques began the extraordinary pages that would become THE BOOK OF MECHTILDE at the kitchen table in her grandparents’ house outside Kingston, Jamaica, where she grew up. She was twenty-two years old, and for the next seven years she worked on it as an act of love, to both celebrate and mourn her mother, Sheila Mechtilde Henriques, who had died of breast cancer when Anna was eleven years old. Inspired by texts from the Book of Job, Anna tells her mother’s story - her youth, her love for her husband and their happy marriage, the birth of her daughters, her slow illness, death, and final peace-all in the form of a fable, sometimes in prose, sometimes in poetry. Each scene is illustrated with a painting encircled with calligraphy and set in a gold border of flowers, fruit, or symbolic creatures. Both the story and the paintings are enriched by Anna’s remarkable family heritage-Jewish and Christian, European, African, Chinese, Indian, and Creole-and by her amazing drive to use her enormous artistic gifts to transform loss into a passionate celebration of life.
ANNA RUTH HENRIQUES is a U.S.-based jeweler, visual artist, and writer who moves adeptly between each genre. Jamaican-born and raised, Anna has resided in France, Spain, England and japan, each culture contributing to the universality and richness of her work. she completed her BA.at Williams College, and MFA. at the university of California, San Diego. her new jewelry collection focuses on unusual yet highly wearable gemstone combinations as well as finely sculpted organic forms. Anna recently won a jewelry design competition that sent her to India to create a collection for future brilliance, an afghan charity. her paintings are in the permanent collections of new york’s el museo del barrio and the jewish museum, as well as the national gallery of jamaica. she is the author and illustrator of the book of mechtilde (knopf). she played the leading role in artist eleanor antin’s feature-length film, man without a world. anna presently lives in new york city.
For more than half a century, C. L. R. James (1901–1989)—’the Black Plato,’ as coined by the London Times—has been an internationally renowned revolutionary thinker, writer, and activist. Born in Trinidad, his lifelong work was devoted to understanding and transforming race and class exploitation in his native West Indies, as well as in Britain and the United States. In C. L. R. JAMES’S CARIBBEAN, noted scholars examine the roots of both James’s life and oeuvre in connection with the economic, social, and political environment of the West Indies. Drawing upon James’s observations of his own life as revealed to interviewers and close friends, this volume provides an examination of James’s childhood and early years as colonial literatteur and his massive contribution to West Indian political-cultural understanding. Moving beyond previous biographical interpretations, the contributors here take up the problem of reading James’s texts in light of poststructuralist criticism, the implications of his texts for Marxist discourse, and for problems of Caribbean development. ‘These penetrating studies throw much-needed light both on C. L. R. James and the Caribbean worlds about which he cared so much. . . . Required reading for all who would like to understand James’s varied work.’ - David Barry Gaspar, author of BONDMEN AND REBELS. ‘This volume is a provocative and powerful introduction to the political and literary writings of C. L. R. James, one of the twentieth century’s greatest intellectuals of the left. This creative collection explores new dimensions of James’s thought and is essential reading for those interested in the black intellectual tradition of the Caribbean in literature, politics, and history.’ - Manning Marable, University of Colorado at Boulder.
Paget Henry, a native of Antigua, is Associate Professor of Sociology and Afro-American Studies at Brown University. His books include PERIPHERAL CAPITALISM AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT IN ANTIGUA. Paul Buhle is the author of C. L. R. JAMES: HIS LIFE AND WORK.
Frank Hercules’ second book, I WANT A BLACK DOLL, published in 1967, takes on a bleaker tone than his previous novel, WHEN THE HUMMINGBIRD SINGS, although it does retain some comic elements. The novel traces the troubled path and the eventual dissolution into violence of an interracial marriage. When John Lincoln, recently graduated as a doctor, met and married Barbara Wakeley, a beautiful Southern girl in her final year at university, they moved to New York and prepared to face the normal tensions of early married life - but with one great difference: John Lincoln was a Negro. There have been many novels with a racial theme, but I Want a Black Doll is the first to show the social stresses from both blacks and whites to which a mixed marriage is subject - even a marriage between two intelligent, loving, deeply civilized people who believe they are aware of, and can face, humiliating discrimination, embarrassment for one’s own ethnic group or patronage from one’s partner’s. For all its intensity, it is written without bitterness - often, indeed, with warm humour and a keen eye for the ridiculous as Frank Hercules, himself a Trinidadian, shows up the excesses of whites and blacks in a wide range of characters drawn from every social level. But it is in his ability to convey the inmost thoughts and feelings of white men, and above all of a white woman, that he displays to best advantage the insight and imaginative power that are the hallmarks of the born novelist. And in its powerful progression towards a disaster rendered inevitable by the very qualities in John and Barbara that first drew them together, his novel has the fateful air of a Greek tragedy. This is not a pretty book. It IS impassioned; immensely powerful; intensely interesting; grippingly written; frequently brutal; but always fascinating.
A fixture of intellectual life for several decades in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, Frank Hercules was uniquely situated to understand the American racial dilemma. Born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, he arrived in New York as a young man after a turbulent life that had already been touched by the racism of British colonialism. In novels and nonfiction writings that included several widely circulated magazine articles, Hercules scrutinized both Trinidadian and American societies.
When John Lincoln, recently graduated as a doctor, met and married Barbara Wakeley, a beautiful Southern girl in her final year at university, they moved to New York and prepared to face the normal tensions of early married life - but with one great difference: John Lincoln was a Negro. There have been many novels with a racial theme, but I Want a Black Doll is the first to show the social stresses from both blacks and whites to which a mixed marriage is subject - even a marriage between two intelligent, loving, deeply civilized people who believe they are aware of, and can face, humiliating discrimination, embarrassment for one’s own ethnic group or patronage from one’s partner’s. For all its intensity, it is written without bitterness - often, indeed, with warm humour and a keen eye for the ridiculous as Frank Hercules, himself a Trinidadian, shows up the excesses of whites and blacks in a wide range of characters drawn from every social level. But it is in his ability to convey the inmost thoughts and feelings of white men, and above all of a white woman, that he displays to best advantage the insight and imaginative power that are the hallmarks of the born novelist. And in its powerful progression towards a disaster rendered inevitable by the very qualities in John and Barbara that first drew them together, his novel has the fateful air of a Greek tragedy. This is not a pretty book. It IS impassioned; immensely powerful; intensely interesting; grippingly written; frequently brutal; but always fascinating.
A fixture of intellectual life for several decades in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, Frank Hercules was uniquely situated to understand the American racial dilemma. Born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, he arrived in New York as a young man after a turbulent life that had already been touched by the racism of British colonialism. In novels and nonfiction writings that included several widely circulated magazine articles, Hercules scrutinized both Trinidadian and American societies.
This is the dazzling, exuberant, hilarious story of Johnny Sebastian Alexander Caesar Octavian de Paria. Despite the aphrodisiac climate of Trinidad, despite oceans of rum, tons of spices, scores of carnivals, and hordes of ardent young ladies, Johnny is still resolutely a virgin at the age of twenty-one. It is also the story of Aunt Jocasta, a woman of great dignity and Himalayan proportions; Professor Wolfgang von Buffus zu Damnitz, the world’s leading authority on urinometrics and everything else; Joe Caldeira, a Portuguese bartender by occupation, a sweetman in his leisure; and Marcellin Gros-Caucaud, a magnificent African of awesome sexual power. In the town of San Fernando, Trinidad, from a swaying hammock under a graceful palm to the smoky interior of the Black Cat Bar, life is joyous for Johnny and his friends. But not for long. A crime of passion, a failed business venture, a venomous snake, and they are all forced to leave paradise. Their chosen route of escape is a sea voyage to England. On the high seas, too, despite the persistent advances of a radish-faced Englishwoman whose rigidity of spine extends to her upper lip, Johnny still preserves his virginity. The ocean liner docks in transit at Madeira, and by grand design Johnny and his entourage converge upon a whorehouse, where they are presented to the cream of local society: a Catholic prelate, a chief rabbi, the prefect of police, a pimp. Now the action really gets rolling. ON LEAVING PARADISE is an elegantly written fable, a pungent satire of colonialism, a sunlit mockery of manners, and above all a grand celebration of youth and sex, lone, and life.
A fixture of intellectual life for several decades in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, Frank Hercules was uniquely situated to understand the American racial dilemma. Born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, he arrived in New York as a young man after a turbulent life that had already been touched by the racism of British colonialism. In novels and nonfiction writings that included several widely circulated magazine articles, Hercules scrutinized both Trinidadian and American societies.
When Mrs. Napoleon Walker, the wife of a wealthy Negro doctor in Port of Spain, selects guests for her famous parties, she uses only one measuring rod - the color of their skins. When Mervyn Herrick, a brilliant Negro lawyer, contemplates a Trinidad governed by the Trinidadians, he wishes the British would rule forever. When Dr. Ivor Griffiths, the eccentric Welsh physician, thinks of the island’s British population, he wishes them all at the bottom of the sea. And when the Governor’s aide-de-camp, who has been having an affair with the Governor’s wife, tells his superior of the alliance, the old boy secretly relishes the thought of what is in store for his young subordinate. Frank Hercules combines these characters with humor and insight in his highly readable novel. To him Trinidad is its people, and his compassion for their ambitions, shortcomings, and human foibles is evident in every situation he creates. In WHERE THE HUMMINGBIRD FLIES, the West Indian island of Trinidad ceases to be the paradise it is often pictured, and becomes Trinidad as it really is - an island anxious for independence but fearful of cutting itself adrift in what might prove to be not merely an unknown but a stormy sea. FRANK HERCULES was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and educated in London at the University Tutorial College and at the well-known school of law the Middle Temple. From 1946 to 1956 he was a business executive; his full-time occupation now is writing. Mr. Hercules became an American citizen in 1959, and lives in New York City. WHERE THE HUMMINGBIRD FLIES is his first novel. .
A fixture of intellectual life for several decades in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, Frank Hercules was uniquely situated to understand the American racial dilemma. Born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, he arrived in New York as a young man after a turbulent life that had already been touched by the racism of British colonialism. In novels and nonfiction writings that included several widely circulated magazine articles, Hercules scrutinized both Trinidadian and American societies.
A study of the territories of the Netherlands in the Western Hemisphere from the discovery of the New World to the 1940s. Contents include chapters on Curacao, The Rise of Surinam and The Slave Insurrections, oil refineries, government, effects of war and more. Indexed with tables and photo plates.
Philip Hanson Hiss was an architectural designer whose career also included photography, public service and public information. Mr. Hiss had been a chairman of the trustees of New College in Sarasota, Fla., and chairman of the Sarasota school board, in which capacity he supervised the redesigning of the Sarasota schools. He also designed and built homes in Florida, although he was not a trained architect. For a time after World War II, Mr. Hiss was a regional director of the United States Information Agency in the Netherlands. He was the author of ''Bali'' and ''Netherlands America,'' photographic histories for which he contributed both pictures and text. Hiss died on October 24, 1988 after a long illness. He was 78 years old and lived in Monterey, California.
The world of CRICK CRACK, MONKEY is a dual one. Tee, the central character, is suspended between the warmth, spontaneity and exuberance of Tantie’s household, into which she and her brother are received when their father emigrates to England, and the formality and pretension of Aunt Beatrice’s world, which Tee is obliged to accept when she wins a scholarship. Tee’s initiation into the negro middle class is an uneasy one: she is confused and disturbed by the discrimination of colour and class that she learns at Aunt Beatrice’s hands and by the attitudes and values that divide her two aunts. The dislocation that Tee feels, the sense of alienation aroused by her discovery of a society marked by its gentility and affectation, the consequent erosion of dignity, early memories of happiness, ultimately Tee’s integration with the factitious world of Aunt Beatrice - these shifting perceptions find no resolution, only acknowledgment that coherence will require a mature revaluation of her experience.
Merle Hodge (born 1944) is a Trinidadian novelist and critic. Her 1970 novel Crick Crack, Monkey is a classic of West Indian literature. Merle Hodge was born in 1944, in Curepe, Trinidad, the daughter of an immigration officer. She received both her elementary and high-school education in Trinidad, and as a student of Bishop Anstey High School, she won the Trinidad and Tobago Girls' Island Scholarship in 1962. The scholarship allowed her to attend University College, London, where she pursued studies in French. In 1965 she completed her B.A. Hons. and received a Master of Philosophy degree in 1967, the focus of which concerned the poetry of the French Guyanese writer Léon Damas. Hodge did quite a bit of traveling after obtaining her degree, working as a typist and baby-sitter to make ends meet. She spent much time in France and Denmark but visited many other countries in both Eastern and Western Europe. After returning to Trinidad in the early 1970s, she taught French for a short time at the junior secondary level. She then received a lecturing position in the French Department at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Jamaica. At UWI she also began the pursuit of a Ph.D. in French Caribbean Literature. In 1979 Maurice Bishop became prime minister of Grenada, and Hodge went there to work with the Bishop regime. She was appointed director of the development of curriculum, and it was her job to develop and install a socialist education program. Hodge had to leave Grenada in 1983 because of the execution of Bishop and the resulting U.S. invasion. Hodge is currently working in Women and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. To date, Merle Hodge has written two novels: Crick Crack, Monkey (1970) and The Life of Laetitia, which was published more than two decades later, in 1993. Hodge's first novel, Crick Crack, Monkey, concerns the conflicts and changes a young girl, Tee, faces as she switches from a rural Trinidadian existence with her Aunt Tantie to an urban, anglicized existence with her Aunt Beatrice. With Tee as narrator, Hodge guides the reader through an intensely personal study of the effects of the colonial imposition of various social and cultural values on the Trinidadian female. Tee recounts the various dilemmas in her life in such a way that it is often difficult to separate the voice of the child, experiencing, from the voice of the woman, reminiscing; in this manner, Hodge broadens the scope of the text considerably. Cultural appropriation, when those who are colonized appropriate the culture of the colonizers, is exemplifed in the story of Crick Crack Monkey. The Life of Laetitia (1993), the story of a young Caribbean girl's first year at school away from home, was well received, one review calling it 'a touching, beautifully written coming-of-age story set in Trinidad'. Hodge has also published various essays concerning life in the Caribbean and the life and works of Léon Damas, including a translation of Damas's collection of poetry, Pigments.
Twelve-year-old Lacey is thrilled to be the first in her family to be admitted to secondary school, even though it means leaving her small Caribbean village and moving into town. As the first in her family to go to secondary school, twelve-year-old Lacey struggles with a variety of problems including a cruel teacher and a difficult home life with her father and stepmother.
Merle Hodge (born 1944) is a Trinidadian novelist and critic. Her 1970 novel Crick Crack, Monkey is a classic of West Indian literature. Merle Hodge was born in 1944, in Curepe, Trinidad, the daughter of an immigration officer. She received both her elementary and high-school education in Trinidad, and as a student of Bishop Anstey High School, she won the Trinidad and Tobago Girls' Island Scholarship in 1962. The scholarship allowed her to attend University College, London, where she pursued studies in French. In 1965 she completed her B.A. Hons. and received a Master of Philosophy degree in 1967, the focus of which concerned the poetry of the French Guyanese writer Léon Damas. Hodge did quite a bit of traveling after obtaining her degree, working as a typist and baby-sitter to make ends meet. She spent much time in France and Denmark but visited many other countries in both Eastern and Western Europe. After returning to Trinidad in the early 1970s, she taught French for a short time at the junior secondary level. She then received a lecturing position in the French Department at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Jamaica. At UWI she also began the pursuit of a Ph.D. in French Caribbean Literature. In 1979 Maurice Bishop became prime minister of Grenada, and Hodge went there to work with the Bishop regime. She was appointed director of the development of curriculum, and it was her job to develop and install a socialist education program. Hodge had to leave Grenada in 1983 because of the execution of Bishop and the resulting U.S. invasion. Hodge is currently working in Women and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad. To date, Merle Hodge has written two novels: Crick Crack, Monkey (1970) and The Life of Laetitia, which was published more than two decades later, in 1993. Hodge's first novel, Crick Crack, Monkey, concerns the conflicts and changes a young girl, Tee, faces as she switches from a rural Trinidadian existence with her Aunt Tantie to an urban, anglicized existence with her Aunt Beatrice. With Tee as narrator, Hodge guides the reader through an intensely personal study of the effects of the colonial imposition of various social and cultural values on the Trinidadian female. Tee recounts the various dilemmas in her life in such a way that it is often difficult to separate the voice of the child, experiencing, from the voice of the woman, reminiscing; in this manner, Hodge broadens the scope of the text considerably. Cultural appropriation, when those who are colonized appropriate the culture of the colonizers, is exemplifed in the story of Crick Crack Monkey. The Life of Laetitia (1993), the story of a young Caribbean girl's first year at school away from home, was well received, one review calling it 'a touching, beautifully written coming-of-age story set in Trinidad'. Hodge has also published various essays concerning life in the Caribbean and the life and works of Léon Damas, including a translation of Damas's collection of poetry, Pigments.
This is a collection of folk tales from the exotic island of Trinidad, woven out of the vivid legends that live in the minds of the island's handsome inhabitants. Witchcraft and curses that spell death hang in the air, with happiness always just a step away from disaster. The distinctions between man, nature, and the animal world blur and recede when a hunter shakes off the evil of the city and glides lithely into the forest, when a boa constrictor comes to the aid of a young married couple, or when a servant girl hears the beckoning call of the sea god. There is about these tales a dream quality - of women in dresses, men in bright shirts and pantaloons, their sudden joys, and their no less sudden griefs. Moving in a rhythm of their own, streaked by the wild logic of pagan lore, these stories of a place in the Caribbean where fact and fancy entwine are enchanting.
Geoffrey Lamont Holder (August 1, 1930 – October 5, 2014) was a Trinidadian-American actor, voice actor, dancer, choreographer, singer, director and painter. He was known for his height (6 ft 6 in, 1.98 m), "hearty laugh", and heavily accented bass voice combined with precise diction. He is particularly remembered as the villain Baron Samedi in the 1973 Bond-movie Live and Let Die and for his 7 Up commercials of the 1970s and 80s.
The lushness of language and the landscape, wild contrasts, and pure storytelling magic abound in this anthology of Caribbean writing. Steeped in the tradition of fabulism, where the irrational and inexplicable coexist with the realities of daily life, the stories in this collection are infused with a vitality and freshness that most writing traditions have long ago lost. From spectral slaving ships to women who shed their skin at night to become owls, stories from writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Marcia Douglas, Ian MacDonald, and Kamau Brathwaite pulse with rhythms, visions, and the tortured history of this spiritually rich region of the world.
NALO HOPKINSON was born on December 20, 1960 in Jamaica and grew up in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada. The daughter of a poet/playwright and a library technician, she has won the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award for Emerging Writers, and her most recent book, the award-winning short fiction collection SKIN FOLK, was selected in 2002 for the New York Times Summer Reading List and was one of the New York Times Best Books of the Year. She is also the author of BROWN GIRL IN THE RING and MIDNIGHT ROBBER and editor of MOJO: CONJURE STORIES. Hopkinson lives in Toronto.
A landmark anthology of contemporary Caribbean literature. Includes selections of short stories, novel excerpts, and poems by such writers as: Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, John Hearne, Daniel Samaroo Joseph, V. S. Reid, Frank Collymore, Roger Mais, Austin Clarke, George Lamming, Karl Sealy, A.N. Forde, Alejandro Carpentier, Aime Cesaire and Samuel Selvon, just to name a few. The book is divided up into an English section, a Dutch section, a French section and a Spanish section.
Barbara Howes (May 1, 1914 New York City - February 24, 1996 Bennington, Vermont) was an American poet. She was adopted by well-to-do Massachusetts family, and reared chiefly in Chestnut Hill, where she attended Beaver Country Day School. She graduated from Bennington College in 1937. She worked briefly for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Mississippi, and then edited the literary magazine, Chimera, from 1943 to 1947 and lived in Greenwich Village. In 1947 she married the poet William Jay Smith, and they lived for a time in England and Italy. They had two sons, David Smith, and Gregory. They divorced in the mid-1960s, and she lived in Pownal, Vermont. In 1971, she signed a letter protesting proposed cuts to the School of the Arts, Columbia University. Her work was published in, Atlantic, Chicago Review, New Directions, New Republic, New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Saturday Review, Southern Review, University of Kansas Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Yale Review.
A landmark anthology of contemporary Caribbean literature. Includes selections of short stories, novel excerpts, and poems by such writers as: Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, John Hearne, Daniel Samaroo Joseph, V. S. Reid, Frank Collymore, Roger Mais, Austin Clarke, George Lamming, Karl Sealy, A.N. Forde, Alejandro Carpentier, Aime Cesaire and Samuel Selvon, just to name a few. The book is divided up into an English section, a Dutch section, a French section and a Spanish section.
Barbara Howes (May 1, 1914 New York City - February 24, 1996 Bennington, Vermont) was an American poet. She was adopted by well-to-do Massachusetts family, and reared chiefly in Chestnut Hill, where she attended Beaver Country Day School. She graduated from Bennington College in 1937. She worked briefly for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Mississippi, and then edited the literary magazine, Chimera, from 1943 to 1947 and lived in Greenwich Village. In 1947 she married the poet William Jay Smith, and they lived for a time in England and Italy. They had two sons, David Smith, and Gregory. They divorced in the mid-1960s, and she lived in Pownal, Vermont. In 1971, she signed a letter protesting proposed cuts to the School of the Arts, Columbia University. Her work was published in, Atlantic, Chicago Review, New Directions, New Republic, New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Saturday Review, Southern Review, University of Kansas Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Yale Review.
Various translators. Poems by: Jean Brierre (Haiti), Roussan Camille (Haiti), Aimé Césaire (Martinique), Leon Damas (French Guiana), Oswald Durand (Haiti), Luc Grimard (Haiti), Louis Morpeau (Haiti), Ignace Nau (Haiti), Charles F. Pressoir (Haiti), Jacques Roumain (Haiti), Emile Roumer (Haiti), Normil Sylvain (Haiti), Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (Haiti), Isaac Toussaint-L'Ouverture (Haiti), Duraciné Vaval (Haiti), Christian Werleigh (Haiti).
Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. He moved to New York City when he was 19 years old to attend Columbia University. He was one of the most versatile writers of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Though known primarily as a poet, Hughes also wrote plays, essays, novels, and a series of short stories that featured a black Everyman named Jesse B. Semple. His writing is characterized by simplicity and realism and, as he once said, ‘people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten.’ POPO AND FIFINA, written in collaboration with fellow poet Arna Bontemps, was his first novel written especially for children. Arna Bontemps (1902-1973) was born in Louisiana and grew up in California. He moved to New York City in 1923, and it was there that he met Langston Hughes and other writers who were leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. Bontemps began his literary career as a poet but also wrote novels and edited anthologies of African-American poetry and folktales. Hughes and Bontemps collaborated on POPO AND FIFINA and also worked together on other novels for young adults and several anthologies, such as POETRY OF THE NEGRO, 1746-1949 and THE BOOK OF NEGRO FOLKLORE. Bontemps is known as one of our major African-American poets, but he is also credited with making black folklore and literature available to the public through his anthologies and through his work as a historian, librarian, and teacher at several American universities. Arnold Rampersad is a professor of English and director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University. Among his books are THE ART AND IMAGINATION OF W. E. B. DU BOIS and the two-volume THE LIFE OF LANGSTON HUGHES.
This powerful novel, set on a small island in the British Indies, is the story of a man in search of his past and his future, haunted by the shadow of a woman he has never met. Victoria Hulbert was born at the turn of the century on a sprawling landed plantation worked by slaves. After her mother's death in childbirth, she is raised by her devoted older sister before being sent off to a European convent to be educated. Upon returning from a Europe torn by war and bloodshed, she is reunited with her sister for only a short time before she is banished, disappearing from the colonial society in which she was raised and her existence The story opens years later, after yet another European war, when the narrator of this eloquent and exquisitely written novel comes across Victoria's letters among his mother's effects. As clues to her disappearance come to light he becomes obsessed with finding her, returning to San Sebastian to trace the odyssey of her exile and her life. Part mystery and part a simple love story, A SHADOW IN THE WEAVE tells a stirring tale of love and betrayal. As seen through the lives of the natives and their colonizers, and through the love of a man and a woman, the ferocity of men's hatreds and the possibility of redemption and transcendence bring this novel brilliantly to light.
Michael Humfrey was born in Grenada and educated in Barbados and England. He lives with his wife on the Norfolk/Suffolk border in England.
‘Election time in Barbados means money,’ said Old Sam, ‘spending money like you just going into a back room and printing it.’ And as election fever grips the island, he could not be more right. When the leader of the Conservative Party departs from the political scene, the forthcoming election is thrown wide open. In St. Anne’s, Sam Martin, a lifelong Labour man and a much respected local figure, decides to stand for the House of Assembly. Nearby, urged on by his ambitious and attractive wife, the politically inexperienced Piker Green offers his candidacy to the Democrats. The issue appears to be simple: the virtues of honesty versus the sly crafts of ambition. But as the rival campaigns get under way, it becomes all too clear that the many uncommitted voters are none too interested with in principles or politics, only in the depth of each candidate’s pocket. With each vote at a premium, the voter sells to the highest bidder. This humourous and vastly entertaining novel about electioneering in the Caribbean takes a long look at democracy in action. It has all the rowdy vitality of the hustings, the bustle of party meetings, of plot and counter-plot behind the scenes and the shameless wheedling of a community that only too well knows its price. But if this is politics without morality, there is a moral that is as true as democracy is old: that it is not always the best man who wins.
Lionel Hutchinson was born in Barbados in 1923 and should have made the fifth consecutive generation of Hutchinsons in the history of his country’s Police Force. Instead, he started life as a newspaper reporter. At the age of nineteen he volunteered for active service with the R. A. F., and after the end of World War II he returned home to his newspaper work. Three years later, he took a job with his country’s Parliament, but still found time to contribute frequently to press, radio and television. Austin Clarke referred to Lionel Hutchinson as ‘ the most underrated Barbadian writer.’
Every community has its own rules and you break them at your peril. That’s was Harriet Jivenot’s problem. She no longer felt she belonged to the free and easy society of Bridgetown’s Lamberts Lane into which she had been born. She wanted to escape to a better life by ridding herself of the brand of the Lane that she so much resented: that of Red-leg, or poor-white Barbadian. The three men in her life each offered a different kind of love, a different escape route. Mike had the glamour of the local hero; Hugh, a business man with a weakness for the bright lights of Bridgetown, offered the temptation of London; only Robert, a quietly determined man, understood that he must wait till Harriet had found her own salvation. When it came, it was more sudden and more dramatic than anyone imagined. This is Lionel Hutchinson’s second novel, and once more it is set in the colourful, exciting life of Barbados. As in the wry comedy of MAN FROM THE PEOPLE, he evokes a sharp portrait of a changing, vibrant society. But with great sympathy and sensitivity he has added a central story whose lesson is universal; a moving study of a young girl’s search for love.
Lionel Hutchinson was born in Barbados in 1923 and should have made the fifth consecutive generation of Hutchinsons in the history of his country’s Police Force. Instead, he started life as a newspaper reporter. At the age of nineteen he volunteered for active service with the R. A. F., and after the end of World War II he returned home to his newspaper work. Three years later, he took a job with his country’s Parliament, but still found time to contribute frequently to press, radio and television. Austin Clarke referred to Lionel Hutchinson as ‘ the most underrated Barbadian writer.’
A historical survey of Black resistance covering revolt in the Pan-African world since the days of the San Domingo Revolution by the author of THE BLACK JACOBINS and BEYOND A BOUNDARY. To the original manuscript which appeared in FACT in 1938, James has added the important events from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. This study includes material on - San Domingo; The Old United States; The Civil War; Revolts in Africa; The Old Colonies; Religious revolts in the New Colonies; The Congo; The Union of South Africa; Marcus Garvey; Negro Movements in recent Years; Epilogue: The History of African Revolt; A Summary of 1939-1969; index. ‘A History of Pan-African Revolt is one of those rare books that continues to strike a chord of urgency, even half a century after it was first published. Time and time again, its lessons have proven to be valuable and relevant for understanding liberation movements in Africa and the diaspora. Each generation who has had the opportunity to read this small book finds new insights, new lessons, new visions for their own age… No piece of literature can substitute for a crystal ball, and only religious fundamentalists believe that a book can provide comprehensive answers to all questions. But if nothing else, A History of Pan-African Revolt leaves us with two incontrovertible facts. First, as long as Black people are denied freedom, humanity and a decent standard of living, they will continue to revolt. Second, unless these revolts involve the ordinary masses and take place on their own terms, they have no hope of succeeding.’ - Robin D.G. Kelley.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
In his study of Herman Melville, ‘Mariners, Renegades and Castaways’ (1976) C.L.R. James wrote: ‘My ultimate aim.is to write a study of American Civilization’. This project, long in gestation, at last sees the light of day in this posthumous publication of what may be seen as the most wide-ranging expression of James’s thought, the link between his mature writings on politics and his semi-autobiographical work, ‘Beyond a Boundary’. In the tradition of de Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America’, James addresses the fundamental question of the ‘right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Ranging across American politics, society and culture, C.L.R. James sets out to integrate his analysis of American society in transition with a commentary on the popular arts of cinema and literature.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
"C. L. R. James has had an extraordinary life. He has arguably had a greater influence on the underlying thinking of independence movements in the West Indies and Africa than any living man" - Sunday Times. "C. L. R. James is one of the most remarkable writers of our generation. His writings over the past half century, here, in the West Indies, in America or in Africa, reveal the eye and heart of an artist, a humanist, one of this century's most genuine Socialists" - Labour Weekly. "It remains remarkable how far ahead of his time he was on so many issues" - New Society. "C. L.R. James is one of those rare individuals whom history proves right" - Race Today. "The black Plato of our generation" - The Times. "A mine of richness and variety" - The Times Educational Supplement. "C. L. R. James is among the great of the twentieth century" - Time Out.
C.L.R. James (1901-1989) was born in Trinidad and was a prominent anti-colonial scholar and cultural critic throughout his life. With Grace Lee and Raya Dunayevskaya, he helped define and popularize the autonomist Marxist tradition in the United States and Canada. David Austin is founder and trustee of the Alfie Roberts Institute, an independent research institute based in Montreal.
In ‘the most important sports book of our time’ (Warren Susman), the sport is cricket; the scene, the colonial West Indies; and the commentator, the eloquent and always provocative C.L.R. James, who shows us how, in the rituals of performance and conflict on the field, we are watching not just prowess but politics and psychology at play Part memoir of a boyhood in a black colony (by one of the founding fathers of African nationalism), part passionate celebration of an unexpected and unusual game, BEYOND A BOUNDARY raises, in a warm and witty voice, serious questions about sports and society With his acute political vision always informed by his abiding player’s enthusiasm, James probes the manners, morals, and heroes of cricket-taking in along the way the history of organized athletics, Greek drama, the aesthetics of batting, Karl Marx, and the behavior of American baseball fans. The scenes could be yesterday’s Negro Baseball League, the boxing ring in Capetown, or tomorrow’s Olympics, for this twenty-year-old classic-now in its first American edition-remains a startling and prophetic statement on the issues of race and sport today. C. L. R. JAMES, historian, novelist, cultural and political critic and activist, was born in Tunapuna, near Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1901. The son of a schoolteacher, he attended the island’s major government secondary school where, in the twenties, he became a teacher himself. During those years he also played club cricket and began writing fiction. James went to England in 1932 to help his friend and cricketing opponent, Learie Constantine, with his autobiography, and published in that year his first political book, THE LIFE OF CAPTAIN CIPRIANI, a pioneering argument on behalf of West Indian self-government. He also became cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and, later, the Glasgow Herald. Now one of the last surviving founders of the African nationalist movement, James edited, during the thirties in London, the journal of the International African Service Bureau, the Pan-African organization whose leaders included Jomo Kenyatta. James came to America on a lecture tour in 1938 and stayed fifteen years. He was the first man to argue for an autonomous, Socialist black movement, independent of white-majority parties; while in the States, he took part in wartime sharecroppers’ strikes and was active in the Socialist Workers’ Party. He was interned on Ellis Island in 1952 (where he wrote MARINERS, RENEGADES AND CASTAWAYS, a study of Melville) and was expelled the following year, returning to England. In 1958, James returned for four years to Trinidad to take part in the preparations for colonial emancipation he’d advocated for a quarter century. Since 1962 he has lived in England, with a brief return to the West Indies to cover a cricketing test series in 1965. C. L. R. James’s many works include his famous study of the Haitian revolution, The BLACK JACOBINS (1938); MINTY ALLEY (1936), a novel; the play TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE, in which he and Paul Robeson performed in London in 1936; MODERN POLITICS (1960) and Party POLITICS IN THE WEST INDIES (1961); BEYOND A BOUNDARY (1963); NKRUMAH AND THE GHANA REVOLUTION (1977); and three volumes of selected writings, THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT, SPHERES OF EXISTENCE, and AT THE RENDEZVOUS OF VICTORY. He continues to write prolifically, contributing to such journals as Radical America, Freedomways, New Society, and New Left Review. C.L.R. James died in London in 1989. ROBERT LIPSYTE was born in New York City. He was a sports reporter and columnist for the New York Times for fifteen years and is currently sports columnist for Charles Kuralt’s ‘Sunday Morning’ on CBS television. His books include NIGGER (the autobiography of Dick Gregory), SPORTSWORLD: AN AMERICAN DREAMLAND, and numerous highly acclaimed works for young adults. .
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
This is a great nuggetty gold mine of a book, It is written about cricket in the West Indies, sociology, the culture of ancient Greece, aesthetics, the Lancashire League, politics, art, philosophy and W. G. Grace, It begins in the author’s boyhood home in Trinidad, ‘superbly situated’, with a direct view from behind the bowler’s arm, and ends as he sees, in Frank Worrell’s admirable leadership in Australia, the triumph of his long campaign for Worrell’s captaincy. A grandly exciting cricket book, but something much more. There are clear and tender pictures of C, L. R, James’s family, lit with a Dickensian humour and vividness; there are endearing character sketches of the old West Indian cricketers: George John, ‘Piggy’ Piggot, Old Cons, Sir Learie Constantine’s father, and Victor Pascall, Learie’s delightful uncle; and besides these profiles there are masterly full-length portraits of the cricketers he most admired: Wilton St. Hill, George Headley, Learie himself, whom he followed to England, and, of course, W. G. Grace, This is a splendidly written record of the author’s triple love-affair with cricket, West Indian independence (of which he has been a leading protagonist) and the glories of English literature. His immense learning, which he wields as lightly as Worrell wields a bat, is deployed to support his thesis that cricket is an art, akin to those of ancient Greece, which reached the heights with Grace and may yet, with its skills, its elegances and its high ethical code, form the basis of new moral and educational structures. This closely packed narrative and analysis is integrated by the author’s own wide personal experiences, These experiences convince him that it was through English literature and English cricket that he and his people have made their most fruitful and most enduring contact with the essence of English life. C. L. R. JAMES, historian, novelist, cultural and political critic and activist, was born in Tunapuna, near Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1901. The son of a schoolteacher, he attended the island’s major government secondary school where, in the twenties, he became a teacher himself. During those years he also played club cricket and began writing fiction. James went to England in 1932 to help his friend and cricketing opponent, Learie Constantine, with his autobiography, and published in that year his first political book, THE LIFE OF CAPTAIN CIPRIANI, a pioneering argument on behalf of West Indian self-government. He also became cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and, later, the Glasgow Herald. Now one of the last surviving founders of the African nationalist movement, James edited, during the thirties in London, the journal of the International African Service Bureau, the Pan-African organization whose leaders included Jomo Kenyatta. James came to America on a lecture tour in 1938 and stayed fifteen years. He was the first man to argue for an autonomous, Socialist black movement, independent of white-majority parties; while in the States, he took part in wartime sharecroppers’ strikes and was active in the Socialist Workers’ Party. He was interned on Ellis Island in 1952 (where he wrote MARINERS, RENEGADES AND CASTAWAYS, a study of Melville) and was expelled the following year, returning to England. In 1958, James returned for four years to Trinidad to take part in the preparations for colonial emancipation he’d advocated for a quarter century. Since 1962 he has lived in England, with a brief return to the West Indies to cover a cricketing test series in 1965. C. L. R. James’s many works include his famous study of the Haitian revolution, The BLACK JACOBINS (1938); MINTY ALLEY (1936), a novel; the play TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE, in which he and Paul Robeson performed in London in 1936; MODERN POLITICS (1960) and Party POLITICS IN THE WEST INDIES (1961); BEYOND A BOUNDARY (1963); NKRUMAH AND THE GHANA REVOLUTION (1977); and three volumes of selected writings, THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT, SPHERES OF EXISTENCE, and AT THE RENDEZVOUS OF VICTORY. He continues to write prolifically, contributing to such journals as Radical America, Freedomways, New Society, and New Left Review. C.L.R. James died in London in 1989. .
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
C. L. R. James (1901-1989). a prominent black Trinidadian intellectual, has been increasingly recognized as a social critic, historian, and cultural commentator of central importance. During the late 1930s and 1940s, James played a key role in the revolutionary socialist current associated with Leon Trotsky. This volume provides an in-depth look at James’s ‘Trotskyist years,’ presenting writings by James on Trotsky’s life and work that are unavailable in other collections. The volume also includes essays by James on the work of Edmund Wilson and Richard Wright, on the impact of European colonialism on Africa, on the interrelationship between U.S. and international labor history, and on African-American history. Substantial essays by the editors, as well as by Paul Buhle, John Bracey, Martin Glaberman, and Charles van Gelderen, contextualize the actual contributions by James himself, which form the heart of the book.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
For over half a century - from the early 1930s to the present day - C.L.R. James has distinguished himself as a writer on cricket, and to many people his name is synonymous with a fine appreciation of the game. Here, for the first time in one volume, is a comprehensive selection from this aspect of his work - informed first-hand portraits of cricketers through the years, evocative reports of both Test and county matches, perceptive observations about controversies such as the Australian "body-line" tour or the West Indies tour of South Africa, brilliant expositions of the history and international social context of the game, correspondence with other enthusiasts and writers (including John Arlott, V.S. Naipaul, Jack Fingleton), as well as unpublished articles from his personal archives. James has always approached cricket with the same scrupulousness and imagination he has brought to bear on questions of politics, history and culture. The game is a critical component in his total view of the world, and so this collection cannot fail to have a significant place alongside those of his publications already available. It shows the developing range and scope of his thinking about cricket - as played by West Indians, Australians, Pakistanis, the English, or others - and will make lively and engrossing reading even for those who have not yet acquired a passion for what James unequivocally terms an art-form. Each chronological section is preceded by notes which place the articles in the context of James's other work, for concerns in cricket are frequently part of his more general preoccupations. As James himself observed in his classic Beyond a Boundary. "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?"
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
GREEK DEMOCRACY - "The vast majority of Greek officials were chosen by a method which amounted to putting names into hat and appointing the ones whose names came out. The average CIO bureaucrat would fall in a fit if it was suggested that any worker selected at random could do the work he is doing. But that was the guiding principle of Greek Democracy. And this is the government under which flourished the greatest civilization the world has ever known. NEGRO AMERICANS – The defense of their full citizenship rights by Negroes is creating a new concept of citizenship and community. When, for months, 50,000 Negroes in Montgomery, Alabama, do not ride buses and overnight organize their own system of transportation, welfare, and political discussion and decision, that is the end of representative democracy."
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
A historical survey of Black resistance covering revolt in the Pan-African world since the days of the San Domingo Revolution by the author of THE BLACK JACOBINS and BEYOND A BOUNDARY. This study includes material on - San Domingo; The Old United States; The Civil War; Revolts in Africa; The Old Colonies; Religious revolts in the New Colonies; The Congo; The Union of South Africa; Marcus Garvey; Negro Movements in recent Years (circa 1938).
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
Political theorist and cultural critic, novelist and cricket enthusiast, C. L. R. James (1901 - 1989) was a brilliant polymath who has been described by Edward Said as ‘a centrally important 20th-century figure.’ Through such landmark works as THE BLACK JACOBINS, BEYOND A BOUNDARY, and AMERICAN CIVILIZATION, James's thought continues to influence and inspire scholars in a wide variety of fields. ‘There is little doubt,’ wrote novelist Caryl Phillips in The New Republic, ‘that James will come to be regarded as the outstanding Caribbean mind of the twentieth century.’ In his seminal work of literary and cultural criticism, MARINERS, RENEGADES AND CASTAWAYS, James anticipated many of the concerns and ideas that have shaped the contemporary fields of American and Postcolonial Studies, yet this widely influential book has been unavailable in its complete form since its original publication in 1953. A provocative study of Moby Dick in which James challenged the prevailing Americanist interpretation that opposed a ‘totalitarian’ Ahab and a ‘democratic, American’ Ishmael, he offered instead a vision of a factory-like Pequod whose ‘captain of industry’ leads the ‘mariners, renegades and castaways’ of its crew to their doom. In addition to demonstrating how such an interpretation supported the emerging US national security state, James also related the narrative of Moby Dick, and its resonance in American literary and political culture, to his own persecuted position at the height (or the depth) of the Truman/McCarthy era.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine. In 1932, he moved to Nelson in Lancashire, England in the hope of furthering his literary career. There he worked for the Manchester Guardian and helped the cricketer Learie Constantine write his autobiography. In 1933, James moved to London. James had begun to campaign for the independence of the West Indies while in Trinidad, and his Life of Captain Cipriani and the pamphlet The Case for West-Indian Self Government were his first important published works, but now he became a leading champion of Pan-African agitation and the Chair of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, formed in 1935 in response to Fascist Italy’s invasion of what is now Ethiopia. He then became a leading figure in the International African Service Bureau, led by his childhood friend George Padmore, to whom he later introduced Kwame Nkrumah. In Britain, he also became a leading Marxist theorist. He had joined the Labour Party, but in the midst of the Great Depression he became a Trotskyist. By 1934, James was a member of an entrist Trotskyist group inside the Independent Labour Party. In this period, amid his frantic political activity, James wrote a play about Toussaint L’Ouverture, which was staged in the West End in 1936 and starred Paul Robeson and Robert Adams. That same year saw the publication in London of James’s only novel, Minty Alley, which he had brought with him in manuscript from Trinidad; it was the first novel to be published by a black Caribbean author in the UK. He also wrote what are perhaps his best-known works of non-fiction: World Revolution (1937), a history of the rise and fall of the Communist International, which was critically praised by Leon Trotsky, and The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), a widely acclaimed history of the Haitian revolution, which would later be seen as a seminal text in the study of the African diaspora. In 1936, James and his Trotskyist Marxist Group left the Independent Labour Party to form an open party. In 1938, this new group took part in several mergers to form the Revolutionary Socialist League. The RSL was a highly factionalised organisation and when James was invited to tour the United States by the leadership of the Socialist Workers’ Party, then the US section of the Fourth International, in order to facilitate its work among black workers, he was encouraged to leave by one such factional opponent, John Archer, in the hope of removing a rival. James moved to the USA in late 1938, and after a tour sponsored by the SWP stayed on for over twenty years. But by 1940 he had developed severe doubts about Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state and left the SWP along with Max Shachtman, who formed the Workers’ Party. Within the WP he formed the Johnson-Forest Tendency with Raya Dunayevskaya (his pseudonym being Johnson and Dunayevskaya’s Forest) and Grace Lee (later Grace Lee Boggs) in order to spread their views within the new party. While within the WP the views of the J-F tendency underwent considerable development and by the end of the Second World War they had definitively rejected Trotsky’s theory of Russia as a degenerated workers state, instead analysing it as being state capitalist. This political evolution was shared by other Trotskyists of their generation, most notably Tony Cliff. Unlike Cliff, they were increasingly looking towards the autonomous movements of oppressed minorities, a theoretical development already visible in James’ thought in his discussions with Leon Trotsky which took place in 1939. An interest in such autonomous struggles came to take centre stage for the tendency. After 1945 the WP saw the prospects for a revolutionary upsurge as receding. The J-F Tendency, by contrast, were more enthused by prospects for mass struggles and came to the conclusion that the SWP, which they considered more proletarian than the WP, thought similarly to themselves about such prospects. Therefore, after a short few months as an independent group when they published a great deal of material for a small group, the J-F tendency joined the SWP in 1947. James would still describe himself as a Leninist, despite his rejection of Lenin’s conception of the vanguard role of the revolutionary party, and argue for socialists to support the emerging black nationalist movements. By 1949, he came to reject the idea of a vanguard party. This led his tendency to leave the Trotskyist movement and rename itself the Correspondence Publishing Committee. In 1955, nearly half the membership of Committee would leave under the leadership of Raya Dunayevskaya to form a separate tendency of Marxist-humanism and found the organization, News and Letters Committees. Whether Raya Dunayevskaya’s faction constituted a majority or minority seems to be a matter of dispute. Historian Kent Worcester claims that Dunayevskaya’s supporters formed a majority of the pre-split Correspondence Publishing Committee but Martin Glaberman has claimed in New Politics that the faction loyal to James had a majority. The Committee split again in 1962 as Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs, two key activists, left to pursue a more Third Worldist approach. The remaining Johnsonites, including leading member Martin Glaberman reconstituted themselves as Facing Reality, which James advised from Britain until the group dissolved, against James’ advice, in 1970. James’s writings were influential in the development of Autonomist Marxism as a current within Marxist thought, though he himself saw his life’s work as developing the theory and practice of Leninism. In 1953, James was forced to leave the US under threat of deportation for having overstayed his visa by over ten years. In his attempt to remain in the USA, James wrote a study of Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, and had copies of the privately published work sent to every member of the Senate. He wrote the book while being detained on Ellis Island. He returned back to England and then, in 1958 returned to Trinidad, where he edited The Nation newspaper for the pro-independence People’s National Movement (PNM) party. He also had become involved again in the Pan-African movement, believing that the Ghana revolution showed that decolonisation was the most important inspiration for international revolutionaries. James also advocated the West Indies Federation, and it was over this that he fell out with the PNM leadership. He returned to Britain, then to the USA in 1968, where he taught at the University of the District of Columbia. Ultimately, he returned to Britain and spent his last years in Brixton, London. In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of books by James were republished or reissued by Allison and Busby, including four volumes of selected writings: The Future In the Present, Spheres of Existence, At the Rendezvous of Victory and Cricket. In 1983, a short British film featuring James in dialogue with the famous historian E. P. Thompson was made. A public library in Hackney, London is named in his honor; in 2005 a reception there to mark its 20th anniversary was attended by his widow, Selma James. C. L. R. James is widely known as a writer on cricket, especially for his autobiographical 1963 book, Beyond a Boundary. This is considered a seminal work of cricket writing, and is often named as the best single book on cricket (or even the best book on any sport) ever written. The book’s key question, which is frequently quoted by modern journalists and essayists, is inspired by Rudyard Kipling and asks: What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? James uses this challenge as the basis for describing cricket in an historical and social context, the strong influence cricket had on his life, and how it meshed with his role in politics and his understanding of issues of class and race. The literary quality of the writing attracts cricketers of all political views. While editor of The Nation, he led the successful campaign in 1960 to have Frank Worrell appointed as the first black captain of the West Indies cricket team..
Political theorist and cultural critic, novelist and cricket enthusiast, C. L. R. James (1901 - 1989) was a brilliant polymath who has been described by Edward Said as ‘a centrally important 20th-century figure.’ Through such landmark works as THE BLACK JACOBINS, BEYOND A BOUNDARY, and AMERICAN CIVILIZATION, James's thought continues to influence and inspire scholars in a wide variety of fields. ‘There is little doubt,’ wrote novelist Caryl Phillips in The New Republic, ‘that James will come to be regarded as the outstanding Caribbean mind of the twentieth century.’ In his seminal work of literary and cultural criticism, MARINERS, RENEGADES AND CASTAWAYS, James anticipated many of the concerns and ideas that have shaped the contemporary fields of American and Postcolonial Studies, yet this widely influential book has been unavailable in its complete form since its original publication in 1953. A provocative study of Moby Dick in which James challenged the prevailing Americanist interpretation that opposed a ‘totalitarian’ Ahab and a ‘democratic, American’ Ishmael, he offered instead a vision of a factory-like Pequod whose ‘captain of industry’ leads the ‘mariners, renegades and castaways’ of its crew to their doom. In addition to demonstrating how such an interpretation supported the emerging US national security state, James also related the narrative of Moby Dick, and its resonance in American literary and political culture, to his own persecuted position at the height (or the depth) of the Truman/McCarthy era.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
Political theorist and cultural critic, novelist and cricket enthusiast, C. L. R. James (1901 - 1989) was a brilliant polymath who has been described by Edward Said as ‘a centrally important 20th-century figure.’ Through such landmark works as THE BLACK JACOBINS, BEYOND A BOUNDARY, and AMERICAN CIVILIZATION, James's thought continues to influence and inspire scholars in a wide variety of fields. ‘There is little doubt,’ wrote novelist Caryl Phillips in The New Republic, ‘that James will come to be regarded as the outstanding Caribbean mind of the twentieth century.’ In his seminal work of literary and cultural criticism, MARINERS, RENEGADES AND CASTAWAYS, James anticipated many of the concerns and ideas that have shaped the contemporary fields of American and Postcolonial Studies, yet this widely influential book has been unavailable in its complete form since its original publication in 1953. A provocative study of Moby Dick in which James challenged the prevailing Americanist interpretation that opposed a ‘totalitarian’ Ahab and a ‘democratic, American’ Ishmael, he offered instead a vision of a factory-like Pequod whose ‘captain of industry’ leads the ‘mariners, renegades and castaways’ of its crew to their doom. In addition to demonstrating how such an interpretation supported the emerging US national security state, James also related the narrative of Moby Dick, and its resonance in American literary and political culture, to his own persecuted position at the height (or the depth) of the Truman/McCarthy era.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
MINTY ALLEY is an early classic of modern Caribbean writing in English. It is the only novel written by C. L. R. James and belongs to the ‘Beacon period’ of Caribbean literature in the late 20s and 30s of this century. C. L. R. James promised another novel after MINTY ALLEY, first published in 1936, but that novel never emerged. MINTY ALLEY and James’s short stories establish the compassionate creative imagination that was to illuminate a brilliant social, political and historical analysis of the Caribbean and the world at large. They also underline a special dimension of the spirit behind his creative critical writing. C. L. R. JAMES’s works include THE BLACK JACOBINS, HISTORY OF PAN AFRICAN REVOLT, BEYOND A BOUNDARY, FACING REALITY; PARTY POLITICS IN THE WEST INDIES, MARINERS RENEGADES AND CASTAWAYS, WORLD REVOLUTION, and others.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
MINTY ALLEY is an early classic of modern Caribbean writing in English. It is the only novel written by C. L. R. James and belongs to the ‘Beacon period’ of Caribbean literature in the late 20s and 30s of this century. C. L. R. James promised another novel after MINTY ALLEY, first published in 1936, but that novel never emerged. MINTY ALLEY and James’s short stories establish the compassionate creative imagination that was to illuminate a brilliant social, political and historical analysis of the Caribbean and the world at large. They also underline a special dimension of the spirit behind his creative critical writing. As Kenneth Ramchand states in his Introduction, the present reprint of MINTY ALLEY ‘offers an opportunity to sketch out some of the continuities in the West Indian literary scene, and to introduce a new generation to an important and interesting work by the most distinguished West Indian of our time and his.’ C. L. R. JAMES’s works include THE BLACK JACOBINS, HISTORY OF PAN AFRICAN REVOLT, BEYOND A BOUNDARY, FACING REALITY; PARTY POLITICS IN THE WEST INDIES, MARINERS RENEGADES AND CASTAWAYS, WORLD REVOLUTION, and others.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
There is a strong belief among devotees of C. L. R. James that it is not possible to have full comprehension of Caribbean literary art in English without first reading MINTY ALLEY. Although frequently reprinted in the United Kingdom, MINTY ALLEY at last reaches the United States. Now American readers can learn what much of the rest of the English-speaking world has long known—that before he wrote such masterworks as BLACK JACOBINS,WORLD REVOLUTION, and BEYOND A BOUNDARY C. L. R. James had already made his mark as one of the foremost of West Indian novelists. In this ground-breaking novel, James discerns new forms of society rooted in the oldest of desires and aspirations through the interactions of the characters of Maisie, Haynes, Mrs. Rouse, and Benoit. In the everyday language and unforgettable dialogue James reveals new modes of human relationships. Haynes, a young middle-class lodger at No. 2 Minty Alley, becomes both confidant and judge as he examines the other inhabitants at this address. From his experiences he is made aware of the educated West Indians impoverishing alienation from society’s mainstream. Through Haynes’s vivid narration James reveals the rich cultural life on Minty Alley. Haynes. an outsider among people of lower class, knows his fellow lodgers only as they have revealed themselves to him through their speech and actions, yet each has a mysterious inner life.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
Book produced from a series of lectures on the subject of modern politics given at the Trinidad public library in its adult education programme.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
Notes on Dialectics, probably the key work in the development of C.L.R, James's thinking, was written in 1948, and though its influence has been deeply felt through privately circulated mimeographed editions, this is its first publication in book form, with a new introduction by the author. James aims at making Hegel’s Logic - a thorough study of which Lenin saw as essential for understanding Marx's Capital - 'a part of our marxist thinking today'. Close textual and explanatory reference to the Science of Logic itself, and to Marx's and Lenin's use of 'dialectic', provide a conceptual framework for examining the history of the workers' movement and the Internationals; and James concludes that Trotsky's marxism, that of the Fourth International, was inadequate for the post-war world. This book's central and prophetic concerns - the revolutionary nature of the proletariat, the state and the party - are just as important in the present world crisis as they were when it was first written. 'C.L.R. James is one of those rare individuals whom history proves right. It is more than a misjudgement to think of him as a black professor, as a black historian, or indeed as the premier intellectual product of the West Indies. To think of him as such is to circumscribe and to limit the achievements of one of the marxist thinkers of our time who has kept the thread of the marxist science weaving through the internationalist concerns of a lifetime' - Race Today. 'One of this century's most genuine Socialists' — Labour Weekly.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
C. L. R. James's correspondence with Constance Webb, the young American woman who eventually became his wife, began in 1939 and lasted a decade. Passionate, poetic, and wonderfully readable, the letters chart an extraordinary friendship and gripping period in the life of C. L. R. James as a revolutionary activist in America. Beginning with James's first letters to Webb (written whilst visiting Trotsky in Coyoacan, Mexico) and ending with his letters from 'exile' in Nevada, the correspondence is simultaneously an intimate record of a romantic relationship and a profound meditation on politics, art, and American civilization. Whether debating with Richard Wright in New York, lecturing in Los Angeles, or singing arias aboard ship in the Gulf of Mexico, James is always a superb traveling companion: quick to draw historical and political lessons from everyday life, and always able to illuminate experience through art. Something powerful was unlocked by James's experience of America. And at the centre of this experience was his attempt to bridge the gap of race, age, and gender between himself and Constance Webb. Already celebrated while unpublished, these letters form one of the major resources on James's life and thought during his American period. But they also tell a story as intellectually stimulating as it is affecting.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
A new selection of writings by a remarkable scholar and thinker - essays, stories, excerpts from longer works, written between the 1920s and 1970s and including material from all aspects of James's enormously wide range of interests. It is a similar brilliant mixture to his previous selected volume, The Future in the Present, of which the critics wrote: ‘C.L.R. James has had an extraordinary life. Writer, cricketer, cricket-writer, Marxist politician, intellectual strategist of West Indian independence, Pan-Africanist . . . he has arguably had a greater influence on the underlying thinking of independence movements in the West Indies and Africa than any living man.' - Sunday Times. ‘C.L.R. James is one of the most remarkable writers of our generation. He is a scholar, journalist, an historian, a practical politician, a cricketer. Yet he has integrated these activities into a unified life ... His writings over the past century, here, in the West Indies, in America or in Africa, reveal the eye and heart of an artist, a humanist, one of this century's most genuine Socialists.' - Labour Weekly. ‘For anyone who wishes to understand Westindian history, Westindian society and the Westindian's view of the world, this selection is incomparable.’ - Westindian World. ‘ A valuable introduction to the work of a man who took part in the politics of the Caribbean, the United States, England and Africa whilst writing on much more, and becoming involved with personalities as different as Leon Trotsky, Jomo Kenyatta, Neville Cardus and Kwame Nkrumah ... a remarkable range of material.’ - West Africa. ‘An immensely stimulating book. James has long been one of the most influential of West Indian writers, but it remains remarkable how far ahead of his time he was on many issues ... An indispensable book. ' — New Society. ‘C.L.R. James ... has a special place in the history of Third World revolutionary movements ... he combines Caribbean nationalism, Black radicalism, a once Trotskyist blend of revolutionary anti-imperialism, and the European classic tradition in an individual and potent mix ... A mine of richness and variety.’ - The Times Educational Supplement. ‘C.L.R. James is one of those rare individuals whom history proves right.' - Race Today.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
Written in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya & Grace Lee, this is another pioneering critique of Lenin and Trotsky, and reclamation of Marx, from the West Indian scholar and activist. This edition includes the original introduction from Martin Glaberman, a new introduction from Paul Buhle, and one from the author himself. "Two generations ago, CLR James and a small circle of collaborators set forth a revolutionary critique of industrial civilization. Their vision possessed a striking originality. So insular was the political context of their theoretical breakthroughs, however, and so thoroughly did their optimistic expectations for working class activity defy trends away from class and social issues to the so-called 'End Of Ideology', that the documents of the signal effort never reached public view. Happily, times have changed. Readers have discovered much, even after all these years, to challenge Marxist (or any other) orthodoxy. They will never find a more succinct version of James' general conclusions that State Capitalism and World Revolution. In this slim volume, James and his comrades successfully predict the future course of Marxism." [Paul Buhle, from his Introduction] "When one looks back over the last 20 years to those men who were most far-sighted, who first began to tease out the muddle of ideology in our times, who were at the same time Marxists with a hard theoretical basis, and close students of society, humanists with a tremendous response to and understanding of human culture, Comrade James is one of the first one thinks of." [E P Thompson]
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
In 1789 the French West Indian colony of San Domingo supplied two thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave trade. Its whole structure rested on the labor of half a million Negro slaves controlled by a handful of whites. To cow the Negroes into docility necessitated a regime of calculated brutality and terrorism, and it was not unusual for a white master to fill a disobedient slave with gunpowder and blow him up with a match. Rebellious slaves were buried up to the neck in sand and their faces smeared with sugar so that the flies might devour the. Others were flogged with the long cowhide rigoise, often receiving as many as one hundred blows. All that was needed to start an organized rebellion in an atmosphere so full of smouldering hatred was a dynamic leader, and he emerged in the person of Toussaint l’Ouverture. His post as a plantation steward had given him experience in administration and authority, and he had further, by diligent study, taught himself to read and write. Not only was he a commanding personality but he was so strong physically that when he was nearly sixty years old he could still jump on a horse running at full speed and do what he liked with it. With Toussaint at the helm, the revolution quickly took shape, and over a period of time succeeded in completely liberating the enslaved Negroes and driving the whites from their colonial possession. The revolt, the only successful slave uprising in history, saw one man completely transform thousands of trembling slaves into a people able to organize themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day. It is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement, and in this book C. L. R. James, one of the foremost of contemporary historians, vividly traces the story of the San Domingo revolution as reflected in the achievements of Toussaint l’Ouverture. A classic and impassioned account of the first revolution in the Third World. This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
A classic and impassioned account of the first revolution in the Third World. This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
The C.L.R. James Reader was begun in James’s lifetime. It was during the summer of 1988 that James and the editor, Anna Grimshaw, started to discuss in detail the contents of a volume which would introduce his work to a new generation of readers. They planned to include a number of key writings from his published corpus and a selection of previously unpublished documents, essays and correspondence. In seeking to escape from the mere chronological documentation of James’s life-one of the major problems James had encountered in his attempt to write an autobiography-they agreed that the principle governing the selection of material should be the organic connection between the different pieces. The introduction to the Reader reflects this approach. It is animated by the expansive and yet unifying theme of James’s remarkable life. And it is rooted in an understanding of his distinctive method. A fragment from James’s autobiography serves as a useful illustration: ‘I had been reading from early Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thackeray, Dickens and later Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and a whole list of writers. And I got a conception of human character and the interesting aspects of human personality, and the plain fact of the matter is the middle class people to whom I belonged and among whom I lived were busy trying to shape their lives according to the British idea of behaviour and principles. They were not very interesting. I dare say in time I could have done something with them. But the people who had passion, human energy, anger, violence and generosity were the common people whom I saw around me. They shaped my political outlook and from that time to this day those are the people I have been most concerned with. That’s why I was able to understand Marx very easily, and particularly Lenin who was concerned with them. . . . I didn’t learn everything from Marxism. When I went to Marxism I was already well prepared. . . . Even in my days of fiction I had the instinct which enabled me to grasp the fundamentals of Marxism so easily and then to work at Marxism having the basic elements of a Marxist view-my concern with the common people.’ . . . James’s method was essentially empirical. From boyhood he had meticulously gathered information-through observation, reading, research and conversation. His mastery of the concrete details of particular forms of human activity gave him enormous confidence in his approach to the world. It formed the basis for his exploration of ideas; and throughout his life, moving with ease between the general current of world history and the concrete particulars of everyday life, James was able to capture both the complexity and unity of the modern world. For many years James’s work was poorly circulated. During the 1970s, however, books by James became much more easily available, largely as a result of Margaret Busby’s initiative in the London-based publishing house, Allison and Busby. In the last decade of James’s life most of his full-length works were reprinted; and three volumes of selected writings brought together his articles and essays which had long been buried in obscure publications. The C.L.R. James Reader, while drawing upon these materials, contains much that is new. In particular, it makes available previously unpublished writings from James’s personal archive. A good deal of the work for the Reader was built upon earlier projects associated with the James archive. The collection of papers, originally organised and catalogued by Jim Murray in the early 1980s, formed the basis of the exhibition, C.L.R. James: Man of the People, held in London in 1986. It also yielded many documents for James’s volume, Cricket, published later in the same year. . . The availability of new materials in the James archive has not just made it possible to fill out the picture of James’s remarkable life, to marvel at the sheer productivity of his eighty and more years or to add on a few more labels to the already long list-Pan-Africanist, Marxist, cricket commentator, critic and writer of fiction. What these documents make possible is a new conception of that life’s work itself. The Reader is such an attempt. Its primary purpose is not to offer a representative sample of writings; but to break some of the old categories which fragment and confine James. We now know more about the scope and precision of James’s project. It is, however, the integration of the parts, the weaving of disparate, scattered pieces into a whole, the creation, as James would say, of something new, which will secure and extend the legacy of one of our century’s most outstanding figures. This was the basis of James’s approach to the work of the great figures-artists, writers and revolutionaries-of history. He knew, too, that it was the challenge of his own autobiography. The Reader, like the autobiography, was unfinished at the time of James’s death.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
The Life of Captain Cipriani (1932) is the earliest full-length work of nonfiction by the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, one of the most significant historians and Marxist theorists of the twentieth century. It is partly based on James's interviews with Arthur Andrew Cipriani (1875–1945). As a captain with the British West Indies Regiment during the First World War, Cipriani was greatly impressed by the service of black West Indian troops and appalled at their treatment during and after the war. After his return to the West Indies, he became a Trinidadian political leader and advocate for West Indian self-government. James's book is as much polemic as biography. Written in Trinidad and published in England, it is an early and powerful statement of West Indian nationalism. An excerpt, The Case for West-Indian Self Government, was issued by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1933. This volume includes the biography, the pamphlet, and a new introduction in which Bridget Brereton considers both texts and the young C. L. R. James in relation to Trinidadian and West Indian intellectual and social history. She discusses how James came to write his biography of Cipriani, how the book was received in the West Indies and Trinidad, and how, throughout his career, James would use biography to explore the dynamics of politics and history.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
The work of C. L. R. James spans several decades of writing in the West Indies, Europe and the USA. This first volume of selected writings includes essays, stories, excerpt: from longer works, ranging in date from 1929 to the 1970s. Some of the pieces have never been published before, the majority have not previously been easily available, and their subject matter reflects the areas in which James has been deeply involved throughout his life - politics, black studies, history, literature, fine arts, sport.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
The Life of Captain Cipriani (1932) is the earliest full-length work of nonfiction by the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, one of the most significant historians and Marxist theorists of the twentieth century. It is partly based on James's interviews with Arthur Andrew Cipriani (1875–1945). As a captain with the British West Indies Regiment during the First World War, Cipriani was greatly impressed by the service of black West Indian troops and appalled at their treatment during and after the war. After his return to the West Indies, he became a Trinidadian political leader and advocate for West Indian self-government. James's book is as much polemic as biography. Written in Trinidad and published in England, it is an early and powerful statement of West Indian nationalism. An excerpt, The Case for West-Indian Self Government, was issued by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1933. This volume includes the biography, the pamphlet, and a new introduction in which Bridget Brereton considers both texts and the young C. L. R. James in relation to Trinidadian and West Indian intellectual and social history. She discusses how James came to write his biography of Cipriani, how the book was received in the West Indies and Trinidad, and how, throughout his career, James would use biography to explore the dynamics of politics and history.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine. Christian Høgsbjerg is a historian who lectures at Leeds Metropolitan University.
After more than a decade in the United States, the Caribbean writer C. L. R. James ran afoul of McCarthyism in 1953 and was deported. In exile in London, he began to write stories in the form of letters to his four-year-old son ‘Nobbie,’ who remained in the States. Through a distinctive, imaginary, and sometimes absurd cast of characters-Good Boongko, Bad boo-boo-loo, Moby Dick, and Nicholas the worker, among others-these stories explore questions of friendship, conflict, community, ethics, and power in humorous and often ingenious ways; they also stand as a moving testament to a father’s struggle to be a vivid presence in the life of his son despite separation and distance. Attesting to James’s remarkable gifts as a writer and his unusual talent for engaging wide and diverse audiences, these witty and poignant stories, published here for the first time, are not just for James aficionados. Each story is a delight in its own way, making the book irresistible for children and adults alike.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
In 1934 C. L. R. James, the widely known Trinidadian intellectual, writer, and political activist, wrote the play Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History, which was presumed lost until the rediscovery of a draft copy in 2005. The play's production, performed in 1936 at London's Westminster Theatre with a cast including the American star Paul Robeson, marked the first time black professional actors starred on the British stage in a play written by a black playwright. This edition includes the program, photographs, and reviews from that production, a contextual introduction and editorial notes on the play by Christian Hogsbjerg, and selected essays and letters by James and others. In Toussaint Louverture, James demonstrates the full tragedy and heroism of Louverture by showing how the Haitian revolutionary leader is caught in a dramatic conflict arising from the contradiction between the barbaric realities of New World slavery and the modern ideals of the Enlightenment. In his portrayal of the Haitian Revolution, James aspired to vindicate black accomplishments in the face of racism and to support the struggle for self-government in his native Caribbean. Toussaint Louverture is an indispensable companion work to The Black Jacobins (1938), James's classic account of Haiti's revolutionary struggle for liberation. This edition of Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History includes the program, photographs, and reviews from its 1936 production at London's Westminster Theatre, a contextual introduction and editorial notes on the play by Christian Hogsbjerg, and selected essays and letters by James and others.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine. Christian Høgsbjerg is a historian who lectures at Leeds Metropolitan University.
The text of a lecture given by James at the University of the West Indies in April 1965.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
A popular history of high quality, WORLD REVOLUTION 1917-1936, first published in 1937, was one of the few contemporary attempts to synthesize the experience of the revolutionary movement after World War I. It continues to hold up well more than half a century after publication, and attests to the depth and breadth that were to become a hallmark of C.L.R. James’s work. Indeed, James’s analysis of the Soviet Union bears an amazing freshness in view of the events of the last few years. Many of James’s short-term predictions have proved surprisingly accurate and, as Al Richardson says in his introduction to this new paperback edition, we can only await the confirmation (or otherwise) of James’s grim prophecy: ‘If the Soviet Union goes down, then Socialism receives a blow which will cripple it for a generation.’
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
A popular history of the rise and fall of the Communist International. First published in 1937, this was one of the few contemporary attempts to synthesize the experience of the revolutionary movement after World War I . . . ‘This book is an introduction to and survey of the revolutionary Socialist movement since the War-the antecedents, foundation and development of the Third International-its collapse as a revolutionary force. The Bolshevik Party, and the Soviet Union which it controls, being the dominating factors in the Third International, are given extensive treatment. The ideas on which the book are based are the fundamental ideas of Marxism. Since 1923 they have been expounded chiefly by Trotsky and a small band of collaborators. Many who sneered or ignored for years are now uncomfortably aware that inside Russia there is something vaguely called ‘Trotskyism,’ which the Soviet authorities, despite the economic successes, discover in the very highest offices in the State and in increasingly wide circles of the population. At the same time in Western Europe, statesmen and publicists, frightened at the steady rise of the revolutionary wave, join with the Stalinist regime in Russia to condemn ‘Trotskyism.’ Mr. Winston Churchill, in the Evening Standard of October 16th, 1936, unleashes a fierce diatribe against the ‘Trotskyists,’ coupled with scarcely veiled approval of the Stalinists, i.e. of the Third International. Governments and national statesmen do pot concern themselves with jesuitical differences between interpretations of Marx and Lenin. The whole future of civilization is involved. The present crisis in world affairs, the growth of Fascism, the Spanish revolution, the inevitable revolution in France, the role of Russia yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, the constant ebb and flow of political parties and movements all over the world, these things must be seen, can only be understood at all, as part of the international revolutionary movement against Capitalism which entered a decisive stage in 1917 with the foundation of the first Workers’ State and, two years later, the organisation of a revolutionary International. Ruhr invasion; the illness and death of Lenin and the quick victory of Stalin over Trotsky in 1923; Chang-Kai-Shek’s northern expedition in 1926, the failure of the Shanghai Commune and the disastrous adventure of the Canton insurrection; the breakdown of the New Economic policy in 1928, the ‘liquidation of the kulak,’ and the capitulation without a blow of the powerful working-class movement of Germany before Hitler; the restoration of private property on the Russian countryside, the Popular Front in France, the murder of Zinoviev and Kamenev, the turning of guns by the Third International on the P.O.U.M. in Spain because it agitates for the Socialist revolution-all these major events of post-war history are one closely-connected whole. Seen in isolation they are a jumble. This book shows their inter-connection. How much the book owes to the writings of Trotsky, the text can only partially show. But even with that great debt, it could never have been written at all but for the material patiently collected and annotated in France, China, America, Germany and Russia. My task has been chiefly one of selection and co-ordination. Yet in so wide and complicated a survey, differences of opinion and emphasis are bound to arise. Therefore while the book owes so much to others as to justify the use of the term ‘we,’ the ultimate responsibility must remain my own.’ - from the author’s preface to the book.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
Revolution is a serious business, and C.L.R. James knew more than most. Our brand-new collection presents eight never-before-published lectures by the celebrated Marxist cultural critic, delivered during his stay in Montreal in 1967 and 1968. Ranging in topic from Marx and Lenin to Shakespeare and Rousseau to Caribbean history and the Haitian Revolution, these lectures demonstrate the staggering breadth and clarity of James' knowledge and interest. Strikingly little information exists today about the period of time James spent working with West Indian intellectuals and students in Canada in the late 1960s, but the research of editor David Austin demonstrates the critical role these encounters played in the development of James' more mature critical theory. Readers just beginning to delve into James work will find this collection accessible and engaging, an ideal introduction to a complex and multi-faceted body of scholarship. Also included are two seminal interviews produced with James during his stay in Canada, selected correspondence from the time period, and an appendix of essays on James' work, which includes the seminal Marty Glaberman essay, "C.L.R. James: The Man and His Work.". You Don't Play With Revolution also includes a preface by Robert A. Hill, co-founder of the C.L.R. James Study Circle and historical advisor to the new James archive at Columbia University, and a lengthy historical introduction by David Austin.
C.L.R. James (1901-1989) was born in Trinidad and was a prominent anti-colonial scholar and cultural critic throughout his life. With Grace Lee and Raya Dunayevskaya, he helped define and popularize the autonomist Marxist tradition in the United States and Canada. David Austin is founder and trustee of the Alfie Roberts Institute, an independent research institute based in Montreal.
This pamphlet contains Anna Grimshaw’s Preface and Introduction to a forthcoming book, The C. L. R. James Reader, Which she edited.
Anna Grimshaw is Associate Professor in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University. She is author of Servants of the Buddha and The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology.
Popular Democracy and the Creative Imagination: The Writings of C.L.R. James 1950-1963 is the second pamphlet in the series published by the C.L.R. James Institute. The Institute was established in 1984 with James's full support and approval and it is committed to the dissemination of his life's work. Just as James in 1953 wrote Mariners, Renegades and Castaways to publicise his case, his threatened deportation from America, so too the writing of these pamphlets is intended to publicise the case for making his work more widely and easily available. The series will explore the major themes of James's writing, examining particular texts and inviting discussion from anyone interested in the remarkable legacy of this major twentieth century figure. Since James's death in May 1989 it has become increasingly difficult to obtain his books. The few volumes which are in print are almost impossible to find and the bulk of his other titles remain out or print. Furthermore, there is a vast quantity of James's work which has never been published; the most outstanding is, of course, his great work on American civilization - The Struggle for Happiness This pamphlet has drawn attention to some of the documents contained in the C.L.R. James archive which are indispensable for a full evaluation of James's contribution to modern history. A number will appear in the C.L.R. James Reader (edited by Anna Grimshaw, Basil Blackwell 1991); but a complete annotated list of the papers contained in the James archive will be published in a forthcoming pamphlet of the Institute.
Anna Grimshaw is Associate Professor in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University. She is author of Servants of the Buddha and The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology.
The C.L.R. James Archive: A Reader's Guide is the third in a series of publications from the CLR. James Institute. The Institute was established in 1984 with James's full support and approval; and it is committed to the dissemination of his life's work. Just as James in 1953 wrote Mariners, Renegades and Castaways to publicise his case against threatened deportation from America, so too this series has been issued to publicise the case for making his work more widely and easily available. Since James's death in May 1989 it has become increasingly difficult to obtain his books. The few volumes remaining in print are almost impossible to find; and the bulk of his other titles are out of print. Furthermore, as this catalogue reveals, there is a vast quantity of James's work which has never been published, the most outstanding example being his great study of American civilization, The Struggle for Happiness. Two of the Institute's earlier pamphlets offer a critical appraisal of this and other key unpublished documents — C.L.R. James and The Struggle for Happiness by Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart (60pp); and Popular Democracy and the Creative Imagination: The Writings of C.L.R. James 1950-1963 by Anna Grimshaw (48pp). The papers described in this third publication of the C.L.R. James Institute have so far not been made available to the public. Readers interested in consulting the James Archive, and in securing its public accessibility, should write to the executors of the C.L.R. James Estate, c/o Benedict Birnberg, 103 Borough High Street, London SE1 1NN.
Anna Grimshaw is Associate Professor in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University. She is author of Servants of the Buddha and The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology.
Includes chapters on "Trotsky 1940", "The Historical Role of the Fourth International", "The Communist Parties in Western Europe", "The Character of the Stalinist Parties", "Imperialism Thirty Years After", and some polemics against someone called "Germain". C.L.R James uses the pseudonym J.R. Johnson in this pamphlet and Dunayevskay uses Forest. This pamphlet by the Johnson-Forest Tendency was published in 1947. The Johnson-Forest Tendency was a grouping in the Trotskyist movement which split off from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940 and went with what became the Workers Party. However, inside the Workers Party, the movement found it necessary to clarify its positions, not only against the empirical and eclectic jumps of Max Shachtman; we found it imperative to clarify our positions against those of Trotsky, positions which the Socialist Workers Party was repeating with ritual emphasis. It was in the course of doing this that in 1947 we published The Invading Socialist Society. But precisely our serious attitude to the fundamentals of Marxism led us to leave the happy-go-lucky improvisations of the Workers Party, and in 1948, to return to the Socialist Workers Party. This brief explanation will serve to place the document historically, and also to explain to the reader, the many polemical references to contemporary Marxist wraiths such as Shachtman, Muniz, and one who wrote under the now-forgotten name of Germain.
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
In his provocative and striking way, James writes of the disturbing transition from adolescence to adulthood, a passage no less brutal or monumental for having been experienced on a lush tropical island in the Caribbean. In fact, Secrets shows us how deceptive, and how much more dangerous, this splendid paradise - overflowing with brilliantly colored flowers and ripe, detectable fruit - can be for a young girl coming of age. The heroine of Secrets, Uxann, is blessed among her friends: Her father is an overseer, comparatively well off by island standards, and she a gifted student. She is reluctant to recognize the signs that this idyllic childhood is at an end - her own physical maturity, her friends' trysts in secret places, and terrifying omens, including the gabilan, a raptor with blazing eyes, which foretells evil. When the call to consciousness finally comes, the truth is revealed as so powerful that it disrupts Uxann's life forever, destroying all that she has taken for granted.
Kelvin Christopher James is the critically-acclaimed author of six novels: People and Peppers, a romance (Harvard Square Editions), Secrets (Villard & Vintage & KDP Indie), Fling with a Demon Lover (HarperCollins & KDP Indie), The Sorcerer's Drum, Web of Freedom, Mooch, the Meek (KDP Indie), and short story collections Jumping Ship and other stories (Villard & KDP Indie), City Lives, Crazy Loves, Backcountry Tales (KDP Indie). He has been the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature.
The epic novel from Marlon James, the Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings an African Game of Thrones. In the stunning first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child. Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard. As Tracker follows the boy's scent — from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers — he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying? Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.
Marlon James (born 24 November 1970) is a Jamaican writer. He has published three novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), and A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Now living in Minneapolis, James teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. James was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to parents who were both in the Jamaican police: his mother (who gave him his first prose book, a collection of stories by O. Henry) became a detective and his father (from whom James took a love of Shakespeare and Coleridge) a lawyer. James is a 1991 graduate of the University of the West Indies, where he read Language and Literature. He left Jamaica because he was scared of homophobic violence. He received a master's degree in creative writing from Wilkes University (2006). James has taught English and creative writing at Macalester College since 2007. His first novel, John Crow's Devil – which was rejected 70 times before being accepted for publication – tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957. His second novel, The Book of Night Women, is about a slave woman's revolt in a Jamaican plantation in the early 19th century. His most recent novel, 2014's A Brief History of Seven Killings, explores several decades of Jamaican history and political instability through the perspectives of many narrators. It won the fiction category of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, having been the first book by a Jamaican author ever to be shortlisted. He is the second Caribbean winner of the prize, following Trinidad-born V. S. Naipaul who won in 1971. James has indicated his next work will be a fantasy novel, titled Black Leopard, Red Wolf. It will be the first in a series.
The Book of Night Women is a sweeping, startling novel, a true tour de force of both voice and storytelling. It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they-and she-will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age and reveals the extent of her power, they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings and desires and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman in Jamaica, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link. Lilith's story overflows with high drama and heartbreak, and life on the plantation is rife with dangerous secrets, unspoken jealousies, inhuman violence, and very human emotion-between slave and master, between slave and overseer, and among the slaves themselves. Lilith finds herself at the heart of it all. And all of it told in one of the boldest literary voices to grace the page recently-and the secret of that voice is one of the book's most intriguing mysteries.
Marlon James (born 24 November 1970) is a Jamaican writer. He has published three novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), and A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Now living in Minneapolis, James teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. James was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to parents who were both in the Jamaican police: his mother (who gave him his first prose book, a collection of stories by O. Henry) became a detective and his father (from whom James took a love of Shakespeare and Coleridge) a lawyer. James is a 1991 graduate of the University of the West Indies, where he read Language and Literature. He left Jamaica because he was scared of homophobic violence. He received a master's degree in creative writing from Wilkes University (2006). James has taught English and creative writing at Macalester College since 2007. His first novel, John Crow's Devil – which was rejected 70 times before being accepted for publication – tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957. His second novel, The Book of Night Women, is about a slave woman's revolt in a Jamaican plantation in the early 19th century. His most recent novel, 2014's A Brief History of Seven Killings, explores several decades of Jamaican history and political instability through the perspectives of many narrators. It won the fiction category of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, having been the first book by a Jamaican author ever to be shortlisted. He is the second Caribbean winner of the prize, following Trinidad-born V. S. Naipaul who won in 1971. James has indicated his next work will be a fantasy novel, titled Black Leopard, Red Wolf. It will be the first in a series.
Claude McKay remains one of the most influential intellectuals of the African diaspora. Best remembered for his extraordinary poetry, his achievement in verse has been widely analysed and praised. Yet in the welter of discussion about McKay, little has been said about his early writing in Jamaican. Two collections from the period, SONGS OF JAMAICA and CONSTAB BALLADS, are known about but little known, and his poems for the Jamaican press, most of which have never been anthologized, are even less known, let alone studied. In A FIERCE HATRED OF INJUSTICE, Winston James elegantly redresses this omission. Through a subtle and detailed consideration of McKay’s formative years on the island, James reviews the themes and politics of poetry which McKay began writing at the age of ten. James demonstrates that McKay’s radicalism in exile can not be properly understood without an appreciation of the poets Jamaican political formation. which a study of McKay’s early poetry elucidates. Above all, James focuses on McKay’s pioneering use of Jamaican creole, revealing the way in which this laid a foundation for subsequent work by writers such as Louise Bennett, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Michael Smith. The volume concludes with a comprehensive anthology of McKay’s early poems together with a little-known interview the poet gave in 1911, a comic sketch of Jamaican peasant life which he wrote in 1912, and an autobiographical story McKay wrote about his experience in the Kingston police force.
Winston James, who grew up in Jamaica and Britain, earned his doctorate at the London School of Economics and teaches History at Columbia University. His previous publications include INSIDE BABYLON: THE CARIBBEAN DIASPORA IN BRITAIN (Verso 1993), edited with Clive Harris.
Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Richard B. Moore, Amy Jacques Garvey, Cyril Briggs, Claude McKay, Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Stokely Carmichael - the roster of immigrants from theh Caribbean who have made a profound impact on the development of radical politics in the United States is extensive. In this magisterial and lavishly illustrated work, Winston James focuses on the twentieth century’s first waves of migrants from the Caribbean and their contribution to political dissidence in America. Examining how the characteristics of the societies they left shaped their perceptions of the land to which they traveled, James draws sharp distinctions between Hispanic, Anglophone, and other non-Hispanic arrivals. He explores the interconnections between the Cuban independence struggle, Puerto Rican nationalism, Afro-American feminism, and black communism in the first turbulent decades of the twentieth century. He also provides fascinating insights into the peculiarities of Puerto Rican radicalism’s impact in New York City and recounts the remarkable story of Afro-Cuban radicalism in Florida. Virgin Islander Hubert Harrison, whom A. Philip Randolph dubbed ‘the father of Harlem radicalism,’ is rescued from the historical shadows by James’s analysis of his pioneering contribution to Afro-America’s radical tradition. In addition to a subtle re-examination of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association - including the exertions and contributions of its female members - James provides the most detailed exploration so far undertaken of Cyril Briggs and his little-known but important African Blood Brotherhood. This diligently researched, wide-ranging and sophisticated book will be welcomed by all those interested in the Caribbean and its émigrés, the Afro-American current within America’s radical tradition, and the history, politics, and culture of the African diaspora.
Winston James, who grew up in Jamaica and Britain, earned his doctorate at the London School of Economics and teaches History at Columbia University. His previous publications include INSIDE BABYLON: THE CARIBBEAN DIASPORA IN BRITAIN (Verso 1993), edited with Clive Harris.
Dread Beat and Blood is perhaps, the most important commentary on the condition of Black people in British society which any of our poets have achieved so far. Its importance lies in the fact that the poems speak directly to the people through a medium which does not falsify the experiences they wish to convey: experiences which have meaning for every Black person in Britain and which illustrate the impact of the frustration and pain felt iii our community today. No amount of comment by journalists or sociologists could speak of our experience quite as these poems do. Andrew Salkey writes in his introduction to the poems: ‘Linton’s poetry is one with Linton’s own experience as a man and as a poet in struggle. No editing gesture need intervene the unity of the two. He grants no concessions. His is a whole world, where to stay dead centre in ghetto suffering and say the following, taken from ‘To Show It So’, is to say it to those who share and understand a common experience of oppression and the matching language of pain, knowing implicitly that those who feel it deep down will also recognise it, and require no glossary or explanatory notes to do so.
Linton Kwesi Johnson is Britain's most influential black poet. The author of four previous collections of poetry and numerous record albums, he is known world-wide for his fusion of lyrical verse and reggae (dub).
Linton Kwesi Johnson was born in August 1952 in Chapleton, a small town in the rural parish of Clarendon in Jamaica. He attended Miss Emily’s private school and later Chapleton and Stacyville All Age schools. He left Jamaica in November 1963 to join his mother who had emigrated to England in 1961. Between 1963 and 1970, Linton attended the Tulse Hill Comprehensive School in Brixton graduating with six O’levels. He worked as an accounts clerk and a clerical officer in the Treasury and the Greater London Council while successfully studying for 2 A’ levels. In 1973, he entered Goldsmith’s College where he read for the Bachelor of Arts Degree in Sociology and after a period of unemployment, he worked as an assembly worker at Twinlock’s in. Croydon. In January 1977, Linton was awarded the Cecil Day Lewis Fellowship as a writer in residence in the Borough of Lambeth and then to the Keskidee Arts Centre as a Library Resources and Education officer. Linton Kwesi Johnson has woven his political and artistic pursuits into the disciplines of waged work and the education industry. On leaving the Tulse Hill Comprehensive School, he joined the Black Panther Movement, a mass organisation of young blacks mobilised to pursue the liberation of blacks from colonial oppression here in Brixton. Within the Black Panther Movement, he, along with others, organized a poetry workshop and later developed his work with a group of poets and drummers called Rasta Love. His work was first published in the journal ‘Race Today’ in 1973 and one year later Race Today published his first book of poems, ‘The Voices of the Living and the Dead’. Bogle L’Ouverture published his second volume of poems, ‘Dread Beat and Blood’ in 1975. A film of the same title, financed by the Arts Council of Great Britain, documented a. poet in the making and was screened by the B.B.C. at peak viewing time. Linton, the recording artist, appeared on the Virgin label in 1978 under the title ‘Dread Beat and Blood’. Then followed ‘Forces of Victory’ in 1979 and ‘Bass Culture’ in 1980 all on the Island Label. . .
Linton Kwesi Johnson is Britain's most influential black poet. The author of four previous collections of poetry and numerous record albums, he is known world-wide for his fusion of lyrical verse and reggae (dub).
‘In 2002 Linton Kwesi Johnson became the second living and the first black poet to have his selected poems published in England in the Penguin Classics series. He is Jamaican by birth, and though he has resided for most of his adult life in England, where he took a university degree in sociology, he writes in Jamaican Creole. Not a dialect, not strictly a ‘patois,’ either, and not a mere post-colonial version of Standard English, Jamaican Creole is a language created out of hard necessity by African slaves from 17th century British English and West African, mostly Ashanti, language groups, with a lexical admixture from the Caribe and Arawak natives of the island. It is a powerfully expressive, flexible and, not surprisingly, musical vernacular, sustained and elaborated upon for over four hundred years by the descendants of those slaves, including those who, like LKJ, have migrated out of Jamaica in the second great diaspora for England, Canada, and the United States. Fortunately, its grammar and orthography, like that of pre-18th century British English, have never been rigidly formalized or fixed by an academy of notables or any authoritative dictionary. It is, therefore, a living, organically evolving language, intimately connected to the lived experience of its speakers.’ -from the Introduction by Russell Banks. CONTAINS FULL-LENGTH CD OF JOHNSON READING.
Linton Kwesi Johnson is Britain's most influential black poet. The author of four previous collections of poetry and numerous record albums, he is known world-wide for his fusion of lyrical verse and reggae (dub).
Poems about racism, race riots, radical politics, police oppression, and black youth by a popular Jamaican-born but British-based reggae artist.
Linton Kwesi Johnson is Britain's most influential black poet. The author of four previous collections of poetry and numerous record albums, he is known world-wide for his fusion of lyrical verse and reggae (dub).
The Fear of French Negroes is an interdisciplinary study that explores how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1845). Using visual culture, popular music and dance, periodical literature, historical memoirs, and state papers, Sara E. Johnson examines the migration of people, ideas, and practices across imperial boundaries. Building on previous scholarship on black internationalism, she traces expressions of both aesthetic and experiential transcolonial black politics across the Caribbean world, including Hispaniola, Louisiana and the Gulf South, Jamaica, and Cuba. Johnson examines the lives and work of figures as diverse as armed black soldiers and privateers, female performers, and newspaper editors to argue for the existence of competing inter-Americanisms as she uncovers the struggle for unity amidst the realities of class, territorial, and linguistic diversity. These stories move beyond a consideration of the well-documented anxiety insurgent blacks occasioned in slaveholding systems to refocus attention on the wide variety of strategic alliances they generated in their quests for freedom, equality and profit.
Sara E. Johnson is Associate Professor of Literature at UC San Diego. Sara Johnson received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and her B.A. in Comparative Literature and African American Studies from Yale University. She is currently working on a book documenting the work of Moreau de Saint-Méry, a late eighteenth-century Caribbean intellectual. She has performed extensive research abroad, living in Senegal, Cuba, Haiti and Martinique. Recent fellowships include those from the Ford Foundation, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Program, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Hellman Fund. Her book The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) is an inter-disciplinary study that explores how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1845). Using visual culture, popular music and dance, periodical literature, historical memoirs, and state papers, the book traces expressions of transcolonial black politics, both aesthetic and experiential, in places including Hispaniola, Louisiana, Jamaica, and Cuba. It was published by the University of California Press as part of the Modern Language initiative, a partnership between the Modern Language Association, the Mellon Foundation, and several university presses. Johnson is the co-editor of Kaiso! Writings By and About Katherine Dunham (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, Studies in Dance History Series, 2006) and Una ventana a Cuba y los Estudios cubanos (San Juan: Ediciones Callejon, Spring 2010). Kaiso! was named one of the top ten arts books of 2006.
Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon Damas are the major subjects of the collection of the poetry of Négritude as it developed among Afro-French writers. Négritude is defined here as the totality of black experience, for example, Césaire's realization that he could not deny his relationship with even the humblest black man because they were bound in a common experience. The poetry contained in this book is part of the rootage of more recent expressions of black awareness. These poets wrote out of their own experience, shaping the French idiom to their own purposes. Edward A. Jones has written a brief introduction to the work of each of these three poets and provided an English translation to accompany some of their major works in French. Also included in the. book are the works of several lesser poets of the Négritude school.
Edward A. Jones is Professor of French and Chairman of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. A native of Mississippi, he took his undergraduate work at Morehouse, and then he earned the Master of Arts degree in French at Middlebury College and the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Romance Language and Literature at Cornell University. He also holds the Diplome de Professeur de Francais from the Sorbonne and the Certificat d'Études Francaises from the University of Grenoble. Dr. Jones has published a number of articles and book reviews in journals, such as South Atlantic Quarterly, French Review, Modern Language Journal, and the Journal of Negro History. He is the author of A Candle in the Dark: A History of Morehouse College. He has been appointed by President Léopold Sédar Senghor, of the West African Republic of Senegal, to serve as Honorary Consul of Senegal in Atlanta.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Haiti became the first and only modern country born from a slave revolt. During the first decades of Haitian independence, a wealth of original poetry was created by the inhabitants of the former French Caribbean island colony and published in Haitian newspapers. These deeply felt poems celebrated the legitimacy of the new nation and the value of the authors’ African origins while revealing a common mission shared by all Haitians in the young republic: freedom from oppressors and equality for all. This collection of deeply felt and powerfully moving Haitian poetry dating back to the first decades of the Caribbean island’s independence from French colonial rule sheds a much needed light on an important and often neglected period in Haiti’s literary history. Editors Kadish and Jenson have made a significant corpus of largely unknown poetry accessible to a wide audience for the first time with this essential bilingual volume of early-nineteenth-century verse that celebrates the authors’ African origins, freedom from oppression, equality for all, and the legitimacy of the only modern country born from a slave revolt.
Doris Y. Kadish is Distinguished Research Professor Emerita of French and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia. Deborah Jenson is Professor of Romance Studies and Global Health at Duke University. Norman R. Shapiro is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Distinguished Professor of Literary Translation at Wesleyan University and an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Deeply engrossing and beautifully written, this debut novel marks the stunning arrival of a major new talent. Set on a fictional Caribbean island, Flickering Shadows is the story of the colorful and compelling inhabitants of a small ex-colony, a village called the Hill. Cephus’s grandfather - one of the most intriguing narrators to appear in fiction in some time - draws the reader into the lives and vivid dramas of the whole community. Cephus, Doreen, Boysie, Inez, young Kwame, the ghost, Dolphus, and an array of vibrantly-depicted characters form a rich and hypnotic tale of love and betrayal, selflessness and honor, lust and dignity. Played out against a backdrop of political chicanery and religious corruption, this entrancing novel captivates from its first sentence to its breathtaking and unforgettable conclusion. ‘People have been asking for some time now: where are the Bajan griot voices to succeed George Lamming, Paule Marshall, Austin Clark? Well, look in vain no further. Here, fresh & young in the spirit-fields of that nearest-to-Africa Caribbean island, is my namesake Kwadwo Agymah Kamau’s first novel, Flickering Shadows, continuing the great coral/choral-calling tradition of Barbados.’ - Kamau Brathwaite.
Kwadwo Agymah Kamau is an Barbadian American novelist. He is a native of Barbados, moved to New York in 1977. He studied at Virginia Commonwealth University. He graduated from Baruch College of CUNY with a bachelor's degree in finance and a master's degree (1985) in quantitative economics. He served first as a statistician at the New York City Department of Investigations, then as a senior economist at the New York State Department of Taxation & Finance. He studied with Paule Marshall at Virginia Commonwealth University in the MFA program. His work has appeared in Callaloo, Caribbean Vibes, Gumbo, InSyte Magazine, He teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma.
Since 1965, West Indians have been emigrating to the United States in record numbers, and to New York City in particular. Caribbean New York shows how the new immigration is reshaping American race relations and sheds much-needed light on factors that underlie some of the city's explosive racial confrontations. Philip Kasinitz examines how two forces-racial solidarity and ethnic distinctiveness-have helped to shape the identity of New York's West Indian community. He compares ‘new’ (post-1965) immigrants with West Indians who arrived earlier in the century, and looks in detail at the economic, political, and cultural rules that Afro-Caribbean immigrants have played in the city during each period.
Philip Kasinitz is Presidential Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has chaired the doctoral program in Sociology from since 2001-2011 and 2014-the present. Kasinitz graduated Boston University in 1979 and earned his doctorate from New York University in 1987. He specializes in immigration, ethnicity, race relations, urban social life and the nature of contemporary cities. Much of his work focuses on New York. He is the author of Caribbean New York for which he won the Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award in 1996. His co-authored book Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age won the Eastern Sociological Society’s Mirra Komarovsky Book Award in 2009 and the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award in 2010. Kasinitz served as the President of the Eastern Sociological Society in 2007-2008 and was awarded the Society’s Merritt Award for career contributions in 2015. Since 2005 has been the book review editor of the ESS journal, Sociological Forum. He is a member of the Historical Advisory Board of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation and a former member of the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on International Migration and the Russell Sage Foundation’s committee to study the social effects of 9-11 on New York City. Kasinitz is frequently quoted in media venues and his work has appeared in CNN On Line, New York Newsday; Dissent; The Nation; The Wall Street Journal; Lingua Franca, and Telos as well as in numerous academic journals. Prior to coming to the Graduate Center, Kasinitz taught at Williams College. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton University, The University of Amsterdam and the Technical University of Berlin.
Told in the voice of a girl as she moves from childhood into adolescence, Buxton Spice is the story the town of Tamarind Grove: its eccentric families, its sweeping joys, and its sudden tragedies. The novel brings to life 1970s Guyana-a world at a cultural and political crossroads-and perfectly captures a child's keen observations, sense of wonder, and the growing complexity of consciousness that marks the passage from innocence to experience.
Oonya Kempadoo (born 1966) is a novelist who was born in the UK of Guyanese parentage, her father being the writer Peter Kempadoo. Born in Sussex, England, "of mixed Indian, African, Scottish, and Amerindian descent", Oonya Kempadoo was brought up in Guyana from the age of five. She has studied art in Amsterdam, and has also lived in Trinidad, St. Lucia, and Tobago. She now lives in St. George's, Grenada. Her first novel, Buxton Spice, a semi-autobiographical rural coming-of-age story, was published 1998. The New York Times described it as "superb, and superbly written". Her second book, Tide Running (Picador, 2001), set in Plymouth, Tobago, is the story of young brothers Cliff and Ossie. Tide Running won the Casa de las Americas Literary Prize for best English or Creole novel. Both of these books were nominated for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards, the first in 2000 and the second in 2003. In 2011, she participated in the International Writing Program's Fall Residency at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA. She was named a Great Talent for the Twenty-First Century by the Orange Prize judges and is a winner of the Casa de las Américas Prize. Her third novel All Decent Animals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) was recommended on Oprah's 2013 Summer Reading List by Karen Russell, who said: "How am I only now finding out about this writer? It's as if she's inventing her own language, which is incantatory, dense, and lush. The authority and blood pulse of it seduced me."
‘If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by airplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V.C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an air- port named after him—why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen . . .’ So begins Jamaica Kincaid's new book, which shows us what we have not yet seen of the place where she grew up—a ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies. First, there is the perhaps familiar aerial view of this longed-for place, the disproportionately large airport, the careening drive over bad roads in a Japanese taxi, the dilapidated school and hospital, the mockery of a library. Then there is the sea: ‘That water—have you ever seen anything like it? Far out, to the horizon, the color of the water is navy blue; nearer, the water is the color of the North American sky ... Oh, what beauty!’ What follows is less familiar, a new point of view, for it is unlikely that, on vacation, you have had the time to think clearly about the people you are visiting— their colonial history, their government, their manners, their sense of time—or about their opinion of you. You are English or European or American, escaping the banality and corruption of your large place; they are Antiguan, formerly British, and unable to escape the same drawbacks of their own little realm. This expansive essay—lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode—cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies.
Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California.
In a piece about Jamaica Kincaid’s work, Derek Walcott wrote: ‘Genius has many surprises, and one of them is geography. While we settle in the tradition of expecting art to be made only in certain places on the map-in those fixed points of culture that make us as assured of our position as the geometry of the stars-some cell, in the least predictable place, is accreting things to itself . . . ‘ With ANNIE JOHN, Kincaid makes us privy to the particular accretions gathered during a coming of age in Antigua, transforming those realities into the structure of a short fictional narrative. While the poetic abstractions that marked many of the stories in her previous book, AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RIVER, are grounded in detail here, their theme of the loss of childhood, on many levels, remains constant. Annie’s childhood is suffused with doting attention from her elders; her passage to adolescence is fraught with events and alliances that lead her away from complacent mutual acceptance. As a punishment in school, she is asked by her English headmistress to copy Books I and II of Milton’s Paradise Lost-her crime, the defacing of a picture of Christopher Columbus, who ‘discovered’ the West Indies, When Annie and her secret friend, the atypical guava-tree climbing, barefoot, and wild-haired ‘Red Girl,’ are physically separated, Annie dreams that they live alone on an island: ‘At night we could sit on the sand and watch ships filled with people on a cruise steam by. We sent confusing signals to the ships, causing them to crash on some nearby rocks, How we laughed as their cries of joy turned to cries of sorrow.’ Annie’s rebellions presage a turning away from her circumscribed island, where, ‘as usual, the sun shone, the trade winds blew; on her way to put some starched clothes on the line, my mother shooed some hens out of her garden . . . ‘ And, more importantly, they signal a break from her previously adored and adoring mother. ‘I could not be sure if for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother or when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the whole world.’ . Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua, in the West Indies, She is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and her stories have also appeared in Rolling Stone and The Paris Review, She now lives with her husband and daughter in New York. Her previous book received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. .
Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, during the academic year. Kincaid is an award-winning writer whose work has been both commended and criticized for its subject matter and tone because her writing draws upon her life and is perceived as angry. In response, Kincaid counters that writers draw upon their lives all the time and that to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not a valid criticism.
A story about a girl’s coming of age. Kincaid says this is one of her stories that were rejected by The New Yorker.
Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, during the academic year. Kincaid is an award-winning writer whose work has been both commended and criticized for its subject matter and tone because her writing draws upon her life and is perceived as angry. In response, Kincaid counters that writers draw upon their lives all the time and that to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not a valid criticism.
Reading Jamaica Kincaid is to plunge, gently, into another way of seeing both the physical world and its elusive inhabitants. Her voice is, by turns, naïvely whimsical and biblical in its assurance, and it speaks of what is partly remembered, partly divined, The memories often concern a childhood in the Caribbean - family, manners, and landscape - as distilled and transformed by Kincaid’s special style and vision. ‘Girl,’ the first story in this collection of ten pieces, plays with a particular but typical upbringing: ‘Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays, try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming.’ The catalogue of demands is varied, the refrain repeated, as in a song. In ‘Holidays,’ a trip to the country is related with the same light touch. The title story, ‘At the Bottom of the River,’ is a culmination of the themes and imagery that inform most of this short but seemingly limitless book. Kincaid leads her readers to consider, as if for the first time, the powerful ties between mother and child; the beauty and destructiveness of nature; the gulf between the masculine and the feminine; the significance of familiar things-a house, a cup, a pen. Transfiguring our human form and our surroundings-shedding skin, darkening an afternoon, painting a perfect place-these stories tell us something we didn’t know, in a way we hadn’t expected. . Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua, in the West Indies, She is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and her stories have also appeared in Rolling’ Stone and The Paris Review, She now lives with her husband in New York, AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RIVER is her first book. .
Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, during the academic year. Kincaid is an award-winning writer whose work has been both commended and criticized for its subject matter and tone because her writing draws upon her life and is perceived as angry. In response, Kincaid counters that writers draw upon their lives all the time and that to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not a valid criticism.
Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. Lewis and Mariah are a thrice-blessed couple-handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Yet, alomst at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful facade. With mingled anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the assumptions and verities of her employers' world and compares them with the vivid realities of her native place. Lucy has no illusions about her own past, but neither is she prepared to be deceived about where she presently is. At the same time that Lucy is coming to terms with Lewis's and Mariah's lives, she is also unravelling the mysteries of her own sexuality. Gradually a new person unfolds: passionate, forthright, and disarmingly honest. In Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid has created a startling new character possessed with adamantine clearsightedness and ferocious integrity-a captivating heroine for our time.
Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California.
Jamaica Kincaid's first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate chauffeur who makes his living along the wide, open roads that pass the only towns he has ever seen and the graveyard where he will be buried. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every sider and suppressed passion fills the air. Misery infects the unstudied, slow pace of the island and of Mr. Potters days. As the narrative unfolds in linked vignettes, his story becomes the story of a vital, crippled community. Kincaid introduces us to Mr. Potter's ancestors - beginning with his father, a poor fisherman, and his mother, who committed suicide - and the refugees fleeing the collapsing world who press in on Mr. Potter's life. Amid his surroundings, Mr. Potter struggles to live at ease: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, to shake off the encumbrance of his daughters - one of whom will return to Antigua after he dies and tell his story with equal measures of distance and sympathy. In Mr. Potter, her most luminous, ambitious work to date, Kincaid breathes life into a figure unlike any in contemporary fiction, an individual consciousness emerging gloriously out of an unexamined life.
Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, during the academic year. Kincaid is an award-winning writer whose work has been both commended and criticized for its subject matter and tone because her writing draws upon her life and is perceived as angry. In response, Kincaid counters that writers draw upon their lives all the time and that to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not a valid criticism.
Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. The youngest of four children, highly intelligent, well read, and a gifted athlete, he had been involved in a murder at the age of fourteen, lived as a Rastafarian, and was heavily immersed in the drug culture. A dreamer who aroused both love and anger, he died painfully and alone in his mother's house. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother's life is also the story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. Kincaid's unblinking record of a life that ended too early speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.
Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, during the academic year. Kincaid is an award-winning writer whose work has been both commended and criticized for its subject matter and tone because her writing draws upon her life and is perceived as angry. In response, Kincaid counters that writers draw upon their lives all the time and that to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not a valid criticism.
Jamaica Kincaid's first garden in Vermont was a square plot in the middle of her front lawn, There, to the consternation of more experienced gardener friends, she planted only seeds of flowers she liked best. In My Garden (Book):, she gathers together all she loves about gardening and plants, and examines it in the same spirit: generously, passionately, and with sharp, idiosyncratic discrimination. Kincaid's affections are matched in intensity only by her dislikes. She loves spring and summer, but cannot bring herself to love winter, for it hides the garden. She adores rhododendron 'Jane Grant,' and appreciates ordinary Blue Lake string beans, but abhors the Asiatic lily and dreams of ways to trap small plant-eating animals. The sources of her inspiration - seed catalogues (the glossy ones, and, preferably, the non-glossy ones), the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, gardens like Monet's at Giverny - are subjected to her scrutiny. She also examines the idea of the garden on Antigua, where she grew up and where one of her favorite school subjects was botany, and she considers the implications of the English idea of the garden in colonized countries. On a trip to the Chelsea Flower Show, she visits historic English gardens on English soil. My Garden (Book): is an intimate, playful, and penetrating book on gardens, the plants that fill them, and the gardeners who tend them. Jamaica Kincaid's most recent book (as editor) is an anthology of writing on plants, My Favorite Plant (FSG, 1998). She lives in Vermont with her husband and children, and she teaches at Harvard University.
Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, during the academic year. Kincaid is an award-winning writer whose work has been both commended and criticized for its subject matter and tone because her writing draws upon her life and is perceived as angry. In response, Kincaid counters that writers draw upon their lives all the time and that to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not a valid criticism.
From 'The Talk of the Town,' Jamaica Kincaid's first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New York. Talk Stories is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's original writing for The New Yorker's 'Talk of the Town,' composed from 1978 to 1983, after she first came to the United States from Antigua. Kincaid found a unique voice, at once in sync with William Shawn's tone for the quintessential elite insider's magazine and (though unsigned) all her own - wonderingly alive to the ironies and screwball details that characterized her adopted city. She meets Miss Jamaica, visiting from Kingston, and escorts the reader to the West Indian Day parade in Brooklyn; she sees Ed Koch don his 'Cheshire-cat smile' and watches Tammy Wynette autograph a copy of Lattimore's Odyssey; she learns the worlds of publishing and partying, of fashion and popular music, and how to call cauliflower a cruditT. The book also records Kincaid's development as a young writer - the newcomer who sensitively records her impressions here takes root to become one of our most respected authors. Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John's, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, A Small Place, The Autobiography of My Mother, and My Brother, as well as My Garden (Book). She lives with her family in Vermont.
Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California.
JAMAICA KINCAID's new novel is the haunting, deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half- African father, was delivered to his laundress as an infant, bundled up like his clothes: ‘It is possible that he would have expected better care for one than the other, but which one I do not know, because he was a very vain man.’ Kincaid takes us from Xuela's childhood in a home where she could hear the song of the sea - ’sometimes as a soft swish, a lapping of waves against the shore of black stones, sometimes with the anger of water boiling in a cauldron resting unsteadily on a large fire' ' - to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack LaBatte, who becomes her first lover. We learn about her passion for Roland, a stevedore who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, and her eventual marriage to an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela's is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is ‘the black room of the world’ that is Xuela's barrenness and motherlessness. The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of a character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution evoked in startling and magical poetry.
Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California.
This is the first literary biography of Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist Derek Walcott. It traces the creative contradictions in his life from colonial St Lucia, where he was part of a tiny English-speaking Protestant mulatto elite in an overwhelmingly French-Creole Roman Catholic black society, to 1999 when, a star of international literature and a symbol of cultural decolonization, he wanted to be Poet Laureate. The author has had access to letters, diaries, uncollected and unpublished writings, and conducted numerous interviews in the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Walcott is seen as someone driven by the need to justify his life and fulfill his talents before an unknowable God, but who, in mastering the ways of the world, often regards himself as an example of fallen humanity. Besides offering an approach to Walcott as a poet, dramatist, theatre director, arts critic, and teacher, the book shows how his desire to be a painter influenced his vision and the way he works.
Bruce King is a freelance editor and writer. He has held professorships or distinguished visiting professorships at Lagos and Ahmadu Bello (Nigeria), Stirling, Windsor (Canada), Canterbury (NZ), Ben Gurion (Israel), North Alabama, Paris III, Paris VII, and Angers (France).
C. L. R. James (1901-1989), one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century, expressed his postcolonial and socialist philosophies in fiction, speeches, essays, and book-length scholarly discourses. However, the majority of academic attention given to James keeps the diverse mediums of James's writing separate, focuses on his work as a political theorist, and subordinates his role as a fiction writer. This book, however, seeks to change such an approach to studying James. Defining creolization as a process by which European, African, Amerindian, Asian, and American cultures are amalgamated to form new hybrid identities and cultures, Nicole King uses this process as a means to understanding James's work and life. She argues that, throughout his career, whether writing a short story or a political history, James articulated his attempt to produce revolutionary, radical discourses with a consistent methodology. James, a Trinidad-born scholar who migrated to England and then to the United States and who described himself both as a black radical and a Victorian intellectual serves as a definitive model of creolization. King argues that James's writings also fit the model of creolization, for each is influenced by diverse types of discourses. James rarely wrote from within the confines of a single discipline, instead choosing to make the layers of history, literature, philosophy, and political theory coalesce in order to make his point. As his West Indian and Western European influences converge in his work and life, he creates texts that are difficult to confine into a specific category or discipline. No matter which medium he uses, James was preoccupied with how to represent the individual personality and at the same time represent the community. The C. L. R. James that emerges from King's study is a man made more compelling and more human because of his complicated, multilayered, and sometimes contradictory allegiances.
NICOLE KING is an associate professor of literature at the University of California (San Diego). Her work has been published in Soundings and the book Minds, Bodies, Blackness.
THE UNTOLD TALE OF JEWISH VALOR AND SEAFARING ADVENTURE IN THE DAYS OF THE SPANISH INQUISITION. In the midst of the Age of Discovery, the Inquisition took hold in Spain an Portugal, forcing many underground Jews to flee the peninsula. The most daring went to the New World as explorers, conquistadors, and pioneering merchants. Others became freewheeling outlaws, practicing piracy on the high seas. In ships bearing names such as the Prophet Samuel, Queen Esther, and Shield of Abraham, Sephardic Jewish pirates plundered Spanish and Portuguese possessions for riches and revenge. The seventeenth century began with Jews outlawed in the New World and most of Europe, and it ended in their freedom. The participants in the liberation included the ‘Great Jewish Pirate’ Sinan, Barbarossa’s crafty second-in-command; Rabbi Samuel Palache, who went from commanding pirate ships to founding Holland’s Jewish community; brothers Abraham and Moses Cohen Henriques, one a merchant, the other a pirate who used cunning and economic muscle to rob the evil empire. JEWISH PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN delves into the lives of these and other Jews who chose the freedom of the seas and New World adventure over the persecution of the Old World. It is about how they helped build the Spanish Empire and - when Jewish survival demanded – brought it down by forming secret alliances with other European powers to ensure the safety of Jews living in hiding. Such was the situation in Jamaica, home to Jews disguised as Portuguese Christians since the time of Columbus, where they conspired with England in the takeover of the island when the Inquisition threatened this Jewish safe haven. Awarded settlement rights, these so-called ‘Portugals’ were soon joined by other New World Jews, and together with an irregular army of cutthroat seamen known to history as the buccaneers of the West Indies, they transformed Jamaica’s Port Royal into the pirate capital of the New World and brought the Spanish Empire to its knees. JEWISH PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN brings to light this strange-but-true tale of Jews who battled the forces of the Inquisition to gain the rights Jews in the West enjoy today. It concludes with their last hurrah - the search for the lost gold mine of Columbus in Jamaica.
EDWARD KRITZLER is a historian and journalist, residing in Kingston, Jamaica.
Set in a Hindu community in the Eastern Caribbean, NO PAIN LIKE THIS BODY is one of the most distinctive, powerful novels in the Caribbean Writers Series. In vivid unsentimental prose, it describes the life of a poor rice-growing family during the August rainy season. Their struggle to cope with illness, a drunken and unpredictable father, and the violence of the elements, is set against a sharply drawn village community. With brilliant economy and originality, Ladoo creates a surreal, terrifying world in which the struggle to survive engenders a courageous, almost religious, relationship with fate. Harold Sonny Ladoo was born and brought up in Trinidad. Like many writers of his generation, he went abroad, emigrating to Canada where he published No Pain Like This Body and Yesterdays. The considerable vigour and promise evident in these two novels and in his other short stories was cut short by his tragic early death, when he was only 28.
Harold Sonny Ladoo (1945–1973) was a Caribbean novelist and author of two books documenting the struggles of living in poverty in the Hindu communities of Trinidad and Tobago. Ladoo was born and grew up in an environment much like the world of his novels. He was born in Trinidad into extreme poverty and immigrated to Toronto, Canada, with his wife and son in 1968 to study English at the University of Toronto. It was during this time that he wrote his first and most notable novel, No Pain Like This body, published in 1972. His second book, Yesterdays, was a much more upbeat book about a young man attempting to launch a Hindu Mission to Canada. Ladoo's third book was intended to be the last part of a trilogy; however, in 1973, while on a visit home to his Calcutta Settlement, he was mysteriously killed and his body was found on the side of a road in Trinidad.
YESTERDAYS is a bawdy, outrageously funny novel of West Indian life, detailing young Poonwa's attempt to launch a Hindu Mission to Canada. He is driven less by religious fervor than by a need for revenge against the blonde Canadian woman sent to bring Christian salvation and suffering to the Heathen on the Island. Dominating the story is Choonilal, pressured to sell his property to finance this dubious scheme. We meet the motley cast of village characters: the conniving priest in cowboy boots, an obliging merchant who seduces every male in sight, a crowd of lusty women. The intrigue is enriched by a wealth of island lore, as everyone gossips and reminisces about their own yesterdays. Despite the farcical tone, the novel, as it develops, takes on the tragic dimension and resonance of all true comedy. YESTERDAYS was conceived by the writer as the second book in a series spanning life in Canada and the Caribbean. This plan was cut short by the sudden death of Harold Ladoo, in Trinidad, in the summer of 1973. Of his first novel, NO PAIN LIKE THIS BODY, the critics said: If Ladoo can do it again he will have secured a place as an important young novelist. in the meantime he has skillfully revealed new territory which it explored can only enrich fiction in Canada.
Harold Sonny Ladoo (1945–1973) was a Caribbean novelist and author of two books documenting the struggles of living in poverty in the Hindu communities of Trinidad and Tobago. Ladoo was born and grew up in an environment much like the world of his novels. He was born in Trinidad into extreme poverty and immigrated to Toronto, Canada, with his wife and son in 1968 to study English at the University of Toronto. It was during this time that he wrote his first and most notable novel, No Pain Like This body, published in 1972. The novel is a vivid story of a young boy growing up in a small Caribbean rice-growing community. It focuses on the day-to-day struggles of a single family through illness, storm, and violence during the August rainy season. The writing is raw and often naïve yet manages to create a visceral experience. His second book, Yesterdays, was a much more upbeat book about a young man attempting to launch a Hindu Mission to Canada. Ladoo's third book was intended to be the last part of a trilogy; however, in 1973, while on a visit home to his Calcutta Settlement, he was mysteriously killed and his body was found on the side of a road in Trinidad. The University of Toronto Mississauga campus (formerly Erindale College), offers to students The Harold Sonny Ladoo Book Prize for Creative Writing ever year.
The story of Dany Laferriere, the narrator and writer living in exile in Montreal, who finally comes home to Haiti. Nothing is different, and yet everything has changed. There is his mother, who has never left Haiti, not even for one minute, and who still performs all the rituals of old. But there is also the army of zombies that takes over the streets at night, while the American army occupies the country by day. What is this country of dead men? Is every Haitian a secret citizen? Is it possible for Laferriere to cross over to that country and then return? Laferriere wanders through Port-au-Prince interrogating old friends and new acquaintances. The tone becomes strident, as do the questions: Do we stay? Do we leave? What's the point? Where can we be ourselves and live like humans at the same time? In the end Laferriere decides to head for Bombardopolis, a village where you only need to eat once every three months -- a way of curing hunger? What will become of him once he gets there, and who will he be when he returns?
Dany Laferrière worked as a journalist in his native Haiti during the notorious Duvalier regime, immigrating to Canada in 1976. He is the author of several acclaimed novels and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix RFO du Livre 2002 and Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montr�al 2009, and in 2009 he was named Quebec Personality of the Year. David Homel has translated over 30 books, many by Quebec authors. He won the Governor General's Literary Award in translation in 1995 for Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? by Dany Laferriere; his translation of Laferriere's How to Make Love to a Negro was nominated in 1988; and he won the prize in 2001 with fellow translator Fred A. Reed for Fairy Wing. His novels, which include Sonya & Jack, Electrical Storms, and The Speaking Cure have been published in several languages. Homel lives in Montreal, Quebec.
On the sun-drenched island of Haiti in the 1970s, under the shadow of Baby Doc Duvalier’s notorious regime, locals eke out an existence as servants, bartenders and panderers to the white elite. Fanfan, Charlie, and Legba, aware of the draw of their adolescent, black bodies, seduce rich, middle-aged white tourists looking for respite from their colourless jobs and marriages. These relationships mirror the power struggle inherent in all transactions in Port-au-Prince’s seedy back streets. Heading South takes us into the world of artists, rappers, Voodoo priests, hotel owners, uptight Parisian journalists and partner-swapping Haitian lovers, all desperately trying to balance happiness with survival. Made into an award-winning film starring Charlotte Rampling, this provocative novel, translated for the first time into English, explores the lines between sexual liberation and exploitation, artistic freedom and appropriation, independence and colonialism.
Dany Laferrière worked as a journalist in his native Haiti during the notorious Duvalier regime, immigrating to Canada in 1978 after a colleague with whom he was collaborating on a story was murdered. He has also worked as a TV and radio host, screenwriter, and director. The author of 13 novels, he has won several awards, including the prestigious Prix Médicis and the Governor Generals award for a Children's novel. Dany Laferrière lives in Montreal, Canada. Wayne Grady is the author of eleven books, the editor of fourteen literary anthologies, and the former editor of Harrowsmith magazine. One of the finest literary translators in the country, he has won the Governor General's Award for Translation and the John Glassco Prize for Literary Translation. He lives in Kingston, Ontario, and teaches creative writing and translation at the University of British Columbia.
On January 12, 2010, novelist Dany Laferrière had just ordered dinner at a Port-au-Prince restaurant with a friend when the earthquake struck. He survived; some three hundred thousand others did not. The quake caused widespread destruction and left over one million homeless. This moving and revelatory book is an eyewitness account of the quake and its aftermath. In a series of vignettes, Laferrière reveals the shock, rage, and grief experienced by those around him, the acts of heroism he witnessed, and his own sense of survivor guilt. At one point, his nephew, astonished at still being alive, asks his uncle not to write about "this," "this" being too horrible to give up so easily to those who were not there. But as a writer, Laferrière can't make such a promise. Still, the question is raised: to whom does this disaster belong? Who gets to talk and write about it? In this way, this book is not only the chronicle of a natural disaster; it is also a personal meditation about the responsibility and power of the written word in a manner that echoes certain post-Holocaust books. Includes a foreword by Michaëlle Jean, UN special envoy to Haiti and the former Governor General of Canada.
Dany Laferrière worked as a journalist in his native Haiti during the notorious Duvalier regime, immigrating to Canada in 1976. He is the author of several acclaimed novels and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix RFO du Livre 2002 and Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montr�al 2009, and in 2009 he was named Quebec Personality of the Year. David Homel has translated over 30 books, many by Quebec authors. He won the Governor General's Literary Award in translation in 1995 for Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? by Dany Laferriere; his translation of Laferriere's How to Make Love to a Negro was nominated in 1988; and he won the prize in 2001 with fellow translator Fred A. Reed for Fairy Wing. His novels, which include Sonya & Jack, Electrical Storms, and The Speaking Cure have been published in several languages. Homel lives in Montreal, Quebec.
Sex and nuclear apocalypse drive this novel by the ex-pat Haitian novelist.
Dany Laferrière OC OQ (born Windsor Kléber Laferrière, 13 April 1953) is a Haitian-Canadian novelist and journalist who writes in French. He was elected to seat 2 of the Académie française on 12 December 2013, and inducted in May 2015. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in Petit-Goâve, Laferrière worked as a journalist in Haiti before moving to Canada in 1976. He also worked as a journalist in Canada, and hosted television programming for the TQS network. Laferrière published his first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer) in 1985. The novel was later adapted into a screenplay by Laferrière and Richard Sadler, earning a Genie Award nomination for best adapted screenplay at the 11th Genie Awards in 1990. The film adaptation of the novel starred Isaach De Bankolé and was directed by Jacques W. Benoit. Laferrière writes exclusively in French, although some of his works have been published in English translation by David Homel. Several further films have been adapted from his work, including On the Verge of a Fever (Le Goût des jeunes filles) in 2004 and Heading South (Vers le sud) in 2005. He also wrote the original screenplays for Voodoo Taxi in 1991 and How to Conquer America in One Night (Comment conquérir l'Amérique en une nuit) in 2004, and was the director of the latter. In 2009, Laferrière won the prestigious Prix Médicis for his 11th novel, L'énigme du retour. Upon receiving the prize, he commented on its ability to open up a new readership in France, giving him visibility there. In the past Laferrière had always refused to be published in the fall, a season associated with the great literary prizes, but had been recommended to do so with L'énigme du retour by his editors. The novel follows Laferrière as he returns to his birthplace in Haiti, 33 years after he left it, upon learning of his father's death in New York City. The narrative blurs the line between prose and poetry, resembling haiku structures in some sections. On 12 December 2013, Laferrière was elected on the first round of balloting to Seat no. 2 of the Académie française, becoming the first Haitian, the first Canadian and the first Quebecer to receive that honour. He is the second black person to have been inducted, the first being Senegalese writer and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor in 1983. On 3 June 2014, he was awarded the International Literature Award by the House of World Cultures for his novel The Return (L'enigme du retour). In 2014, he was appointed officer of the National Order of Quebec. In 2015, Laferrière was awarded the Order of Canada with the grade of officer. In 2016, Laferrière won the Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award for his literary achievements. Laferrière lives in Montreal, Quebec.
Racial and sexual politics collide in this cult classic that launched Laferrière as one of North America’s finest literary provocateurs. Brilliant and tense, Dany Laferrière’s first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired, is as fresh and relevant today as when it was first published in 1985. With raunchy humor and a working-class intellectualism, Laferrière’s narrator wanders the slums of Montreal, has sex with white women, and writes a book to save his life. With this novel, Laferrière began a series of internationally acclaimed social and political novels about the love of the world, and the world of sex, including Heading South and I Am a Japanese Writer.
Dany Laferrière was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1953. He is the author of fourteen novels, including I Am a Japanese Writer, Heading South, and the award-winning How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired. Laferrière is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Prix Carbet des Lycéens and the Prix Médicis in France, and the Governor General's Literary Award in Canada. He lives in Montreal.
Brilliant and tense, Dany Laferrière's first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, is as fresh and relevant today as when it was first published in Canada in 1985. With ribald humor and a working-class intellectualism on par with Charles Bukowski's or Henry Miller's, Laferrière's narrator wanders the streets and slums of Montreal, has sex with white women, and writes a book to save his life. With this novel, Laferrière began a series of internationally acclaimed social and political novels about the love of the world, and the world of sex, including Heading South and I Am a Japanese Writer. It launched Laferrière as one of the literary world's finest provocateurs and continues to draw strong comparisons to the writings of James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac. The book was made into a feature film and translated into several languages — this is the first U.S. edition.
Dany Laferrière worked as a journalist in his native Haiti during the notorious Duvalier regime, immigrating to Canada in 1976. He is the author of several acclaimed novels and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix RFO du Livre 2002 and Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montr�al 2009, and in 2009 he was named Quebec Personality of the Year. David Homel has translated over 30 books, many by Quebec authors. He won the Governor General's Literary Award in translation in 1995 for Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? by Dany Laferriere; his translation of Laferriere's How to Make Love to a Negro was nominated in 1988; and he won the prize in 2001 with fellow translator Fred A. Reed for Fairy Wing. His novels, which include Sonya & Jack, Electrical Storms, and The Speaking Cure have been published in several languages. Homel lives in Montreal, Quebec.
A devilishly intelligent new novel by the internationally bestselling author and Prix Médicis winner. A black writer from Montreal has found the perfect title for his next book I Am a Japanese Writer. His publisher loves it and gives him an advance. The problem is, he can't seem to write a word of it. He nurses his writer's block by taking baths, re-reading the Japanese poet Basho and engaging in amorous intrigues with rising pop star Midori. The book, still unwritten, becomes a cult phenomenon in Japan, and the writer an international celebrity. A Japanese writer publishes a book called I Am a Malagasy Writer. Even the Japanese consulate is intrigued. Our hero is delighted—until things start to go wrong. Part postmodern fantasy, part Kafkaesque nightmare and part travelogue to the inner reaches of the self, I Am a Japanese Writer calls into question everything we think we know about what-and who-makes a work of art
Dany Laferrière worked as a journalist in his native Haiti during the notorious Duvalier regime, immigrating to Canada in 1976. He is the author of several acclaimed novels and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix RFO du Livre 2002 and Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal 2009, and in 2009 he was named Quebec Personality of the Year. David Homel has translated over 30 books, many by Quebec authors. He won the Governor General's Literary Award in translation in 1995 for Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? by Dany Laferriere; his translation of Laferriere's How to Make Love to a Negro was nominated in 1988; and he won the prize in 2001 with fellow translator Fred A. Reed for Fairy Wing. His novels, which include Sonya & Jack, Electrical Storms, and The Speaking Cure have been published in several languages. Homel lives in Montreal, Quebec.
An affecting meditation on loss and exile ANGEL GURRIA-QUINTANA, Financial Times Windsor Laferrière left Haiti in fear of his life. He has lived in Montreal for thirty-three years, and when his father dies in New York, himself an exile for half a century, Windsor travels there to attend the funeral, and then back to Haiti to inform his mother of the death. In Haiti, Windsor is faced with the grim truth of life in his homeland - the endemic poverty, the thwarted ambitions and broken dreams. But only here can he become a writer again . . . The Enigma of the Return lives where fiction, poetry and autobiography meet. These creative tensions sustain a narrative of astonishing beauty, clarity and insight. "Looks set to become one of the great poetic statements of homesickness and return . . . It should be read by all exiles everywhere" Ian Thomson, Independent "A poetic, melancholic tour de force . . . a compelling, intense, stark and poignant exploration of living life as an outsider . . . The great Haitian novel" Jo Lateu, New Internationalist.
Dany Laferrière worked as a journalist in his native Haiti during the notorious Duvalier regime, immigrating to Canada in 1976. He is the author of several acclaimed novels and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix RFO du Livre 2002 and Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montr�al 2009, and in 2009 he was named Quebec Personality of the Year.
Seven years have gone by and three novels have appeared since the publication of "How To Make Love To a Negro" catapulted Dany Laferriere to instant celebrity. Now Laferriere returns to the arena of "How To Make Love To a Negro" in this searing, often hilarious look at the great Whore of America: Success. Is it possible to be a writer when women stop you on the street and make you justify the title of your first book? What happens to a serious young black writer when his media persona takes over? Sex, race, fame and class: Laferriere covers all the bases. At the same time, he explores black culture, never afraid to take on black icons-Spike Lee, Miles Davis, Magic Johnson, Toni Morrison - and stand them on their heads. Fiercely independent, piercing, insolent, and always well informed: no wonder he's been compared to James Baldwin and Charles Bukowski.
Dany Laferrière worked as a journalist in his native Haiti during the notorious Duvalier regime, immigrating to Canada in 1976. He is the author of several acclaimed novels and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix RFO du Livre 2002 and Le Grand Prix du Livre de Montr�al 2009, and in 2009 he was named Quebec Personality of the Year. David Homel has translated over 30 books, many by Quebec authors. He won the Governor General's Literary Award in translation in 1995 for Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? by Dany Laferriere; his translation of Laferriere's How to Make Love to a Negro was nominated in 1988; and he won the prize in 2001 with fellow translator Fred A. Reed for Fairy Wing. His novels, which include Sonya & Jack, Electrical Storms, and The Speaking Cure have been published in several languages. Homel lives in Montreal, Quebec.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION - George Lamming, one of the Caribbean’s finest intellects and foremost literary artists . . . summons us to the urgency of our obligations. The elegance of his utterance should not in any way detract from the gravity of the challenge . . . The on-going struggle demands from all with the gift of knowledge and insight, the commitment of self in the continuing development of humankind. What we have learnt from history will have sharpened insights about ourselves in the process of cross-fertilisation - the great art of humankind’s ‘becoming’ out of the dynamism of the synthesising of contradictions. For this is the story of life in all the Americas of which our Caribbean is a pivotal and integral part for all of the past half a millennium. This is, indeed, the source and stuff of great literature, great art, great social structures. of sturdy crucibles of human understanding, of great intellectual achievement in science and the humanities from ancient times to this day. The Lamming monographs are themselves part of the current discourse which targets the historical cultural and scientific implications of the pan-hemispheric encounters that will continue to be of global importance well into the twenty-first century. - REX NETTLEFORD, Pro Vice Chancellor University of the West Indies.
GEORGE LAMMING was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados. He was educated at Roebuck Boys School and the prestigious Combemere High School. He received early encouragement from Frank Collymore, his teacher and mentor, and editor of the literary journal, BIM. Lamming left Barbados for Trinidad in 1946, and went to England in 1950. He made his home in London for some twenty-five years. During this time he published six novels and a highly influential collection of essays, THE PLEASURES OF EXILE (1960). Lamming now makes his home in Barbados where he remains actively involved in the cultural life of the Caribbean. Awards and honors include a Guggenheim, the Somerset Maugham Award, a Canadian Council Fellowship, a British Commonwealth Foundation grant, and an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies.
‘We are in the heart of a coloured or half-coloured community, sharing its sudden, unreasonable passions, its naive illusions about the world outside. The people speak an English vernacular in which the book is written. The result is something strange, emotional and compassionate, something between garrulous realism and popular poetry, and it is quite delightful. . . . One is back again in the pages of Huckleberry Finn - the fundamental book of a civilization - and Mr. Lamming’s book reminds one delightfully, indeed poignantly of it in many episodes . . . . As in Huckleberry Finn there is the feeling for landscape, for times of day and night and there is nothing rhetorical, studied or conventional about his descriptions. Mr. Lamming catches the myth-making and myth-dissolving mind of boyhood, the sudden stupors and astonishments. He has caught the endless jawing of boys as they grow up into a life which is very different from the one they imagine. . . . This ability to get the groping mind is Mr. Lamming’s gift and it is very valuable and very civilised. His book makes our kind of documentary writing look conventional and silly.’ - V. S. PRITCHETT (New Statesman and Nation).
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
‘We are in the heart of a coloured or half-coloured community, sharing its sudden, unreasonable passions, its naive illusions about the world outside. The people speak an English vernacular in which the book is written. The result is something strange, emotional and compassionate, something between garrulous realism and popular poetry, and it is quite delightful. . . . One is back again in the pages of Huckleberry Finn - the fundamental book of a civilization - and Mr. Lamming’s book reminds one delightfully, indeed poignantly of it in many episodes . . . . As in Huckleberry Finn there is the feeling for landscape, for times of day and night and there is nothing rhetorical, studied or conventional about his descriptions. Mr. Lamming catches the myth-making and myth-dissolving mind of boyhood, the sudden stupors and astonishments. He has caught the endless jawing of boys as they grow up into a life which is very different from the one they imagine. . . . This ability to get the groping mind is Mr. Lamming’s gift and it is very valuable and very civilised. His book makes our kind of documentary writing look conventional and silly.’ - V. S. PRITCHETT (New Statesman and Nation).
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
‘We are in the heart of a coloured or half-coloured community, sharing its sudden, unreasonable passions, its naive illusions about the world outside. The people speak an English vernacular in which the book is written. The result is something strange, emotional and compassionate, something between garrulous realism and popular poetry, and it is quite delightful. . . . One is back again in the pages of Huckleberry Finn - the fundamental book of a civilization - and Mr. Lamming’s book reminds one delightfully, indeed poignantly of it in many episodes . . . . As in Huckleberry Finn there is the feeling for landscape, for times of day and night and there is nothing rhetorical, studied or conventional about his descriptions. Mr. Lamming catches the myth-making and myth-dissolving mind of boyhood, the sudden stupors and astonishments. He has caught the endless jawing of boys as they grow up into a life which is very different from the one they imagine. . . . This ability to get the groping mind is Mr. Lamming’s gift and it is very valuable and very civilised. His book makes our kind of documentary writing look conventional and silly.’ - V. S. PRITCHETT (New Statesman and Nation).
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
'They won't know you, the you that's hidden somewhere in the castle of your skin.' Nine-year-old G. leads a life of quiet mischief crab catching, teasing preachers and playing among the pumpkin vines. His sleepy fishing village in 1930s Barbados is overseen by the English landlord who lives on the hill, just as their 'Little England' is watched over by the Mother Country. Yet gradually, G. finds himself awakening to the violence and injustice that lurk beneath the apparent order of things. As the world he knows begins to crumble, revealing the bruising secret at its heart, he is spurred ever closer to a life-changing decision. Lyrical and unsettling, George Lamming's autobiographical coming-of-age novel is a story of tragic innocence amid the collapse of colonial rule. 'Rich and riotous' - The Times. 'Its poetic imaginative writing has never been surpassed' - Tribune.
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
NATIVES OF MY PERSON (1972), which some critics have considered Lamming's major work, is an allegorical account a journey of a slave ship toward San Christobal during the early colonial period. In the equivocal ideals of the ship's Commandant, and in the tortured introspection of its officers and crew, the doomed and hollow nature of colonialism is starkly exposed from within. But the voyage is also symbolic, transcending its historical setting. The true theme is freedom in its fullest sense. The book is concerned with the struggle of men against the guilt and fear of their bondage to women, and with the struggle of nations, setting out on the political voyage, to achieve real independence from larger powers. The two are inextricable, for private morality must sicken, if public morality is corrupt. In its exploration of the many natives within each person, the novel implies that the failures of the colonial past lie within as much as without; but so, too, does the future which we must learn.
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
Black imagination has laid claim to a new literary continent with this story of a sixteenth-century voyage of the Reconnaissance, a forbidden expedition to the mysterious Isles of the Black Rocks. A psychologically complex and brooding commentary on power, politics, and love, NATIVES OF MY PERSON reveals the splendor and savagery on which the great empires of the West have been founded, while casting fearful shadows on contemporary events in the Third World. The Commandant had held the highest military and naval honors of the Kingdom of Lime Stone and had earlier been responsible for slaughtering the Tribes of the Indies; now he wishes to break free from the ancient restrictions of the Kingdom, and unknown to the all-powerful House of Trade and Justice, dreams of establishing an ideal colony in what was recently known as San Cristobal. But the desperate band of vandals and fugitives who make up the officers and crew of the Reconnaissance do not understand the motives of the Commandant. It was the dream of gold that had brought them together; they cannot understand why he has suddenly ordered them not to take slaves. And is the voyage a way for the officers to get away from their wives or to rejoin them? What is the connection between the voyages of conquest and the madhouse at Severn, and what is the relationship between the Commandant and the Lady of the House? NATIVES OF MY PERSON is George Lamming’s richest and most disturbing novel; its brooding rhythms and sense of mystery will hold the reader enthralled. George Lamming was born in Barbados and is best known for his autobiographical novel, IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN. A poet, journalist, and broadcaster, he has also published three other novels, THE EMIGRANTS, OF AGE AND INNOCENCE, and SEASON OF ADVENTURE, as well as THE PLEASURES OF EXILE, a book of nonfiction. Lamming has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Canada Council Award, and the Somerset Maugham Award, and has lectured widely at U.S. and Canadian universities. He is currently writer-in-residence at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. .
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
In OF AGE AND INNOCENCE Lamming - whom the New Statesman saluted as ‘the outstanding literary figure of the new West Indian movement’ - has drawn a vivid picture of an island in the Antilles, where his record of the pursuit of an illusion is set against a background of political agitation and native religious enthusiasm. Mr Lamming has an ear for the inflexions of dialogue and a poet’s interest in exploring beyond normal frontiers. OF AGE AND INNOCENCE is an exciting and imaginative book.
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
In OF AGE AND INNOCENCE Lamming - whom the New Statesman saluted as ‘the outstanding literary figure of the new West Indian movement’ - has drawn a vivid picture of an island in the Antilles, where his record of the pursuit of an illusion is set against a background of political agitation and native religious enthusiasm. Mr Lamming has an ear for the inflexions of dialogue and a poet’s interest in exploring beyond normal frontiers. OF AGE AND INNOCENCE is an exciting and imaginative book.
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
In this novel George Lamming has made an evolutionary jump. All the earlier qualities are here: the poetry and the pity, the great gusts of comic invention, the fine, intuitive understanding of people in relation to themselves, to each other and to the society they live in. All these are here, but here, also, is something totally new. It is authority. The scene of SEASON OF ADVENTURE is that same Caribbean island of San Cristobal, first mapped in Of Age and Innocence. But now San Cristobal has achieved independence and is a republic, with all the problems and complexities of its new estate. The story is of the girl, Fola, tipped out of her easy hammock of social privilege and accomplishment by the terrifying impact of the traditional ceremony of the souls, and driven to an obsessional search, through fact and through fantasy, for her own ‘ meaning, for what she really is. It quickens to a murder, a murder hunt in which all the islanders are involved, and a revolt that leads to a change of government. Here is the whole of San Cristobal, with its new ruling class, its impoverished Reserve, its steel bands and their homeric drummers, its hospitals, schools, factories and government offices, its police, its children, its artists and its whores, its cats and rats and crabs and ants. The reader moves through the book with growing recognition and involvement. It is a world apart, and then it becomes our world, relevant, echoing, and the drums are in the blood. The primitive rites of the ceremony of the souls have opened out into themes of universal meaning—redemption, atonement, the winning of freedom and the release of the creative spirit through an acceptance and an understanding of the past.
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
In this novel George Lamming has made an evolutionary jump. All the earlier qualities are here: the poetry and the pity, the great gusts of comic invention, the fine, intuitive understanding of people in relation to themselves, to each other and to the society they live in. All these are here, but here, also, is something totally new. It is authority. The scene of SEASON OF ADVENTURE is that same Caribbean island of San Cristobal, first mapped in Of Age and Innocence. But now San Cristobal has achieved independence and is a republic, with all the problems and complexities of its new estate. The story is of the girl, Fola, tipped out of her easy hammock of social privilege and accomplishment by the terrifying impact of the traditional ceremony of the souls, and driven to an obsessional search, through fact and through fantasy, for her own ‘ meaning, for what she really is. It quickens to a murder, a murder hunt in which all the islanders are involved, and a revolt that leads to a change of government. Here is the whole of San Cristobal, with its new ruling class, its impoverished Reserve, its steel bands and their homeric drummers, its hospitals, schools, factories and government offices, its police, its children, its artists and its whores, its cats and rats and crabs and ants. The reader moves through the book with growing recognition and involvement. It is a world apart, and then it becomes our world, relevant, echoing, and the drums are in the blood. The primitive rites of the ceremony of the souls have opened out into themes of universal meaning—redemption, atonement, the winning of freedom and the release of the creative spirit through an acceptance and an understanding of the past.
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
THE EMIGRANTS begins in a sense where Mr. Lamming’s first prose narrative, IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN, left off. The emigrants are a group of West Indians who have set out for England in a blind search for a ‘better break.’ In three sections — ‘A Voyage,’ ‘Rooms and Residents,’ and ‘Another Time’ — Mr. Lamming describes their voyage over and their settlement in the mother country. He shows us the small world of the emigrants, torn loose from their native moorings, within the larger world of England. Writing lyrically and with imagination, he reveals their aspirations and doubts, their bewilderment and lonely isolation as they seek to find roots in an unfamiliar society whose complex terms elude them. Perhaps never before in recent literature has the feeling of lack of contact between human beings been so sensitively and beautifully evoked as in this book. In exploring his theme, Mr. Lamming has again made brilliant use of the richness of the English language. Combining dramatic dialogue with passages of dialect, wit, and pure poetic description, he has created a story of great poignancy and power. Above everything else THE EMIGRANTS is a stirring statement about man’s life and the human condition. To read it is to recognize that George Lamming is a writer of unusual talent, an innovator who has full command of his style and is breaking new ground in his writing.
George Lamming (born 8 June 1927) is a Bajan novelist, essayist and poet and an important figure in Caribbean literature, who first won critical acclaim with his debut novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953). He has held academic posts including as a distinguished visiting professor at Duke University and a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department of Brown University, and has lectured extensively around the world.
ELIZABETH JENNINGS, writing in The Spectator, said of George Lamming’s latest work: ‘It is not often that a book of the power and scope of THE EMIGRANTS comes the way of the reviewer. I would say unreservedly that this is one of the finest pieces of prose literature that I have come across for a long time.’ THE EMIGRANTS begins in a sense where Mr. Lamming’s first prose narrative, IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN, left off. The emigrants are a group of West Indians who have set out for England in a blind search for a ‘better break.’ In three sections — ‘A Voyage,’ ‘Rooms and Residents,’ and ‘Another Time’ — Mr. Lamming describes their voyage over and their settlement in the mother country. He shows us the small world of the emigrants, torn loose from their native moorings, within the larger world of England. Writing lyrically and with imagination, he reveals their aspirations and doubts, their bewilderment and lonely isolation as they seek to find roots in an unfamiliar society whose complex terms elude them. Perhaps never before in recent literature has the feeling of lack of contact between human beings been so sensitively and beautifully evoked as in this book. In exploring his theme, Mr. Lamming has again made brilliant use of the richness of the English language. Combining dramatic dialogue with passages of dialect, wit, and pure poetic description, he has created a story of great poignancy and power. Above everything else THE EMIGRANTS is a stirring statement about man’s life and the human condition. To read it is to recognize that George Lamming is a writer of unusual talent, an innovator who has full command of his style and is breaking new ground in his writing. GEORGE LAMMING was born of mixed African and English parentage in Barbados, British West Indies, in 1927. After leaving school he taught French and English for four years at a boarding school in Trinidad. He went to England in 1950, and for some months worked in various factories in the London area. In 1951 he began to broadcast a weekly program of reviews of books and films on the B.B.C.’s Colonial Service. His poems have been broadcast over B.B.C. and published in British and West Indian magazines. IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN was Mr. Lamming’s first prose work. .
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
In THE PLEASURES OF EXILE, George Lamming reveals the way he sees and thinks as a colonial writer who has chosen to live as an exile in London. He explains how this situation is forced upon the West Indian writer, and although this is not a literary exercise, Lamming leaves us in no doubt about the origin and development of the West Indian novel during the decade 1948 to 1958. In reporting his experience of Ghana, Nigeria and the United States he draws a picture of three different types of world whose citizens - the West Indian, the West African and the American Negro - share the common historic bond of slavery and colonialism, yet remain distinct products of their particular social and political environment. Lamming gives the word `colonialism’ a universal significance by suggesting the sense in which the white coloniser inevitably becomes colonised by the very process of colonisation. Political independence is an absolute necessity if we are to make a move forward but political independence can only help towards that atmosphere in which an intelligent and creative assault must be made upon the whole edifice of cultural imperialism; for it is this particular brand of imperialism which, in Lamming’s opinion, is the very basis of the colonial’s psychological disorder. The book is not only a warning to the new independent states of Africa. It is a condemnation of West Indian ambivalence and bad faith. It is, above all, a frank and authentic indictment of the English conscience and, as such, it demands the attention of every English reader who would like to know how this particular stranger in our midst has seen us.
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
The lives of a group of West Indian artists have reached a debilitating climax in contemporary London. Teeton, the painter, decides to return to San Cristobal to devote himself to revolution, but cannot bring himself to tell his landlady, the Old Dowager, that he is leaving. Derek, after the fleeting glory of a Stratford season as Othello, now has only a bit role an corpse found on a park bench. Roger, the musician, falsely accusing Nicole, his white American wife, of infidelity, is driving her to suicide. The apparent realism of the opening of WATER WITH BERRIES soon dissolves into the mythic world of THE TEMPEST; the reader is forced to inhabit one character after another in quick succession, even simultaneously. Who is the strange woman whom Teeton meets one dark night on Hampstead Heath? Why does the Old Dowager flee with him to a storm-wracked island in the Orkneys, and what is her relationship with the caretaker? WATER WITH BERRIES is a frightening novel, because its subject is what it means to be a West Indian; the violence of its action, far from catering to a mindless sensationalism, works in the service of a fictional imagination that is deeply political.
George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott. He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies. Since then, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.
Sailing the tide of a tumultuous era of Atlantic revolutions, a remarkable group of African-born and African-descended individuals transformed themselves from slaves into active agents of their lives and times. Big Prince Whitten, the black Seminole Abraham, and General Georges Biassou were ‘Atlantic creoles,’ Africans who found their way to freedom by actively engaging in the most important political events of their day. These men and women of diverse ethnic backgrounds, who were fluent in multiple languages and familiar with African, American, and European cultures, migrated across the new world’s imperial boundaries in search of freedom and a safe haven. Yet, until now, their extraordinary lives and exploits have been hidden from posterity. Through prodigious archival research, Jane Landers radically alters our vision of the breadth and extent of the Age of Revolution, and our understanding of its actors. Whereas Africans in the Atlantic world are traditionally seen as destined for the slave market and plantation labor, Landers reconstructs the lives of unique individuals who managed to move purposefully through French, Spanish, and English colonies, and through Indian territory, in the unstable century between 1750 and 1850. Mobile and adaptive, they shifted allegiances and identities depending on which political leader or program offered the greatest possibility for freedom. Whether fighting for the King of Kongo, England, France, or Spain, or for the Muskogee and Seminole chiefs, their thirst for freedom helped to shape the course of the Atlantic revolutions and to enrich the history of revolutionary lives in all times.
JANE LANDERS is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.
OPEN GATE is the first bilingual collection of modern Haitian Creole poetry available to English readers. These stunning lyrics provide a fascinating look into Haitian culture, addressing a wide range of subjects - love, hardship, nature, and the violent political repression endemic in Haiti. Yet the humor, vitality, and linguistic richness of these poems testify to Haiti’s indomitable spirit and the struggle for freedom. ‘This is a groundbreaking anthology. The very existence of this collection demands respect for Haitian Creole and the people who speak, write, and live in this language. Haiti is more than a political and economic crisis, the same way that Vietnam is more than a war. Haiti is also poetry of tender lyricism and militant fire. There is an education here for those who are willing to learn; our teachers range from pioneering writers like Paul Laraque to dynamic young poets like Patrick Sylvain. Their voices have proven stronger and more resilient than all the dictators and secret police in Haiti’s troubled history. At last these voices sing in English too, and we should listen.’ - Martin Espada.
One of the greatest poets of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Paul Laraque united a beautiful and surrealist lyric poetry with political consciousness to ‘changer la vie.’ For him poetry could be a ‘fighting weapon’ on behalf of people struggling against class exploitation, foreign domination and cultural alienation, in the tradition of Jacques Roumain, Massillon Coicou, Louis Aragon, Nicolás Guillén, and Pablo Neruda. Paul was one of the poets who welcomed Alisa and André Breton at Port-au-Prince airport during the Surrealist guru's first visit to Haiti in December 1945. He left Haiti in 1961 for New York City, USA, where his wife Marcelle rejoined him the following year. Paul was deprived of his Haitian citizenship from 1964 to 1986 for opposition to the Duvaliers' dictatorship. He received Cuba's Casa de las Americas Poetry Prize in 1979 for his work Les armes quotidiennes / Poésie quotidienne (‘Everyday Weapons / Everyday Poetry’). His published works include, among others, Ce qui demeure (‘What has remained’), Festibal (‘Slingshot’), Camourade, Sòlda mawon (‘Maroon Soldier’) and the anthology Oeuvres incomplètes (‘Incomplete Works’). He was co-editor (with Jack Hirschman) and one of the authors of Open Gate: An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry, Curbstone Press, 2001. With his brother Franck, he recently published the critical memoir, Haiti: entre la lutte et l'espoir (‘Haiti: Between Struggle and Hope’), Edition Cidihca, 2004. Besides his impressive and skillful handling of the French and Creole languages in his poems, we will retain from Paul Laraque an indomitable commitment to social justice and political liberation in ways that transcend specific historical conjunctures. He experienced political heartbreaks, including the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the unraveling of the Haitian popular movement, following the hopeful winds of 1986 and 1991, but he never showed signs of discouragement or despair. Until the very end he remained a champion of Haiti's independence and the cause of political equality and human liberation in general. Until the very end he believed that Haiti will one day be beautiful and nurturing to its people again, liberated from foreign domination, and its people free from class exploitation. Paul Laraque died on March 8, 2007, at 5 AM, in New York; he was 86 years old.
A bilingual collection of poems translated by Rosemary Manno. From the INTRODUCTION by Jack Hirschman, San Francisco—April, 1986: When Paul Laraque returned to Haiti in March, 1986 it was the first time in 25 years of exile that he had set foot on his native soil. During those years he had been deprived of his citizenship and his military pension (he had been a colonel in the Haitian army in the 4(Ys and 5(Ys) because of his diasporic activities against the Duvalier regimes (Papa and Baby Doc both). For almost an entire generation this marvelous poet has served the cause of Haitian liberation as a cultural and political worker tirelessly writing for the day which finally arrived, when the hated Duvalier dynasty was put to flight and the people's revolutionary development could begin to unfold. It is ironic that New York City, for all its communications power, was hardly aware that it was the exile-home of one of the most important poets of the Americas, one whose work had won the Casa de las Americas Prize in Cuba in 1979, (the first book of poems in French so honored by the socialist island). So I am greatly pleased to be able to introduce CAMOURADE, the French poems of Paul Laraque, rendered with great sensitivity and clarity by Rosemary Manno, a poet in her own right and a member of the Jacques Roumain Cultural Brigade of San Francisco. The magical liberations of Laraque's political poems, which are never far from being love poems, fuse with the more personally intimate works to create a single body of revolutionary hope, the foundation of his every word. As such he began as a child of French Surrealism (like Eluard and Breton), but the content of struggle which his poems embody comes from the anti-imperialist momentum of progressive peoples everywhere and, in particular, from the Haitian people in their struggle for national liberation and socialism. In this, the work of Jacques Roumain and Jacques Stephen Alexis, Haitian revolutionaries and poets, plays an important part. Indeed, Laraque is in a direct line with such 'indigenous exiles' who helped found Haiti's earliest Communist parties. As the Secretary-General today of the Association of Haitian Writers Abroad, and as one of the founders of the Unified Democratic Front for National Liberation (some years ago), Laraque carries on one of the most profound cultural and political traditions in the Americas, one in which poets are not amputated 7 from the life of their people but serve their people's struggles in direct political ways. The poems of CAMOURADE date from the 40's to the present. They are selected from two volumes, LES ARMES QUOTIDIENNES and POESIE QUOTIDIENNE and from works written recently. Some of the early works appeared in Haiti prior to Laraque's exile, but the main body of poems has, until now, been banned from his native land. Happily that no longer will be the case, and his poems can now directly help his own people in their new revolutionary transformations; just as this edition of superlative translations will substantiate the international importance of Paul Laraque’s work to the North American community.
One of the greatest poets of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Paul Laraque united a beautiful and surrealist lyric poetry with political consciousness to ‘changer la vie.’ For him poetry could be a ‘fighting weapon’ on behalf of people struggling against class exploitation, foreign domination and cultural alienation, in the tradition of Jacques Roumain, Massillon Coicou, Louis Aragon, Nicolás Guillén, and Pablo Neruda. Paul was one of the poets who welcomed Alisa and André Breton at Port-au-Prince airport during the Surrealist guru's first visit to Haiti in December 1945. He left Haiti in 1961 for New York City, USA, where his wife Marcelle rejoined him the following year. Paul was deprived of his Haitian citizenship from 1964 to 1986 for opposition to the Duvaliers' dictatorship. He received Cuba's Casa de las Americas Poetry Prize in 1979 for his work Les armes quotidiennes / Poésie quotidienne (‘Everyday Weapons / Everyday Poetry’). His published works include, among others, Ce qui demeure (‘What has remained’), Festibal (‘Slingshot’), Camourade, Sòlda mawon (‘Maroon Soldier’) and the anthology Oeuvres incomplètes (‘Incomplete Works’). He was co-editor (with Jack Hirschman) and one of the authors of Open Gate: An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry, Curbstone Press, 2001. With his brother Franck, he recently published the critical memoir, Haiti: entre la lutte et l'espoir (‘Haiti: Between Struggle and Hope’), Edition Cidihca, 2004. Besides his impressive and skillful handling of the French and Creole languages in his poems, we will retain from Paul Laraque an indomitable commitment to social justice and political liberation in ways that transcend specific historical conjunctures. He experienced political heartbreaks, including the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the unraveling of the Haitian popular movement, following the hopeful winds of 1986 and 1991, but he never showed signs of discouragement or despair. Until the very end he remained a champion of Haiti's independence and the cause of political equality and human liberation in general. Until the very end he believed that Haiti will one day be beautiful and nurturing to its people again, liberated from foreign domination, and its people free from class exploitation. Paul Laraque died on March 8, 2007, at 5 AM, in New York; he was 86 years old.
Haitian Creole poetry, with facing-page English translations by Jack Hirschman. Paul Laraque’s poetry contains the magic of folk proverb and folk humor mingled with very direct urges and stirrings of revolt and revolution. It is a poetry infused with a keen sense of the misery of a people exploited to the fullest by the vampires of imperialism, yet a people with powerful revolutionary memory and impulses. (Jack Hirschman, translator)
One of the greatest poets of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Paul Laraque united a beautiful and surrealist lyric poetry with political consciousness to ‘changer la vie.’ For him poetry could be a ‘fighting weapon’ on behalf of people struggling against class exploitation, foreign domination and cultural alienation, in the tradition of Jacques Roumain, Massillon Coicou, Louis Aragon, Nicolás Guillén, and Pablo Neruda. Paul was one of the poets who welcomed Alisa and André Breton at Port-au-Prince airport during the Surrealist guru's first visit to Haiti in December 1945. He left Haiti in 1961 for New York City, USA, where his wife Marcelle rejoined him the following year. Paul was deprived of his Haitian citizenship from 1964 to 1986 for opposition to the Duvaliers' dictatorship. He received Cuba's Casa de las Americas Poetry Prize in 1979 for his work Les armes quotidiennes / Poésie quotidienne (‘Everyday Weapons / Everyday Poetry’). His published works include, among others, Ce qui demeure (‘What has remained’), Festibal (‘Slingshot’), Camourade, Sòlda mawon (‘Maroon Soldier’) and the anthology Oeuvres incomplètes (‘Incomplete Works’). He was co-editor (with Jack Hirschman) and one of the authors of Open Gate: An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry, Curbstone Press, 2001. With his brother Franck, he recently published the critical memoir, Haiti: entre la lutte et l'espoir (‘Haiti: Between Struggle and Hope’), Edition Cidihca, 2004. Besides his impressive and skillful handling of the French and Creole languages in his poems, we will retain from Paul Laraque an indomitable commitment to social justice and political liberation in ways that transcend specific historical conjunctures. He experienced political heartbreaks, including the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the unraveling of the Haitian popular movement, following the hopeful winds of 1986 and 1991, but he never showed signs of discouragement or despair. Until the very end he remained a champion of Haiti's independence and the cause of political equality and human liberation in general. Until the very end he believed that Haiti will one day be beautiful and nurturing to its people again, liberated from foreign domination, and its people free from class exploitation. Paul Laraque died on March 8, 2007, at 5 AM, in New York; he was 86 years old.
During the seventeenth century, sea raiders own as buccaneers controlled the Caribbean. Buccaneers were not pirates but privateers, licensed to attack the Spanish by the governments of England, France, and Holland. Jon Latimer charts the exploits of these men who followed few rules as they forged new empires. Lacking effective naval power, the English, French, and Dutch developed privateering as the means of protecting their young New World colonies. They developed a form of semi-legal private warfare, often carried out regardless of political developments on the other side of the Atlantic, but usually with tacit approval from London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs of such figures as William Dampier, Sieur Raveneau de Lussan, Alexander Oliver Exquemelin, and Basil Ringrose, Jon Latimer portrays a world of madcap adventurers, daredevil seafarers, and dangerous rogues. Piet Hein of the Dutch West India Company captured, off the coast of Cuba, the Spanish treasure fleet, laden with American silver, and funded the Dutch for eight months in their fight against Spain. The switch from tobacco to sugar transformed the Caribbean, and everyone scrambled for a quick profit in the slave trade. Oliver Cromwell's ludicrous Western Design—a grand scheme to conquer Central America—fizzled spectacularly, while the surprising prosperity of Jamaica set England solidly on the road to empire. The infamous Henry Morgan conducted a dramatic raid through the tropical jungle of Panama that ended in the burning of Panama City. From the crash of gunfire to the billowing sail on the horizon, Latimer brilliantly evokes the dramatic age of the buccaneers.
Jonathan David Latimer (1964 – 4 January 2009) was an historian and writer based in Wales. His books include Operation Compass 1940 (Osprey, 2000), Tobruk 1941 (Osprey, 2001), Deception in War (John Murray, 2001), Alamein (John Murray, 2002), Burma: The Forgotten War (John Murray, 2004) and 1812: War with America (Harvard University Press, 2007) which won a Distinguished Book Award from the Society for Military History and was shortlisted for the George Washington Book Prize. Born in Prestatyn, Wales, Latimer was educated at Christleton County High School, Chester. He studied for a geography degree at University College, Swansea but switched course to graduate in oceanography. He worked as an oceanographer until becoming a full-time writer in 1997. In 2003, he became an honorary research fellow at his alma mater (by this time Swansea University) and was appointed as a part-time lecturer in history on the BA (Hons) degree scheme 'War and Society'. He was also a guest lecturer at the Joint Services Command and Staff College at Shrivenham. Latimer was an enthusiastic part-time soldier. Originally enlisting as a sapper in the Royal Monmouthshire (Militia), he was commissioned in 1986 into the 3rd Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, Territorial Army. He spent periods attached to regular battalions in Northern Ireland (1989), Australia (1991–2) and as an intelligence officer (1992–3). Latimer died following a heart attack in January 2009. His book, Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire was published posthumously in April 2009.
Birds of the Dominican Republic and Haiti fills a large void in the literature on birdwatching and the environment in these tropical countries. The first comprehensive field guide devoted to Hispaniola’s birds, it provides detailed accounts for more than 300 species, including thirty-one endemic species. Included in the species descriptions are details on key field marks, similar species, voice, habitats, geographic distribution on Hispaniola, status, nesting, range, and local names used in both the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The authors also comment on ecology, behavior, and taxonomic status. The book provides color illustrations and range maps based on the most recent data available. But the authors’ intent is to provide more than just a means of identifying birds. The guide also underscores the importance of promoting the conservation of migratory and resident birds, and building support for environmental measures.
Steven Latta is Assistant Director for Conservation and Field Research at the National Aviary. Christopher Rimmer is Director of Conservation Biology at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science. Allan Keith is coauthor, with Herbert Raffaele, of A Guide to the Birds of the West Indies. James Wiley is Leader at the Maryland Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, U.S. Geological Survey. Herbert Raffaele is Chief of the Office of International Affairs of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Kent McFarland is Senior Research Biologist at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science. Eladio Fernandez is a professional photographer who specializes in Caribbean nature subjects.
A 1st volume of strange and erotic song, through whose fulgurant smoke break flashes of lyric fire. A limited edition of 200 copies.
Leon Laviaux was a Creole poet from Martinique.
In the 1930s a handful of Jamaicans had a revelation concerning the divinity of Haile Selassie, king of Ethiopia, and founded the most popular mystical movement of the 20th century. Here is their astonishing tale. Leonard Percival Howell (c. 1898-1981) was the first Rasta. Although jailed, ridiculed, and treated as insane, Howell, alias the Gong, established a Rasta community of 4,500 members, the first agro-industrial enterprise devoted to producing marijuana. In the late l950s the community was dispersed, disseminating Rasta teachings throughout the ghettos of the island. And a young singer named Bob Marley adopted Howell s message, calling himself Tuff Gong; through Marley’s visions, reggae was ready to explode. Intrepid journalist Helene Lee explored the ghettos and mountains of Jamaica to go far beyond the standard imagery of Rasta-ganja, reggae, dreadlocks. Instead she gives us an uncensored vision of a movement with complex roots, and the exceptional journey of a man who taught an enslaved people how to be proud and impose their culture on the world.
Helene Lee has been writing about black music for the Paris daily Liberation for over 20 years; her first book, Rockers d’Afrique (1986), is a superb study of African popular music. She has also produced records and television documentaries. Lily Davis is a translator and writer o± fiction. She divides her time between New York and Paris, France. Stephen Davis is the author of, among other music biographies, Bob Marley, Hammer of the Gods, and Walk This Way.
The artwork of Fran; Lessac accompanies this collection of poems by various Caribbean poets, including Robert Johnson, Edward Brathwaite, A.L. Hendricks, Evan Jones, and others. Twenty-two wonderful paintings by this primitive artist describe her home on the island of Monserrat, accompanied by simple stories describing the activities by various authors. Interesting deconstructionist book. Instead of seeking the universal, it particularizes the experience of the experience of Caribbean natives in a fragmented style.
Frané Lessac is a U.S born author, illustrator and painter who currently lives and works in Western Australia. Frané Lessac has published over 40 books for children and won numerous awards for her illustrations. Frané Lessac currently resides in Fremantle, Western Australia.
This book covers the British and former British West Indian territories, that is, the entire English-speaking Antilles, including the mainland territories of Guyana and British Honduras and the Atlantic territories of Bermuda and the Bahamas. It provides an analysis and interpretation of modern West Indian society over the period of the last forty years. For the first time here is a comprehensive study that is at once panoramic in scope and scholarly in depth, analyzing in detail the character of the various elements that have gone to make up the whole West Indian society from the First World War. "Lewis focuses in this brilliant volume on the contemporary period of the English-speaking West Indies. Instead of the traveler's account or journalistic essay which have been the usual fare, Lewis gives us an in-depth analysis of the forces which have contributed to the shaping of West Indian society. In this undertaking of large dimensions Lewis has used a variety of written sources as well as material from his own travels. The task is herculean, but Lewis has been most successful." —Choice . nothing short of brilliant. ... a fruitful combination of political biography and social history.... If the author's method does not adjust to contemporary canons of objective social science it at least has the virtue of combining profound intellectual honesty with tenacious and unmuddled ideological commitment... . Gordon Lewis, in the final analysis, is as much an adopted West Indian as he is the detached left-wing Laborite intellectual. And while the latter gives this study its thoroughly ideological pugnaciousness, it is the former which gives it its profoundly human quality. The end product is ample testimony to the felicitous marriage of the two.' — The Hispanic American Historical Review.
Gordon K. Lewis (1919 - 16 Aug 1991) was a leading expert on Caribbean politics. A native of Wales, Dr. Lewis first came to Puerto Rico to help write its first Constitution, which was adopted in 1952. He earned his doctorate in 1954 at Harvard University and then returned to Puerto Rico. He joined the political science department at the University of Puerto Rico in the 1950's and served as director of the university's Institute of Caribbean Studies from 1983 to 1987. He had been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, the University of California, Brandeis University, Oxford University and Michigan State University. He served as a consultant to the governments of Trinidad and Tobago and the United States Virgin Islands. The University of Puerto Rico said he had just completed a book on the Caribbean, to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press. His other books included "Grenada: The Jewel Despoiled," published in 1987, on the American invasion of Grenada in 1983; "The Main Currents of Caribbean Thought," published in 1983; "With the Saints at the River: The Jonestown Guyana Holocaust," 1978, and "Puerto Rico: Freedom and Power in the Caribbean," 1962.
Introduces the numbers one to ten as a young girl describes various sights on her Caribbean island.
‘During the past thirty years an extraordinary literary awakening has taken place on the islands of the Caribbean, especially the English-speaking territories. . . And yet this renaissance has remained largely undiscovered and unrecognized in the United States, though it takes place upon our very doorstep.’ - from the Introduction. . . This stimulating collection of short stories, poems, essays and plays captures the spirit of the contemporary Caribbean cultural evolution. Authors include Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, A. L. Hendriks, and Edward Brathwaite. In addition, Dr. Livingston provides an introduction to the history of Caribbean literature, informative headnotes on each writer, and thirty-two photos of life in these beautiful tropical lands.
Award-winning author Alan Lomax has dedicated his life to recording the music of cultures that are largely ignored, thereby preserving forever a magnificent musical heritage. In the words of Studs Terkel, Lomax is 'one of America's most imaginative and daring musicologists.' Together with J. D. Elder, a former minister of culture of Trinidad and Tobago, and his sister Bess Lomax Hawes, Lomax collects here sixty-eight children's song games - the music, the lyrics, and the stories behind them - from countries throughout the eastern Caribbean. Also included are personal essays that detail Lomax's experiences while recording the music, and his and Elder's encounters with the traditions upon which the songs are based. Through words, music, and pictures, Brown Girl in the Ring captures a fascinating and essential part of life on the islands of Trinidad, Tobago, Dominica, St. Lucia, Anguilla, Nevis, and Carriacou. And as they have criss-crossed the world in the wake of the great migrations of the last four hundred years, these songs have taken on as well a life of their own, becoming a cherished part of many different cultural traditions.
Alan Lomax is the author of, among other works, The Folk Songs of North America, Mister Jelly Roll, and The Land Where the Blues Began, for which he received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Beginning in the spring of 1997, Rounder Records will be releasing The Alan Lomax Collection, a library of one hundred CDs made from his landmark recordings. J. D. Elder is the author of Song Games of Trinidad and Tobago. Bess Lomax Hawes is the co-author of Step It Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage.
A rich and entertaining new collection of short stories from Trinidad’s foremost story-teller. With the characteristic skill now expected from this writer of international repute, Earl Lovelace paints a sensitive, compassionate and often humorous portrait of everyday Trinidad life. Ordinary people like Victory the barber, Shoemaker Arnold, Miss Ross - once the most sought after woman in Cunaripo - Blues and Joebell, both ambitious to see new lands, are invested with a special magic that draws the reader into a rhythmical, colourful and changing world. ‘His writing is lyrical, reflecting Trinidadian speech habits as well as they have ever been reflected.’ - Financial Times.
Earl Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: 'Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures.' As Bernardine Evaristo notes, 'Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken.' Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940–47), Nelson Street Boys, R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948–53, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate). He worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954-56) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956–66). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia as a forest ranger. In 1962 his first novel, While Gods Are Falling, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum (BP). From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971-73), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995-6), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996-97), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999–2004). He is a columnist for the Trinidad Express, and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including Voices, South, and Wasafiri. Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled A Writer In His Place. Lovelace has three daughters and two sons. His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel Salt. Earl Lovelace collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on writing the film Joebell and America, based on his short story of the same title.
In the town of Cascadu, Trinidad, the 1970 Black Power rebellion has failed. Sonnyboy, hapless and luckless, is desperate to be recognised as part of the rebellion and forces the uninterested police to arrest him. KingKala, a singer, returns from detention and is sidelined in the calypso tent, his music dated and unfashionable. They now hope to make their name in the movie that is being shot on the island - but that too does not end as expected. And so we follow the townsfolk through their experiments in music, politics, religion and love; as, in their day-to-day adventures - be it a game of cricket, the short life of a corner shop or a miracle at a funeral - they begin to see more clearly what their community has to offer for its liberation. Sad and uplifting, humorous but never mocking, Is Just a Movie is a warm, gentle novel about small moments of magic in ordinary life.
Earl Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: 'Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures.' As Bernardine Evaristo notes, 'Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken.' Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940–47), Nelson Street Boys, R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948–53, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate). He worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954-56) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956–66). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia as a forest ranger. In 1962 his first novel, While Gods Are Falling, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum (BP). From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971-73), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995-6), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996-97), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999–2004). He is a columnist for the Trinidad Express, and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including Voices, South, and Wasafiri. Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled A Writer In His Place. Lovelace has three daughters and two sons. His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel Salt. Earl Lovelace collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on writing the film Joebell and America, based on his short story of the same title.
Earl Lovelace’s new novels THE WINE OF ASTONISHMENT (CWS 28) and THE DRAGON CAN’T DANCE confirm the promise that showed in THE SCHOOLMASTER (CWS 20) and WHILE GODS ARE FALLING which were originally published in the mid-sixties. The reviewers in London and the Caribbean have reacted with delighted interest. The Financial Times said ‘His writing is lyrical, reflecting Trinidadian speech habits as well as they have been reflected.’ His gift for dialogue is seen again in this collection of plays, JESTINA’S CALYPSO (CWS 32). He was born in Toco, Trinidad in 1935. His first job was as a proof-writer with the Trinidad Publishing Company. He studied at Howard University and was Visiting Novelist at Johns Hopkins. Earl Lovelace’s talent for catching the liveliness of the everyday speech of Trinidadians is used to splendid effect in this collection of three plays. In ‘Jestina’s Calypso’, a play of pathos and poetry, Jestina’s pen-pal is arriving by plane from the USA to marry her. Jestina - ugly, lived in and thirty-nine but beautiful on the inside – hasn’t sent her own picture, but beautiful Laura’s. The play takes in not only Jestina’s personalized tragedy but becomes a paradigm of Trinidad’s post-colonial situation. In post-revolution Trinidad, Mr. A. A. Ablack of ‘The New Hardware Store’ prospers while others continue to suffer. With the exception of young Miss Prime, the staff are all disillusioned about their prospects under Mr. Ablack. ‘My Name is Village’ is a racy, exciting musical; Earl Lovelace had the whole of his village of Matura in the original production.
Earl Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: 'Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures.' As Bernardine Evaristo notes, 'Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken.' Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940–47), Nelson Street Boys, R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948–53, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate). He worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954-56) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956–66). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia as a forest ranger. In 1962 his first novel, While Gods Are Falling, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum (BP). From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971-73), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995-6), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996-97), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999–2004). He is a columnist for the Trinidad Express, and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including Voices, South, and Wasafiri. Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled A Writer In His Place. Lovelace has three daughters and two sons. His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel Salt. Earl Lovelace collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on writing the film Joebell and America, based on his short story of the same title.
Guinea John, mythical ancestor of Blackpeople in Trinidad, put two corncobs under his armpits and flew away from the scene of his enslavement, back to Africa. But his descendants, having eaten salt, were too heavy to fly and could not follow....One hundred years after official Emancipation, the diverse people of Trinidad - African, Asian, and European - still have not settled into the New World. Two men set out to free them from 'old captivities' and to welcome them to their island homeland. Alford George, a teacher turned politician, works through the government. Bango Durity, a worker and activist, organizes populist rallies. Around them swirl a cast of unforgettable men and women, each telling his own story in his own voice, each striving with passion and wit to make sense of life in a still-young country where the roles of enslaved and landowner still linger, but 'the sky, the sea, every green leaf and tangle of vines sing freedom.'
Earl Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: 'Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures.' As Bernardine Evaristo notes, 'Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken.' Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940–47), Nelson Street Boys, R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948–53, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate). He worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954-56) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956–66). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia as a forest ranger. In 1962 his first novel, While Gods Are Falling, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum (BP). From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971-73), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995-6), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996-97), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999–2004). He is a columnist for the Trinidad Express, and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including Voices, South, and Wasafiri. Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled A Writer In His Place. Lovelace has three daughters and two sons. His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel Salt. Earl Lovelace collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on writing the film Joebell and America, based on his short story of the same title.
To the inhabitants of Calvary Hill, a slum on the outskirts of Port of Spain, poverty is very much a condition of life and no one thinks to escape it. It is therefore a shock to Miss Cleothilda, the ageing carnival queen, when the East Indian, Pariag, newly arrived from the country, saves enough money to buy a bicycle to peddle the Indian sweetmeats that he and his wife make in their room. Feelings in the courtyard run high but Aldrick, the amiable drifter whose story this is, won’t be drawn in. His energy is concentrated on the making of his dragon costume for the carnival parade; the two days of Carnival are a time of transformation that make sense of his aimless life. But this year he is disturbed. Not by Pariag, but by Sylvia, the virginal young beauty from across the yard who is ready to sell herself to the rent collector for her masquerade costume, if Aidrick doesn’t prevent her. What becomes of Aldrick and Sylvia, and the large cast of richly observed characters, is the stuff of this dramatic and moving Trinidadian novel.
Earl Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: 'Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures.' As Bernardine Evaristo notes, 'Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken.' Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940–47), Nelson Street Boys, R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948–53, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate). He worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954-56) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956–66). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia as a forest ranger. In 1962 his first novel, While Gods Are Falling, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum (BP). From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971-73), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995-6), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996-97), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999–2004). He is a columnist for the Trinidad Express, and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including Voices, South, and Wasafiri. Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled A Writer In His Place. Lovelace has three daughters and two sons. His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel Salt. Earl Lovelace collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on writing the film Joebell and America, based on his short story of the same title.
Welcome to Calvary Hill, a shanty town in Port of Spain, Trinidad, where the 'sun set on starvation and rise on potholed roads' and shacks 'leap out of the red dirt and stone, thin like smoke, fragile like kite paper.' This is the home of Aldrick Prospect, dashing, out of work, unproclaimed king of the Hill; of Cleothilde, fading beauty, and of Sylvia, her youthful usurper; of Fisheye, a 'bad John' and rebel idealist; and of Philo, Calypsonian, song-writer. Joined in poverty, they are invisible to the rest of society, except once each year during Carnival, when their masquerades briefly grant them the power of their neighborhood personas. At the beginning, a kind of harmony reigns: 'All o' we is one,' says Cleothilde. Then things change: businesses sponsor the steel bands, which lose their rebellious spirit; Philo writes a hit song and moves to a better neighborhood; lovely Sylvia gives up on Aldrick and allows Guy, an older man, to take care of her. Only Aldrick and Fisheye remain loyal to the old ethos: No accommodation. Then, for Aldrick, Carnival loses its fascination. He is no longer content to find power in masquerade. But it will take one more masquerade of another kind - involving guns and hostages - before Aldrick is able to gain the self-knowledge and wisdom to become the true leader of Calvary Hill.
Earl Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: 'Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures.' As Bernardine Evaristo notes, 'Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken.' Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940–47), Nelson Street Boys, R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948–53, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate). He worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954-56) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956–66). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia as a forest ranger. In 1962 his first novel, While Gods Are Falling, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum (BP). From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971-73), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995-6), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996-97), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999–2004). He is a columnist for the Trinidad Express, and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including Voices, South, and Wasafiri. Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled A Writer In His Place. Lovelace has three daughters and two sons. His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel Salt. Earl Lovelace collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on writing the film Joebell and America, based on his short story of the same title.
The second novel by an award-winning Caribbean novelist, playwright and poet. It deals with the impingements of modern life on a remote village in the interior of Trinidad which wants a school and a schoolmaster. Earl Lovelace's Trinidadian novel tells the story of an isolated rural community coming into contact with the wider world. The villagers learn, only too cruelly, that progress can mean the destruction of cherished values.
Earl Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: 'Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures.' As Bernardine Evaristo notes, 'Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken.' Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940–47), Nelson Street Boys, R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948–53, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate). He worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954-56) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956–66). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia as a forest ranger. In 1962 his first novel, While Gods Are Falling, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum (BP). From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971-73), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995-6), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996-97), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999–2004). He is a columnist for the Trinidad Express, and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including Voices, South, and Wasafiri. Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled A Writer In His Place. Lovelace has three daughters and two sons. His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel Salt. Earl Lovelace collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on writing the film Joebell and America, based on his short story of the same title.
Written by one of the pre-eminent literary presences of the Caribbean, THE WINE OF ASTONISHMENT is a deeply affecting and satisfying novel that evokes the humanity and dignity – the triumphs and disappointments – of the people of a small Trinidadian village during and after World War II, as they try to hold on to their identity amid changing times.
Earl Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: 'Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures.' As Bernardine Evaristo notes, 'Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken.' Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940–47), Nelson Street Boys, R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948–53, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate). He worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954-56) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956–66). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia as a forest ranger. In 1962 his first novel, While Gods Are Falling, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum (BP). From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971-73), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995-6), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996-97), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999–2004). He is a columnist for the Trinidad Express, and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including Voices, South, and Wasafiri. Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled A Writer In His Place. Lovelace has three daughters and two sons. His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel Salt. Earl Lovelace collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on writing the film Joebell and America, based on his short story of the same title.
Winner of the $5,000 Trinidad Independence Literary Award, WHILE GODS ARE FALLING has in the words of J. B. Priestley - ‘a contemporary ‘feel.’ ‘ It is this quality of contemporary immediacy that gives Earl Lovelace’s first novel a relevance that far transcends the shores of Trinidad. In Port of Spain, Walter Castle, married, with one child and another expected, has been passed over again for promotion in his job. In his disappointment he reviews his past life in city and in country and the bitterness of his present lot - an apartment in a tenement building in a district where lawlessness is rife. Against the counterpoint of past and present, the color and squalor of Trinidad life, with its steel-bands, gambling and stick fighting, are vividly portrayed. Walter’s friends and neighbors - characters whose speech is as rich as their circumstances are poor - weave in and out of the story, until violence erupts and drastically alters their lives.
Earl Lovelace (born 13 July 1935) is an award-winning Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: 'Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures.' As Bernardine Evaristo notes, 'Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile. But Lovelace's fiction is deeply embedded in Trinidadian society and is written from the perspective of one whose ties to his homeland have never been broken.' Born in Toco, Trinidad and Tobago, Earl Lovelace was sent to live with his grandparents in Tobago at a very young age, but rejoined his family in Toco when he was 11 years old. His family later moved to Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and then Morvant. Lovelace attended Scarborough Methodist Primary School, Scarborough, Tobago (1940–47), Nelson Street Boys, R.C., Port of Spain (1948), and Ideal High School, Port of Spain (1948–53, where he sat the Cambridge School Certificate). He worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a proofreader from 1953 to 1954, and then for the Department of Forestry (1954-56) and the Ministry of Agriculture (1956–66). He began writing while stationed in the village of Valencia as a forest ranger. In 1962 his first novel, While Gods Are Falling, won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence literary competition sponsored by British Petroleum (BP). From 1966 to 1967, Lovelace studied at Howard University, Washington, DC, and in 1974 he received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also Visiting Novelist. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, he spent the year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He taught at Federal City College (now University of the District of Columbia), Washington, DC (1971-73), and from 1977 to 1987 he lectured in literature and creative writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence in England by the London Arts Board (1995-6), a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts (1996-97), and was Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington (1999–2004). He is a columnist for the Trinidad Express, and has contributed to a number of periodicals, including Voices, South, and Wasafiri. Based in Trinidad, while teaching and touring various countries, he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, the year his 70th birthday was honoured with a conference and celebrations at the University of the West Indies. Lovelace is the subject of a 2014 documentary film by Funso Aiyejina entitled A Writer In His Place. Lovelace has three daughters and two sons. His artist son Che Lovelace illustrated the jacket of the 1997 US edition of his novel Salt. Earl Lovelace collaborated with his filmmaker daughter Asha Lovelace on writing the film Joebell and America, based on his short story of the same title.
At the turn of the century in the sleepy West Indian village of Monkey Road, fifteen year-old Midra falls under the spell of reputed shapeshifter Prince Johnson, the descendant of a runaway slave known as The African. In one night of passion, her life changes and so does everything else in the village.
Glenville Lovell (born 1955) is a writer, dancer, novelist and playwright.Lovell was born in a Chattel house in Parish Land, Christ Church, Barbados and grew up around rich storytelling among the sugar cane workers. His first novel, Fire in the Canes was published in 1995 and was met with critical acclaim. So too was his second novel, Song of Night, published in 1998. Lovell's work as a playwright earned him the 2002 Frank Collymore Literary Award for the Barbados-based Mango Ripe! Mango Sweet!. Many of his novels and plays have represented Barbados at the Caribbean Festival of Arts.
Trinidadian poet and painter’s first full collection of poems.
John Lyons (born October 1933) is a Trinidad-born poet, painter, illustrator, educator and curator. He has worked as a theatre designer, exhibition adviser and as a teacher both of visual art and creative writing. As an art critic, he has written essays for catalogues, notably for Denzil Forrester's major touring exhibition Dub Transition, for Jouvert Print Exhibition and Tony Phillips' Jazz and The Twentieth Century.
David Macey’s FRANTZ FANON is an elegant and accomplished biography of one of the twentieth century’s most influential third-world thinkers, a black man from the Caribbean who died a member of the Algerian Front de Liberation National, and whose eloquent writings inspired self-styled revolutionaries around the world. Born in Martinique, then as now a département of France, Frantz Fanon (1925—61) was trained as a psychiatrist in Lyons before taking up a post in colonial Algeria. He had already experienced racism as a soldier in the Free French Army, for which he had volunteered and in whose ranks he saw combat during the liberation of France. In Algeria, he came into contact with the Front de Liberation National, whose committed struggle for an independent Algeria was met with exceptional violence by the French Army. Fanon identified strongly with the FLN and soon became a marked man. Forced to flee Algeria when he resigned his post, Fanon subsequently worked with the FLN as a propagandist and ambassador. Based on extensive and original research, this is the most complete and objective biography of Fanon written yet. It dismisses the myths that have surrounded him and reveals Fanon to be a complex figure, infinitely more interesting than the theorist of anti-colonial violence celebrated by the left in the 1960s. Macey portrays Fanon as a man formed in the context of the French Caribbean, with its history of slavery and racism, and traces Fanon’s intellectual career as a political thinker and psychiatrist with great care, setting it against the background of postwar French culture. David Macey has done justice for the first time to the extraordinary life of this complex figure, who, although flawed in some respects, was fundamentally a humanist committed to the eradication of colonialism, a man whose angry and eloquent writings are still of fierce relevance today.
David Macey (5 October 1949 – 7 October 2011) was an English translator and intellectual historian of the French left. He translated around sixty books from French to English, and wrote biographical studies of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon. David Macey was born in Sunderland and grew up in Houghton-le-Spring. His father was a miner who had been sent down the pit aged fourteen, and his mother a woman whose family had been unable to afford for her to take up a grammar school place. He was educated at Durham Johnston Grammar School and went on to read French at University College London, where he wrote a PhD on Paul Nizan. Interested in trying to link Marxism and psychoanalysis, Macey became a prolific contributor to Radical Philosophy. From 1974 he taught part-time at North London Polytechnic, UCL and City University London. In 1975 he was a founding member of the British Campaign for an Independent East Timor. After his partner Margaret Atack took a permanent post at Leeds University in 1981, Macey left academia to become a full-time writer and translator. Later, in 1995, he was appointed research associate in the French department of Leeds University; in 2010 he became special professor in translation at the University of Nottingham. Macey married Margaret Atack in 1988, and they adopted three children.
‘We is cane people and notting else and when de cane is done we finish.’ Yet with the bankruptcy of the sugar plantation, the labourers have to face the loss of their livelihood. In this elegiac novel, Clem Maharaj goes to the heart of a dying community, where fear and despair co-exist with robust laughter and sustaining friendship. With poignant clarity he unfolds the lives that have been bound together by the estate and extends a sensitive understanding to all those bound up in its history: the betrayed and the betrayers, the rum-soaked and the sex-obsessed, the fighters and the losers. It is a tribute to the humanity of all the dispossessed.
CLEM MAHARAJ was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad. He grew up on a sugar estate near Princes Town and attended a Catholic secondary school in Port of Spain. In 1960 he came to England and in 1967 he began working for C.L.R. James, the philosopher, and developed an interest in writing. He has organised several groups and campaigns around social and political issues. In recent years he has concentrated more on writing, and continues to work at an inner London law centre. THE DISPOSSESSED is his first novel.
The earlier novels of Roger Mais were justly praised for the vivid picture they presented of life in Jamaica and for the lyrical passion of the style in which they were written. His new story is in a different vein and in a different setting. The scene is rural and the figures in it have not suffered much by contact with civilization. But the story is not altogether idyllic. It concerns Jake, a wood carver engaged upon a monumental figure of Samson, and his devoted servants and friends, among them Bess the cook, who is keeping a watchful eye upon her daughter Miriam and Glen the handyman. To supply both chorus and commentator is Amos, an accordion player. There is much quiet humour here masking deep feelings, and Roger Mais again displays his ability for uncovering the secret springs of action and for communicating his compassionate understanding. The mood and tempo of the story change swiftly, working up to a climax during a thunderstorm and reaching a quiet ending in the calm that follows. ROGER MAIS was born at Kingston, Jamaica, in 1905. One of his great-grandfathers was sentenced to the stocks for harbouring runaway slaves. His education was sketchy and unorthodox, but liberal. He is unmarried, and is a painter, as well as a writer, and THE HILLS WERE JOYFUL TOGETHER is his first novel. His recreations are reading, the theatre and music. He says that his most interesting experience was going to jail for six months under Defence Regulations, for writing an article which was considered adverse to the War Effort, but was really only asking for a more liberal constitution (and got it). He wrote this first novel, he says, very quickly, and because he had to; ‘it had been gestating for years.’
Roger Mais (11 August 1905 - 21 June 1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was educated at Calabar High School. He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, which was associated with the People's National Party. He also wrote several plays, reviews, and short stories for the newspaper Focus and the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, concerning his articles with social injustice and inequality. He used this approach to reach his local audience and to primarily push for a national identity and anti-colonialism. Mais published more than a hundred short stories, most being found in Public Opinion and Focus. Other stories are collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man, published in the 1940s. Mais's play, George William Gordon, was also published in the 1940s, focusing on the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. It played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character, who was in conventional colonial history described as a rebel and traitor, but who would be proclaimed, on the centenary of the rebellion, a national hero. In 1944, Mais wrote the anti-British satirical tirade ‘Now We Know,’ criticizing British colonial rule. It resulted in his incarceration of six months in the Spanish Town Penitentiary. This period of imprisonment was instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), a work about working-class life in the Kingston of the 1940s. ‘Why I Love and Leave Jamaica’, an article written in 1950, also stirred many emotions. It labelled the bourgeoisie and the ‘philistines’ as shallow and criticized their impacting role on art and culture. In addition, Mais's wrote more than thirty stage and radio plays. The plays Masks and Paper Hats and Hurricane were performed in 1943, Atlanta in Calydon in 1950; The Potter's Field was published in Public Opinion (1950) and The First Sacrifice in Focus (1956). Mais left for England in 1952. He lived in London, then in Paris, and for a time in the south of France. He took an alias, Kingsley Croft, and showcased an art exhibition in Paris. His artwork also appeared on the covers of his novels. In 1953, his novel The Hills Were Joyful Together was published by Jonathan Cape in London. Soon afterwards, Brother Man (1954) was published, a sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafari movement. Then the following year, Black Lightning was published. While Mais's first two novels had urban settings, Black Lightning (1955) centred on an artist living in the countryside. In 1955 Mais was forced to return to Jamaica after falling ill with cancer; he died that same year in Kingston at the age of 50. His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen, The Wind, thirty-two years after his death. Mais's novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history. He also had an influence on younger writers of the pre-independence period, notably John Hearne. Many of Mais's manuscripts have been deposited in the library of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) is written in the style of a narrative. It takes place in a ‘yard’ consisting of individuals and families living in a confinement of shacks shaped squarely, leaving a yard in the center. In this yard, daily and public life of the tenement unfolds. Mais took inspiration from Trinidadian C. L. R. James's novel Minty Alley and short story ‘Triumph’, which illustrated ‘yard’ life. Mais's The Hills Were Joyful Together is basically a depiction of slum life, portraying the upset of poverty in these yards. Mais claimed that he was ‘concerned with setting down objectively the hopes, fears, [and] frustrations of these people’. He wanted the novel to be ‘essentially realistic, even to the point of seeming violent, rude, expletive, functional, primitive, raw’. Brother Man (London: Cape, 1954) stood as a statement of protest, as well as being a major contributor to a nativist aesthetic. Mais was interested in the creole, the political reconstructionism of the 1930s, and the sociocultural problems of the ‘yards.’ There was a need for a nativist aesthetic. There was talk about a renewed self-government and the formation of a West Indian federation, provoking writers and intellectuals from the region to reflect on this optimistic future and to search for forms to give it a local face. Brother Man was Mais's contribution to this movement. The novel is situated in Kingston's slums. It portrays the daily condition of poverty of the society. Kamau Brathwaite refers to this as the ‘jazz novel’, where the ‘words are 'notes' that develop into riffs, themes, and 'choruses,' themselves part of a call/response design based on the aesthetic principle of solo/duo/trio improvisatons, with a return, at the end of each 'chorus,' to the basic group/ensemble community.’ Unlike the first two novels, Black Lightning (1955) takes place in the countryside. The novel centres on Jake, a blacksmith and a sculptor. He looks to Samson as a model of a man's independence and decides to carve a structure of Samson in mahogony. But when his wife elopes with another man, Jake's finished sculpture comes out as a blinded Samson leaning on a little boy. Jake is then blinded by lightning and has to depend on his friends to live. The tragic discovery of his dependence on humanity eventually drives Jake to his suicidal death. In 1938, major riots and uprising broke out all throughout the Caribbean islands (primarily in Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad). In Jamaica, riots emerged in the 1938 Montego Bay and among the banana loaders, firemen, and sanitation workers in Kingston. It was in Kingston, where Mais was headed to volunteer to help quell the rioting, that he had an apparent change of heart. He seemingly emerged with a completely alternative mindset, as explained in John Hearne's 1955 ‘A Personal Memoir’, and took the side of the workers/rioters. Many saw this as the event that spurred Mais' political involvement. At the end of this critical year, new leaders, including Mais, appropriately emerged to direct and push for political and social changes. Roger Mais' works, which include short stories, plays, reviews, and ‘think pieces’ among other genres, all generally have a political undertone to some degree. He contributed to a left-wing political newspaper called Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952 before he left Jamaica. The other writers of the post-1930s had similar ambitions, a period being characterized as ‘a more determined and confident nationalism.’ His stories appeared in Public Opinion and Focus, two journalistic publications. He also published two collections, Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man. His main concerns were social injustice/inequality and colonialism. His stories and poems have been described as ‘propaganda’, where he illustrated poverty to the full extent. Some have gone so far as to say that his works were ‘weapons of war’, dealt ‘in a long and famous stream of realism’ (Norman Washington Manley). This sort of realism allowed for his readers/audience to understand the poverty in a way which was brutally honest. Examples of these works are The Hills Were Joyful Together and Brother Man. He adamantly denounced England as ‘exploitive’, ‘enslaving’, and disloyal and Winston Churchill for ‘hypocrisy and deception’. Subsequently, Mais was charged with sedition and sentenced to a six-month sentence. The Jamaican public was sympathetic to his imprisonment and helped to incite controversy and public commotion. It is in this sense that Mais was able to involve the Rastafari movement, a Jamaican cultural movement, in his novel Brother Man, in which he is able to identify with the anti-colonialism and afrocentrism of the Rastafari movement. Arguably, another important political contribution was his work to build a national identity, and he did this by: ‘'nativizing' the subjects and concerns of his writing’, ‘supplying a corrective to colonialism by [...] reclaiming subverted or disregarded histories’, and ‘gave authority to the island's language and voice’ (Hawthorne). This essentially means he would intentionally present protagonists that spoke in the local West Indian dialect to connect with his local audience, a significant change in attitude from previous works by other authors. Mais would also include nationalist propaganda demonstrating forgotten Jamaican culture and history. Other similar influential writers of Jamaican heritage include Vera Bell, Claude Thompson, Una Marson, John Hearne, Philip Sherlock, John Figueroa, and Louise Bennett-Coverly. Raised into a middle-class family with full access to ‘cultured’ traditions, Mais often incorporated a romantic idea into his writings. He drew from his Western education inspirations that lead to his use of ‘tragic,’ ‘visionary,’ and ‘poetic’ elements within books and plays. His belief in individualism and the writer's freedom to pursue imagination are reflected in many of his early works. However, Mais later recognized the tension between his colonial heritage and the nationalist movement and changed direction. By adopting a realistic stance, Mais decided to assume a literary style that would be more representative of the Caribbean national consciousness. This particular form allowed Mais to present ‘unambiguous, direct truths about the people and culture.’ Many of his later novels thus portray sufferings and despairs undergone by innocent people under British rule. One inspiration that he wove into his writings sprang from the 1938 People's National Party that was launched by Norman Manley. The movement aimed to grant Jamaica self-government, which sparked concurrent enthusiasm within the literary field. Besides Roger Mais another author, Vic Reid also incorporated into his works Manley's ambitious drive to independence. Reid's novel New Day is a historical account of Jamaica from 1865 to 1944. Like Mais, Reid finds primary sources particularly useful in modeling political messages into stories. During the 1930s, the first endeavours were made to write and introduce plays related to Caribbean life. Before that period, plays were European-based, with European actors as well. Shows consisted of Romeo and Juliet and reading of Shakespearian plays, but progress towards expressing Caribbean life was being made. The year symbolized an advance for Caribbean theatre. The desire to represent local life and history of the Caribbeans onstage were produced, and the theatre's capability to entertain and to raise concerning questions were acknowledged. George William Gordon acts as a representation for the lower class, alluding to the oppressions they were forced to endure throughout the play. The form of George William Gordon indicates that the scenes are meant to be performed in public. Therefore, the play not only represents the people, but also functions as a voice for the people so that their cries can be heard. The unfair court system, the low wages and their repercussions are stated clearly in the work by anonymous persons acting as a uniting voice for the people. It forms an identity for the Black underclass majority, which was Mais's ultimate goal in his work.
In BROTHER MAN Roger Mais returns to Jamaica, the scene of his first novel, THE HILLS WERE JOYFUL TOGETHER, to tell a story which, simple in outline, is charged with emotional power that can hardly fail to move the least susceptible of readers. It is a story many times repeated in the world’s history and not yet at the end of its run. Brother Man, a cobbler by trade and a member of a sect called the Taferites, tries to live according to New Testament precepts. His neighbours in a poor street tolerate his eccentricities as long as they can trade upon them, and he succeeds in winning their respect and affection. Against his wholly beneficent influence is ranged that of Brother Ambo, an obeah man. It is a plain conflict between Good and Evil. The tribulations which Brother Man is called upon to endure involve unpleasant characters and violent incidents: life in a Jamaican slum is as ugly as slum life in any part of the world. Roger Mais has provided his own illustrations to the book. They beautifully reinforce the story.
Roger Mais (11 August 1905 - 21 June 1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was educated at Calabar High School. He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, which was associated with the People's National Party. He also wrote several plays, reviews, and short stories for the newspaper Focus and the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, concerning his articles with social injustice and inequality. He used this approach to reach his local audience and to primarily push for a national identity and anti-colonialism. Mais published more than a hundred short stories, most being found in Public Opinion and Focus. Other stories are collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man, published in the 1940s. Mais's play, George William Gordon, was also published in the 1940s, focusing on the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. It played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character, who was in conventional colonial history described as a rebel and traitor, but who would be proclaimed, on the centenary of the rebellion, a national hero. In 1944, Mais wrote the anti-British satirical tirade ‘Now We Know,’ criticizing British colonial rule. It resulted in his incarceration of six months in the Spanish Town Penitentiary. This period of imprisonment was instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), a work about working-class life in the Kingston of the 1940s. ‘Why I Love and Leave Jamaica’, an article written in 1950, also stirred many emotions. It labelled the bourgeoisie and the ‘philistines’ as shallow and criticized their impacting role on art and culture. In addition, Mais's wrote more than thirty stage and radio plays. The plays Masks and Paper Hats and Hurricane were performed in 1943, Atlanta in Calydon in 1950; The Potter's Field was published in Public Opinion (1950) and The First Sacrifice in Focus (1956). Mais left for England in 1952. He lived in London, then in Paris, and for a time in the south of France. He took an alias, Kingsley Croft, and showcased an art exhibition in Paris. His artwork also appeared on the covers of his novels. In 1953, his novel The Hills Were Joyful Together was published by Jonathan Cape in London. Soon afterwards, Brother Man (1954) was published, a sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafari movement. Then the following year, Black Lightning was published. While Mais's first two novels had urban settings, Black Lightning (1955) centred on an artist living in the countryside. In 1955 Mais was forced to return to Jamaica after falling ill with cancer; he died that same year in Kingston at the age of 50. His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen, The Wind, thirty-two years after his death. Mais's novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history. He also had an influence on younger writers of the pre-independence period, notably John Hearne. Many of Mais's manuscripts have been deposited in the library of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) is written in the style of a narrative. It takes place in a ‘yard’ consisting of individuals and families living in a confinement of shacks shaped squarely, leaving a yard in the center. In this yard, daily and public life of the tenement unfolds. Mais took inspiration from Trinidadian C. L. R. James's novel Minty Alley and short story ‘Triumph’, which illustrated ‘yard’ life. Mais's The Hills Were Joyful Together is basically a depiction of slum life, portraying the upset of poverty in these yards. Mais claimed that he was ‘concerned with setting down objectively the hopes, fears, [and] frustrations of these people’. He wanted the novel to be ‘essentially realistic, even to the point of seeming violent, rude, expletive, functional, primitive, raw’. Brother Man (London: Cape, 1954) stood as a statement of protest, as well as being a major contributor to a nativist aesthetic. Mais was interested in the creole, the political reconstructionism of the 1930s, and the sociocultural problems of the ‘yards.’ There was a need for a nativist aesthetic. There was talk about a renewed self-government and the formation of a West Indian federation, provoking writers and intellectuals from the region to reflect on this optimistic future and to search for forms to give it a local face. Brother Man was Mais's contribution to this movement. The novel is situated in Kingston's slums. It portrays the daily condition of poverty of the society. Kamau Brathwaite refers to this as the ‘jazz novel’, where the ‘words are 'notes' that develop into riffs, themes, and 'choruses,' themselves part of a call/response design based on the aesthetic principle of solo/duo/trio improvisatons, with a return, at the end of each 'chorus,' to the basic group/ensemble community.’ Unlike the first two novels, Black Lightning (1955) takes place in the countryside. The novel centres on Jake, a blacksmith and a sculptor. He looks to Samson as a model of a man's independence and decides to carve a structure of Samson in mahogony. But when his wife elopes with another man, Jake's finished sculpture comes out as a blinded Samson leaning on a little boy. Jake is then blinded by lightning and has to depend on his friends to live. The tragic discovery of his dependence on humanity eventually drives Jake to his suicidal death. In 1938, major riots and uprising broke out all throughout the Caribbean islands (primarily in Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad). In Jamaica, riots emerged in the 1938 Montego Bay and among the banana loaders, firemen, and sanitation workers in Kingston. It was in Kingston, where Mais was headed to volunteer to help quell the rioting, that he had an apparent change of heart. He seemingly emerged with a completely alternative mindset, as explained in John Hearne's 1955 ‘A Personal Memoir’, and took the side of the workers/rioters. Many saw this as the event that spurred Mais' political involvement. At the end of this critical year, new leaders, including Mais, appropriately emerged to direct and push for political and social changes. Roger Mais' works, which include short stories, plays, reviews, and ‘think pieces’ among other genres, all generally have a political undertone to some degree. He contributed to a left-wing political newspaper called Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952 before he left Jamaica. The other writers of the post-1930s had similar ambitions, a period being characterized as ‘a more determined and confident nationalism.’ His stories appeared in Public Opinion and Focus, two journalistic publications. He also published two collections, Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man. His main concerns were social injustice/inequality and colonialism. His stories and poems have been described as ‘propaganda’, where he illustrated poverty to the full extent. Some have gone so far as to say that his works were ‘weapons of war’, dealt ‘in a long and famous stream of realism’ (Norman Washington Manley). This sort of realism allowed for his readers/audience to understand the poverty in a way which was brutally honest. Examples of these works are The Hills Were Joyful Together and Brother Man. He adamantly denounced England as ‘exploitive’, ‘enslaving’, and disloyal and Winston Churchill for ‘hypocrisy and deception’. Subsequently, Mais was charged with sedition and sentenced to a six-month sentence. The Jamaican public was sympathetic to his imprisonment and helped to incite controversy and public commotion. It is in this sense that Mais was able to involve the Rastafari movement, a Jamaican cultural movement, in his novel Brother Man, in which he is able to identify with the anti-colonialism and afrocentrism of the Rastafari movement. Arguably, another important political contribution was his work to build a national identity, and he did this by: ‘'nativizing' the subjects and concerns of his writing’, ‘supplying a corrective to colonialism by [...] reclaiming subverted or disregarded histories’, and ‘gave authority to the island's language and voice’ (Hawthorne). This essentially means he would intentionally present protagonists that spoke in the local West Indian dialect to connect with his local audience, a significant change in attitude from previous works by other authors. Mais would also include nationalist propaganda demonstrating forgotten Jamaican culture and history. Other similar influential writers of Jamaican heritage include Vera Bell, Claude Thompson, Una Marson, John Hearne, Philip Sherlock, John Figueroa, and Louise Bennett-Coverly. Raised into a middle-class family with full access to ‘cultured’ traditions, Mais often incorporated a romantic idea into his writings. He drew from his Western education inspirations that lead to his use of ‘tragic,’ ‘visionary,’ and ‘poetic’ elements within books and plays. His belief in individualism and the writer's freedom to pursue imagination are reflected in many of his early works. However, Mais later recognized the tension between his colonial heritage and the nationalist movement and changed direction. By adopting a realistic stance, Mais decided to assume a literary style that would be more representative of the Caribbean national consciousness. This particular form allowed Mais to present ‘unambiguous, direct truths about the people and culture.’ Many of his later novels thus portray sufferings and despairs undergone by innocent people under British rule. One inspiration that he wove into his writings sprang from the 1938 People's National Party that was launched by Norman Manley. The movement aimed to grant Jamaica self-government, which sparked concurrent enthusiasm within the literary field. Besides Roger Mais another author, Vic Reid also incorporated into his works Manley's ambitious drive to independence. Reid's novel New Day is a historical account of Jamaica from 1865 to 1944. Like Mais, Reid finds primary sources particularly useful in modeling political messages into stories. During the 1930s, the first endeavours were made to write and introduce plays related to Caribbean life. Before that period, plays were European-based, with European actors as well. Shows consisted of Romeo and Juliet and reading of Shakespearian plays, but progress towards expressing Caribbean life was being made. The year symbolized an advance for Caribbean theatre. The desire to represent local life and history of the Caribbeans onstage were produced, and the theatre's capability to entertain and to raise concerning questions were acknowledged. George William Gordon acts as a representation for the lower class, alluding to the oppressions they were forced to endure throughout the play. The form of George William Gordon indicates that the scenes are meant to be performed in public. Therefore, the play not only represents the people, but also functions as a voice for the people so that their cries can be heard. The unfair court system, the low wages and their repercussions are stated clearly in the work by anonymous persons acting as a uniting voice for the people. It forms an identity for the Black underclass majority, which was Mais's ultimate goal in his work.
Listen, the Wind is an important selection of short stories by one of Jamaica's greatest writers, Roger Mais. It includes work that has never previously been published as well as some of Mais's best known stories. The stories are written with sensitivity and perception, their moving themes set against a backdrop of both urban and rural experience. Mais's acute awareness of the human condition, at its heights and depths, adds richness, authenticity and a sharp edge to his portraits of life.
Roger Mais (11 August 1905 - 21 June 1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was educated at Calabar High School. He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, which was associated with the People's National Party. He also wrote several plays, reviews, and short stories for the newspaper Focus and the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, concerning his articles with social injustice and inequality. He used this approach to reach his local audience and to primarily push for a national identity and anti-colonialism. Mais published more than a hundred short stories, most being found in Public Opinion and Focus. Other stories are collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man, published in the 1940s. Mais's play, George William Gordon, was also published in the 1940s, focusing on the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. It played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character, who was in conventional colonial history described as a rebel and traitor, but who would be proclaimed, on the centenary of the rebellion, a national hero. In 1944, Mais wrote the anti-British satirical tirade ‘Now We Know,’ criticizing British colonial rule. It resulted in his incarceration of six months in the Spanish Town Penitentiary. This period of imprisonment was instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), a work about working-class life in the Kingston of the 1940s. ‘Why I Love and Leave Jamaica’, an article written in 1950, also stirred many emotions. It labelled the bourgeoisie and the ‘philistines’ as shallow and criticized their impacting role on art and culture. In addition, Mais's wrote more than thirty stage and radio plays. The plays Masks and Paper Hats and Hurricane were performed in 1943, Atlanta in Calydon in 1950; The Potter's Field was published in Public Opinion (1950) and The First Sacrifice in Focus (1956). Mais left for England in 1952. He lived in London, then in Paris, and for a time in the south of France. He took an alias, Kingsley Croft, and showcased an art exhibition in Paris. His artwork also appeared on the covers of his novels. In 1953, his novel The Hills Were Joyful Together was published by Jonathan Cape in London. Soon afterwards, Brother Man (1954) was published, a sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafari movement. Then the following year, Black Lightning was published. While Mais's first two novels had urban settings, Black Lightning (1955) centred on an artist living in the countryside. In 1955 Mais was forced to return to Jamaica after falling ill with cancer; he died that same year in Kingston at the age of 50. His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen, The Wind, thirty-two years after his death. Mais's novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history. He also had an influence on younger writers of the pre-independence period, notably John Hearne. Many of Mais's manuscripts have been deposited in the library of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) is written in the style of a narrative. It takes place in a ‘yard’ consisting of individuals and families living in a confinement of shacks shaped squarely, leaving a yard in the center. In this yard, daily and public life of the tenement unfolds. Mais took inspiration from Trinidadian C. L. R. James's novel Minty Alley and short story ‘Triumph’, which illustrated ‘yard’ life. Mais's The Hills Were Joyful Together is basically a depiction of slum life, portraying the upset of poverty in these yards. Mais claimed that he was ‘concerned with setting down objectively the hopes, fears, [and] frustrations of these people’. He wanted the novel to be ‘essentially realistic, even to the point of seeming violent, rude, expletive, functional, primitive, raw’. Brother Man (London: Cape, 1954) stood as a statement of protest, as well as being a major contributor to a nativist aesthetic. Mais was interested in the creole, the political reconstructionism of the 1930s, and the sociocultural problems of the ‘yards.’ There was a need for a nativist aesthetic. There was talk about a renewed self-government and the formation of a West Indian federation, provoking writers and intellectuals from the region to reflect on this optimistic future and to search for forms to give it a local face. Brother Man was Mais's contribution to this movement. The novel is situated in Kingston's slums. It portrays the daily condition of poverty of the society. Kamau Brathwaite refers to this as the ‘jazz novel’, where the ‘words are 'notes' that develop into riffs, themes, and 'choruses,' themselves part of a call/response design based on the aesthetic principle of solo/duo/trio improvisatons, with a return, at the end of each 'chorus,' to the basic group/ensemble community.’ Unlike the first two novels, Black Lightning (1955) takes place in the countryside. The novel centres on Jake, a blacksmith and a sculptor. He looks to Samson as a model of a man's independence and decides to carve a structure of Samson in mahogony. But when his wife elopes with another man, Jake's finished sculpture comes out as a blinded Samson leaning on a little boy. Jake is then blinded by lightning and has to depend on his friends to live. The tragic discovery of his dependence on humanity eventually drives Jake to his suicidal death. In 1938, major riots and uprising broke out all throughout the Caribbean islands (primarily in Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad). In Jamaica, riots emerged in the 1938 Montego Bay and among the banana loaders, firemen, and sanitation workers in Kingston. It was in Kingston, where Mais was headed to volunteer to help quell the rioting, that he had an apparent change of heart. He seemingly emerged with a completely alternative mindset, as explained in John Hearne's 1955 ‘A Personal Memoir’, and took the side of the workers/rioters. Many saw this as the event that spurred Mais' political involvement. At the end of this critical year, new leaders, including Mais, appropriately emerged to direct and push for political and social changes. Roger Mais' works, which include short stories, plays, reviews, and ‘think pieces’ among other genres, all generally have a political undertone to some degree. He contributed to a left-wing political newspaper called Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952 before he left Jamaica. The other writers of the post-1930s had similar ambitions, a period being characterized as ‘a more determined and confident nationalism.’ His stories appeared in Public Opinion and Focus, two journalistic publications. He also published two collections, Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man. His main concerns were social injustice/inequality and colonialism. His stories and poems have been described as ‘propaganda’, where he illustrated poverty to the full extent. Some have gone so far as to say that his works were ‘weapons of war’, dealt ‘in a long and famous stream of realism’ (Norman Washington Manley). This sort of realism allowed for his readers/audience to understand the poverty in a way which was brutally honest. Examples of these works are The Hills Were Joyful Together and Brother Man. He adamantly denounced England as ‘exploitive’, ‘enslaving’, and disloyal and Winston Churchill for ‘hypocrisy and deception’. Subsequently, Mais was charged with sedition and sentenced to a six-month sentence. The Jamaican public was sympathetic to his imprisonment and helped to incite controversy and public commotion. It is in this sense that Mais was able to involve the Rastafari movement, a Jamaican cultural movement, in his novel Brother Man, in which he is able to identify with the anti-colonialism and afrocentrism of the Rastafari movement. Arguably, another important political contribution was his work to build a national identity, and he did this by: ‘'nativizing' the subjects and concerns of his writing’, ‘supplying a corrective to colonialism by [...] reclaiming subverted or disregarded histories’, and ‘gave authority to the island's language and voice’ (Hawthorne). This essentially means he would intentionally present protagonists that spoke in the local West Indian dialect to connect with his local audience, a significant change in attitude from previous works by other authors. Mais would also include nationalist propaganda demonstrating forgotten Jamaican culture and history. Other similar influential writers of Jamaican heritage include Vera Bell, Claude Thompson, Una Marson, John Hearne, Philip Sherlock, John Figueroa, and Louise Bennett-Coverly. Raised into a middle-class family with full access to ‘cultured’ traditions, Mais often incorporated a romantic idea into his writings. He drew from his Western education inspirations that lead to his use of ‘tragic,’ ‘visionary,’ and ‘poetic’ elements within books and plays. His belief in individualism and the writer's freedom to pursue imagination are reflected in many of his early works. However, Mais later recognized the tension between his colonial heritage and the nationalist movement and changed direction. By adopting a realistic stance, Mais decided to assume a literary style that would be more representative of the Caribbean national consciousness. This particular form allowed Mais to present ‘unambiguous, direct truths about the people and culture.’ Many of his later novels thus portray sufferings and despairs undergone by innocent people under British rule. One inspiration that he wove into his writings sprang from the 1938 People's National Party that was launched by Norman Manley. The movement aimed to grant Jamaica self-government, which sparked concurrent enthusiasm within the literary field. Besides Roger Mais another author, Vic Reid also incorporated into his works Manley's ambitious drive to independence. Reid's novel New Day is a historical account of Jamaica from 1865 to 1944. Like Mais, Reid finds primary sources particularly useful in modeling political messages into stories. During the 1930s, the first endeavours were made to write and introduce plays related to Caribbean life. Before that period, plays were European-based, with European actors as well. Shows consisted of Romeo and Juliet and reading of Shakespearian plays, but progress towards expressing Caribbean life was being made. The year symbolized an advance for Caribbean theatre. The desire to represent local life and history of the Caribbeans onstage were produced, and the theatre's capability to entertain and to raise concerning questions were acknowledged. George William Gordon acts as a representation for the lower class, alluding to the oppressions they were forced to endure throughout the play. The form of George William Gordon indicates that the scenes are meant to be performed in public. Therefore, the play not only represents the people, but also functions as a voice for the people so that their cries can be heard. The unfair court system, the low wages and their repercussions are stated clearly in the work by anonymous persons acting as a uniting voice for the people. It forms an identity for the Black underclass majority, which was Mais's ultimate goal in his work.
The Author: from a Self-Portrait in Oils . Keywords: Literature Caribbean Jamaica Black. The author is a Jamaican and his novel is set in Jamaica. Its characters, who belong to the submerged nine-tenths of the population, are strangers to writers of books for tourists and to the tourists themselves, but not to the police nor to politicians at election times. Roger Mais, having lived and worked among them for most of his 47 years, knows them intimately; and his story, concerned with a small community of the industrious, the shiftless, the pious and the lawless, is as close to reality as art can depict it. Naive and savage, generous and cunning, sensitive and gross, their violence repels while their simple tenderness attracts. Their high spirits, their humour, their love of singing and dancing, are here contrasted with their primitive barbarity in scenes which evoke terror and pity, tears and laughter. In a style that soars into lyrical beauty and plumbs the depths of squalid tragedy, this is a novel of great power by a writer whose sincerity is not to be denied. . ROGER MAIS was born at Kingston, Jamaica, in 1905. One of his great-grandfathers was sentenced to the stocks for harbouring runaway slaves. His education was sketchy and unorthodox, but liberal. He is unmarried, and is a painter, as well as a writer, and THE HILLS WERE JOYFUL TOGETHER is his first novel. His recreations are reading, the theatre and music. He says that his most interesting experience was going to jail for six months under Defence Regulations, for writing an article which was considered adverse to the War Effort, but was really only asking for a more liberal constitution (and got it). He wrote this first novel, he says, very quickly, and because he had to; ‘it had been gestating for years’.
Roger Mais (11 August 1905 - 21 June 1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was educated at Calabar High School. He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, which was associated with the People's National Party. He also wrote several plays, reviews, and short stories for the newspaper Focus and the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, concerning his articles with social injustice and inequality. He used this approach to reach his local audience and to primarily push for a national identity and anti-colonialism. Mais published more than a hundred short stories, most being found in Public Opinion and Focus. Other stories are collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man, published in the 1940s. Mais's play, George William Gordon, was also published in the 1940s, focusing on the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. It played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character, who was in conventional colonial history described as a rebel and traitor, but who would be proclaimed, on the centenary of the rebellion, a national hero. In 1944, Mais wrote the anti-British satirical tirade ‘Now We Know,’ criticizing British colonial rule. It resulted in his incarceration of six months in the Spanish Town Penitentiary. This period of imprisonment was instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), a work about working-class life in the Kingston of the 1940s. ‘Why I Love and Leave Jamaica’, an article written in 1950, also stirred many emotions. It labelled the bourgeoisie and the ‘philistines’ as shallow and criticized their impacting role on art and culture. In addition, Mais's wrote more than thirty stage and radio plays. The plays Masks and Paper Hats and Hurricane were performed in 1943, Atlanta in Calydon in 1950; The Potter's Field was published in Public Opinion (1950) and The First Sacrifice in Focus (1956). Mais left for England in 1952. He lived in London, then in Paris, and for a time in the south of France. He took an alias, Kingsley Croft, and showcased an art exhibition in Paris. His artwork also appeared on the covers of his novels. In 1953, his novel The Hills Were Joyful Together was published by Jonathan Cape in London. Soon afterwards, Brother Man (1954) was published, a sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafari movement. Then the following year, Black Lightning was published. While Mais's first two novels had urban settings, Black Lightning (1955) centred on an artist living in the countryside. In 1955 Mais was forced to return to Jamaica after falling ill with cancer; he died that same year in Kingston at the age of 50. His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen, The Wind, thirty-two years after his death. Mais's novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history. He also had an influence on younger writers of the pre-independence period, notably John Hearne. Many of Mais's manuscripts have been deposited in the library of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) is written in the style of a narrative. It takes place in a ‘yard’ consisting of individuals and families living in a confinement of shacks shaped squarely, leaving a yard in the center. In this yard, daily and public life of the tenement unfolds. Mais took inspiration from Trinidadian C. L. R. James's novel Minty Alley and short story ‘Triumph’, which illustrated ‘yard’ life. Mais's The Hills Were Joyful Together is basically a depiction of slum life, portraying the upset of poverty in these yards. Mais claimed that he was ‘concerned with setting down objectively the hopes, fears, [and] frustrations of these people’. He wanted the novel to be ‘essentially realistic, even to the point of seeming violent, rude, expletive, functional, primitive, raw’. Brother Man (London: Cape, 1954) stood as a statement of protest, as well as being a major contributor to a nativist aesthetic. Mais was interested in the creole, the political reconstructionism of the 1930s, and the sociocultural problems of the ‘yards.’ There was a need for a nativist aesthetic. There was talk about a renewed self-government and the formation of a West Indian federation, provoking writers and intellectuals from the region to reflect on this optimistic future and to search for forms to give it a local face. Brother Man was Mais's contribution to this movement. The novel is situated in Kingston's slums. It portrays the daily condition of poverty of the society. Kamau Brathwaite refers to this as the ‘jazz novel’, where the ‘words are 'notes' that develop into riffs, themes, and 'choruses,' themselves part of a call/response design based on the aesthetic principle of solo/duo/trio improvisatons, with a return, at the end of each 'chorus,' to the basic group/ensemble community.’ Unlike the first two novels, Black Lightning (1955) takes place in the countryside. The novel centres on Jake, a blacksmith and a sculptor. He looks to Samson as a model of a man's independence and decides to carve a structure of Samson in mahogony. But when his wife elopes with another man, Jake's finished sculpture comes out as a blinded Samson leaning on a little boy. Jake is then blinded by lightning and has to depend on his friends to live. The tragic discovery of his dependence on humanity eventually drives Jake to his suicidal death. In 1938, major riots and uprising broke out all throughout the Caribbean islands (primarily in Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad). In Jamaica, riots emerged in the 1938 Montego Bay and among the banana loaders, firemen, and sanitation workers in Kingston. It was in Kingston, where Mais was headed to volunteer to help quell the rioting, that he had an apparent change of heart. He seemingly emerged with a completely alternative mindset, as explained in John Hearne's 1955 ‘A Personal Memoir’, and took the side of the workers/rioters. Many saw this as the event that spurred Mais' political involvement. At the end of this critical year, new leaders, including Mais, appropriately emerged to direct and push for political and social changes. Roger Mais' works, which include short stories, plays, reviews, and ‘think pieces’ among other genres, all generally have a political undertone to some degree. He contributed to a left-wing political newspaper called Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952 before he left Jamaica. The other writers of the post-1930s had similar ambitions, a period being characterized as ‘a more determined and confident nationalism.’ His stories appeared in Public Opinion and Focus, two journalistic publications. He also published two collections, Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man. His main concerns were social injustice/inequality and colonialism. His stories and poems have been described as ‘propaganda’, where he illustrated poverty to the full extent. Some have gone so far as to say that his works were ‘weapons of war’, dealt ‘in a long and famous stream of realism’ (Norman Washington Manley). This sort of realism allowed for his readers/audience to understand the poverty in a way which was brutally honest. Examples of these works are The Hills Were Joyful Together and Brother Man. He adamantly denounced England as ‘exploitive’, ‘enslaving’, and disloyal and Winston Churchill for ‘hypocrisy and deception’. Subsequently, Mais was charged with sedition and sentenced to a six-month sentence. The Jamaican public was sympathetic to his imprisonment and helped to incite controversy and public commotion. It is in this sense that Mais was able to involve the Rastafari movement, a Jamaican cultural movement, in his novel Brother Man, in which he is able to identify with the anti-colonialism and afrocentrism of the Rastafari movement. Arguably, another important political contribution was his work to build a national identity, and he did this by: ‘'nativizing' the subjects and concerns of his writing’, ‘supplying a corrective to colonialism by [...] reclaiming subverted or disregarded histories’, and ‘gave authority to the island's language and voice’ (Hawthorne). This essentially means he would intentionally present protagonists that spoke in the local West Indian dialect to connect with his local audience, a significant change in attitude from previous works by other authors. Mais would also include nationalist propaganda demonstrating forgotten Jamaican culture and history. Other similar influential writers of Jamaican heritage include Vera Bell, Claude Thompson, Una Marson, John Hearne, Philip Sherlock, John Figueroa, and Louise Bennett-Coverly. Raised into a middle-class family with full access to ‘cultured’ traditions, Mais often incorporated a romantic idea into his writings. He drew from his Western education inspirations that lead to his use of ‘tragic,’ ‘visionary,’ and ‘poetic’ elements within books and plays. His belief in individualism and the writer's freedom to pursue imagination are reflected in many of his early works. However, Mais later recognized the tension between his colonial heritage and the nationalist movement and changed direction. By adopting a realistic stance, Mais decided to assume a literary style that would be more representative of the Caribbean national consciousness. This particular form allowed Mais to present ‘unambiguous, direct truths about the people and culture.’ Many of his later novels thus portray sufferings and despairs undergone by innocent people under British rule. One inspiration that he wove into his writings sprang from the 1938 People's National Party that was launched by Norman Manley. The movement aimed to grant Jamaica self-government, which sparked concurrent enthusiasm within the literary field. Besides Roger Mais another author, Vic Reid also incorporated into his works Manley's ambitious drive to independence. Reid's novel New Day is a historical account of Jamaica from 1865 to 1944. Like Mais, Reid finds primary sources particularly useful in modeling political messages into stories. During the 1930s, the first endeavours were made to write and introduce plays related to Caribbean life. Before that period, plays were European-based, with European actors as well. Shows consisted of Romeo and Juliet and reading of Shakespearian plays, but progress towards expressing Caribbean life was being made. The year symbolized an advance for Caribbean theatre. The desire to represent local life and history of the Caribbeans onstage were produced, and the theatre's capability to entertain and to raise concerning questions were acknowledged. George William Gordon acts as a representation for the lower class, alluding to the oppressions they were forced to endure throughout the play. The form of George William Gordon indicates that the scenes are meant to be performed in public. Therefore, the play not only represents the people, but also functions as a voice for the people so that their cries can be heard. The unfair court system, the low wages and their repercussions are stated clearly in the work by anonymous persons acting as a uniting voice for the people. It forms an identity for the Black underclass majority, which was Mais's ultimate goal in his work.
These three novels of West Indian life are now published, in response to many requests, in a single volume, together with the author’s original illustrations. They first appeared in the nineteen fifties and are recognized as primary works in a literature that is becoming increasingly well known. The Times has spoken of Mais’s ‘great understanding of human nature’; the Guardian of his ‘affection, pity and humour’. His books are remarkable for their vivid scenes, their truthful picture of Jamaican Negro life, and most of all for the beauty and originality of their author’s vision.
Roger Mais (11 August 1905 - 21 June 1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was educated at Calabar High School. He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, which was associated with the People's National Party. He also wrote several plays, reviews, and short stories for the newspaper Focus and the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, concerning his articles with social injustice and inequality. He used this approach to reach his local audience and to primarily push for a national identity and anti-colonialism. Mais published more than a hundred short stories, most being found in Public Opinion and Focus. Other stories are collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man, published in the 1940s. Mais's play, George William Gordon, was also published in the 1940s, focusing on the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. It played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character, who was in conventional colonial history described as a rebel and traitor, but who would be proclaimed, on the centenary of the rebellion, a national hero. In 1944, Mais wrote the anti-British satirical tirade ‘Now We Know,’ criticizing British colonial rule. It resulted in his incarceration of six months in the Spanish Town Penitentiary. This period of imprisonment was instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), a work about working-class life in the Kingston of the 1940s. ‘Why I Love and Leave Jamaica’, an article written in 1950, also stirred many emotions. It labelled the bourgeoisie and the ‘philistines’ as shallow and criticized their impacting role on art and culture. In addition, Mais's wrote more than thirty stage and radio plays. The plays Masks and Paper Hats and Hurricane were performed in 1943, Atlanta in Calydon in 1950; The Potter's Field was published in Public Opinion (1950) and The First Sacrifice in Focus (1956). Mais left for England in 1952. He lived in London, then in Paris, and for a time in the south of France. He took an alias, Kingsley Croft, and showcased an art exhibition in Paris. His artwork also appeared on the covers of his novels. In 1953, his novel The Hills Were Joyful Together was published by Jonathan Cape in London. Soon afterwards, Brother Man (1954) was published, a sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafari movement. Then the following year, Black Lightning was published. While Mais's first two novels had urban settings, Black Lightning (1955) centred on an artist living in the countryside. In 1955 Mais was forced to return to Jamaica after falling ill with cancer; he died that same year in Kingston at the age of 50. His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen, The Wind, thirty-two years after his death. Mais's novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history. He also had an influence on younger writers of the pre-independence period, notably John Hearne. Many of Mais's manuscripts have been deposited in the library of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) is written in the style of a narrative. It takes place in a ‘yard’ consisting of individuals and families living in a confinement of shacks shaped squarely, leaving a yard in the center. In this yard, daily and public life of the tenement unfolds. Mais took inspiration from Trinidadian C. L. R. James's novel Minty Alley and short story ‘Triumph’, which illustrated ‘yard’ life. Mais's The Hills Were Joyful Together is basically a depiction of slum life, portraying the upset of poverty in these yards. Mais claimed that he was ‘concerned with setting down objectively the hopes, fears, [and] frustrations of these people’. He wanted the novel to be ‘essentially realistic, even to the point of seeming violent, rude, expletive, functional, primitive, raw’. Brother Man (London: Cape, 1954) stood as a statement of protest, as well as being a major contributor to a nativist aesthetic. Mais was interested in the creole, the political reconstructionism of the 1930s, and the sociocultural problems of the ‘yards.’ There was a need for a nativist aesthetic. There was talk about a renewed self-government and the formation of a West Indian federation, provoking writers and intellectuals from the region to reflect on this optimistic future and to search for forms to give it a local face. Brother Man was Mais's contribution to this movement. The novel is situated in Kingston's slums. It portrays the daily condition of poverty of the society. Kamau Brathwaite refers to this as the ‘jazz novel’, where the ‘words are 'notes' that develop into riffs, themes, and 'choruses,' themselves part of a call/response design based on the aesthetic principle of solo/duo/trio improvisatons, with a return, at the end of each 'chorus,' to the basic group/ensemble community.’ Unlike the first two novels, Black Lightning (1955) takes place in the countryside. The novel centres on Jake, a blacksmith and a sculptor. He looks to Samson as a model of a man's independence and decides to carve a structure of Samson in mahogony. But when his wife elopes with another man, Jake's finished sculpture comes out as a blinded Samson leaning on a little boy. Jake is then blinded by lightning and has to depend on his friends to live. The tragic discovery of his dependence on humanity eventually drives Jake to his suicidal death. In 1938, major riots and uprising broke out all throughout the Caribbean islands (primarily in Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad). In Jamaica, riots emerged in the 1938 Montego Bay and among the banana loaders, firemen, and sanitation workers in Kingston. It was in Kingston, where Mais was headed to volunteer to help quell the rioting, that he had an apparent change of heart. He seemingly emerged with a completely alternative mindset, as explained in John Hearne's 1955 ‘A Personal Memoir’, and took the side of the workers/rioters. Many saw this as the event that spurred Mais' political involvement. At the end of this critical year, new leaders, including Mais, appropriately emerged to direct and push for political and social changes. Roger Mais' works, which include short stories, plays, reviews, and ‘think pieces’ among other genres, all generally have a political undertone to some degree. He contributed to a left-wing political newspaper called Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952 before he left Jamaica. The other writers of the post-1930s had similar ambitions, a period being characterized as ‘a more determined and confident nationalism.’ His stories appeared in Public Opinion and Focus, two journalistic publications. He also published two collections, Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man. His main concerns were social injustice/inequality and colonialism. His stories and poems have been described as ‘propaganda’, where he illustrated poverty to the full extent. Some have gone so far as to say that his works were ‘weapons of war’, dealt ‘in a long and famous stream of realism’ (Norman Washington Manley). This sort of realism allowed for his readers/audience to understand the poverty in a way which was brutally honest. Examples of these works are The Hills Were Joyful Together and Brother Man. He adamantly denounced England as ‘exploitive’, ‘enslaving’, and disloyal and Winston Churchill for ‘hypocrisy and deception’. Subsequently, Mais was charged with sedition and sentenced to a six-month sentence. The Jamaican public was sympathetic to his imprisonment and helped to incite controversy and public commotion. It is in this sense that Mais was able to involve the Rastafari movement, a Jamaican cultural movement, in his novel Brother Man, in which he is able to identify with the anti-colonialism and afrocentrism of the Rastafari movement. Arguably, another important political contribution was his work to build a national identity, and he did this by: ‘'nativizing' the subjects and concerns of his writing’, ‘supplying a corrective to colonialism by [...] reclaiming subverted or disregarded histories’, and ‘gave authority to the island's language and voice’ (Hawthorne). This essentially means he would intentionally present protagonists that spoke in the local West Indian dialect to connect with his local audience, a significant change in attitude from previous works by other authors. Mais would also include nationalist propaganda demonstrating forgotten Jamaican culture and history. Other similar influential writers of Jamaican heritage include Vera Bell, Claude Thompson, Una Marson, John Hearne, Philip Sherlock, John Figueroa, and Louise Bennett-Coverly. Raised into a middle-class family with full access to ‘cultured’ traditions, Mais often incorporated a romantic idea into his writings. He drew from his Western education inspirations that lead to his use of ‘tragic,’ ‘visionary,’ and ‘poetic’ elements within books and plays. His belief in individualism and the writer's freedom to pursue imagination are reflected in many of his early works. However, Mais later recognized the tension between his colonial heritage and the nationalist movement and changed direction. By adopting a realistic stance, Mais decided to assume a literary style that would be more representative of the Caribbean national consciousness. This particular form allowed Mais to present ‘unambiguous, direct truths about the people and culture.’ Many of his later novels thus portray sufferings and despairs undergone by innocent people under British rule. One inspiration that he wove into his writings sprang from the 1938 People's National Party that was launched by Norman Manley. The movement aimed to grant Jamaica self-government, which sparked concurrent enthusiasm within the literary field. Besides Roger Mais another author, Vic Reid also incorporated into his works Manley's ambitious drive to independence. Reid's novel New Day is a historical account of Jamaica from 1865 to 1944. Like Mais, Reid finds primary sources particularly useful in modeling political messages into stories. During the 1930s, the first endeavours were made to write and introduce plays related to Caribbean life. Before that period, plays were European-based, with European actors as well. Shows consisted of Romeo and Juliet and reading of Shakespearian plays, but progress towards expressing Caribbean life was being made. The year symbolized an advance for Caribbean theatre. The desire to represent local life and history of the Caribbeans onstage were produced, and the theatre's capability to entertain and to raise concerning questions were acknowledged. George William Gordon acts as a representation for the lower class, alluding to the oppressions they were forced to endure throughout the play. The form of George William Gordon indicates that the scenes are meant to be performed in public. Therefore, the play not only represents the people, but also functions as a voice for the people so that their cries can be heard. The unfair court system, the low wages and their repercussions are stated clearly in the work by anonymous persons acting as a uniting voice for the people. It forms an identity for the Black underclass majority, which was Mais's ultimate goal in his work.
These three novels of West Indian life are now published, in response to many requests, in a single volume, together with the author’s original illustrations. They first appeared in the nineteen fifties and are recognized as primary works in a literature that is becoming increasingly well known. The Times has spoken of Mais’s ‘great understanding of human nature’; the Guardian of his ‘affection, pity and humour’. His books are remarkable for their vivid scenes, their truthful picture of Jamaican Negro life, and most of all for the beauty and originality of their author’s vision.
Roger Mais (11 August 1905 - 21 June 1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born to a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica. By 1951, he had won ten first prizes in West Indian literary competitions. His integral role in the development of political and cultural nationalism is evidenced in his being awarded the high honour of the Order of Jamaica in 1978.Roger Mais was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and was educated at Calabar High School. He worked at various times as a photographer, insurance salesman, and journalist, launching his journalistic career as a contributor to the weekly newspaper Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952, which was associated with the People's National Party. He also wrote several plays, reviews, and short stories for the newspaper Focus and the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, concerning his articles with social injustice and inequality. He used this approach to reach his local audience and to primarily push for a national identity and anti-colonialism. Mais published more than a hundred short stories, most being found in Public Opinion and Focus. Other stories are collected in Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man, published in the 1940s. Mais's play, George William Gordon, was also published in the 1940s, focusing on the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. It played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character, who was in conventional colonial history described as a rebel and traitor, but who would be proclaimed, on the centenary of the rebellion, a national hero. In 1944, Mais wrote the anti-British satirical tirade ‘Now We Know,’ criticizing British colonial rule. It resulted in his incarceration of six months in the Spanish Town Penitentiary. This period of imprisonment was instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), a work about working-class life in the Kingston of the 1940s. ‘Why I Love and Leave Jamaica’, an article written in 1950, also stirred many emotions. It labelled the bourgeoisie and the ‘philistines’ as shallow and criticized their impacting role on art and culture. In addition, Mais's wrote more than thirty stage and radio plays. The plays Masks and Paper Hats and Hurricane were performed in 1943, Atlanta in Calydon in 1950; The Potter's Field was published in Public Opinion (1950) and The First Sacrifice in Focus (1956). Mais left for England in 1952. He lived in London, then in Paris, and for a time in the south of France. He took an alias, Kingsley Croft, and showcased an art exhibition in Paris. His artwork also appeared on the covers of his novels. In 1953, his novel The Hills Were Joyful Together was published by Jonathan Cape in London. Soon afterwards, Brother Man (1954) was published, a sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafari movement. Then the following year, Black Lightning was published. While Mais's first two novels had urban settings, Black Lightning (1955) centred on an artist living in the countryside. In 1955 Mais was forced to return to Jamaica after falling ill with cancer; he died that same year in Kingston at the age of 50. His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen, The Wind, thirty-two years after his death. Mais's novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history. He also had an influence on younger writers of the pre-independence period, notably John Hearne. Many of Mais's manuscripts have been deposited in the library of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) is written in the style of a narrative. It takes place in a ‘yard’ consisting of individuals and families living in a confinement of shacks shaped squarely, leaving a yard in the center. In this yard, daily and public life of the tenement unfolds. Mais took inspiration from Trinidadian C. L. R. James's novel Minty Alley and short story ‘Triumph’, which illustrated ‘yard’ life. Mais's The Hills Were Joyful Together is basically a depiction of slum life, portraying the upset of poverty in these yards. Mais claimed that he was ‘concerned with setting down objectively the hopes, fears, [and] frustrations of these people’. He wanted the novel to be ‘essentially realistic, even to the point of seeming violent, rude, expletive, functional, primitive, raw’. Brother Man (London: Cape, 1954) stood as a statement of protest, as well as being a major contributor to a nativist aesthetic. Mais was interested in the creole, the political reconstructionism of the 1930s, and the sociocultural problems of the ‘yards.’ There was a need for a nativist aesthetic. There was talk about a renewed self-government and the formation of a West Indian federation, provoking writers and intellectuals from the region to reflect on this optimistic future and to search for forms to give it a local face. Brother Man was Mais's contribution to this movement. The novel is situated in Kingston's slums. It portrays the daily condition of poverty of the society. Kamau Brathwaite refers to this as the ‘jazz novel’, where the ‘words are 'notes' that develop into riffs, themes, and 'choruses,' themselves part of a call/response design based on the aesthetic principle of solo/duo/trio improvisatons, with a return, at the end of each 'chorus,' to the basic group/ensemble community.’ Unlike the first two novels, Black Lightning (1955) takes place in the countryside. The novel centres on Jake, a blacksmith and a sculptor. He looks to Samson as a model of a man's independence and decides to carve a structure of Samson in mahogony. But when his wife elopes with another man, Jake's finished sculpture comes out as a blinded Samson leaning on a little boy. Jake is then blinded by lightning and has to depend on his friends to live. The tragic discovery of his dependence on humanity eventually drives Jake to his suicidal death. In 1938, major riots and uprising broke out all throughout the Caribbean islands (primarily in Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad). In Jamaica, riots emerged in the 1938 Montego Bay and among the banana loaders, firemen, and sanitation workers in Kingston. It was in Kingston, where Mais was headed to volunteer to help quell the rioting, that he had an apparent change of heart. He seemingly emerged with a completely alternative mindset, as explained in John Hearne's 1955 ‘A Personal Memoir’, and took the side of the workers/rioters. Many saw this as the event that spurred Mais' political involvement. At the end of this critical year, new leaders, including Mais, appropriately emerged to direct and push for political and social changes. Roger Mais' works, which include short stories, plays, reviews, and ‘think pieces’ among other genres, all generally have a political undertone to some degree. He contributed to a left-wing political newspaper called Public Opinion from 1939 to 1952 before he left Jamaica. The other writers of the post-1930s had similar ambitions, a period being characterized as ‘a more determined and confident nationalism.’ His stories appeared in Public Opinion and Focus, two journalistic publications. He also published two collections, Face and Other Stories and And Most of All Man. His main concerns were social injustice/inequality and colonialism. His stories and poems have been described as ‘propaganda’, where he illustrated poverty to the full extent. Some have gone so far as to say that his works were ‘weapons of war’, dealt ‘in a long and famous stream of realism’ (Norman Washington Manley). This sort of realism allowed for his readers/audience to understand the poverty in a way which was brutally honest. Examples of these works are The Hills Were Joyful Together and Brother Man. He adamantly denounced England as ‘exploitive’, ‘enslaving’, and disloyal and Winston Churchill for ‘hypocrisy and deception’. Subsequently, Mais was charged with sedition and sentenced to a six-month sentence. The Jamaican public was sympathetic to his imprisonment and helped to incite controversy and public commotion. It is in this sense that Mais was able to involve the Rastafari movement, a Jamaican cultural movement, in his novel Brother Man, in which he is able to identify with the anti-colonialism and afrocentrism of the Rastafari movement. Arguably, another important political contribution was his work to build a national identity, and he did this by: ‘'nativizing' the subjects and concerns of his writing’, ‘supplying a corrective to colonialism by [...] reclaiming subverted or disregarded histories’, and ‘gave authority to the island's language and voice’ (Hawthorne). This essentially means he would intentionally present protagonists that spoke in the local West Indian dialect to connect with his local audience, a significant change in attitude from previous works by other authors. Mais would also include nationalist propaganda demonstrating forgotten Jamaican culture and history. Other similar influential writers of Jamaican heritage include Vera Bell, Claude Thompson, Una Marson, John Hearne, Philip Sherlock, John Figueroa, and Louise Bennett-Coverly. Raised into a middle-class family with full access to ‘cultured’ traditions, Mais often incorporated a romantic idea into his writings. He drew from his Western education inspirations that lead to his use of ‘tragic,’ ‘visionary,’ and ‘poetic’ elements within books and plays. His belief in individualism and the writer's freedom to pursue imagination are reflected in many of his early works. However, Mais later recognized the tension between his colonial heritage and the nationalist movement and changed direction. By adopting a realistic stance, Mais decided to assume a literary style that would be more representative of the Caribbean national consciousness. This particular form allowed Mais to present ‘unambiguous, direct truths about the people and culture.’ Many of his later novels thus portray sufferings and despairs undergone by innocent people under British rule. One inspiration that he wove into his writings sprang from the 1938 People's National Party that was launched by Norman Manley. The movement aimed to grant Jamaica self-government, which sparked concurrent enthusiasm within the literary field. Besides Roger Mais another author, Vic Reid also incorporated into his works Manley's ambitious drive to independence. Reid's novel New Day is a historical account of Jamaica from 1865 to 1944. Like Mais, Reid finds primary sources particularly useful in modeling political messages into stories. During the 1930s, the first endeavours were made to write and introduce plays related to Caribbean life. Before that period, plays were European-based, with European actors as well. Shows consisted of Romeo and Juliet and reading of Shakespearian plays, but progress towards expressing Caribbean life was being made. The year symbolized an advance for Caribbean theatre. The desire to represent local life and history of the Caribbeans onstage were produced, and the theatre's capability to entertain and to raise concerning questions were acknowledged. George William Gordon acts as a representation for the lower class, alluding to the oppressions they were forced to endure throughout the play. The form of George William Gordon indicates that the scenes are meant to be performed in public. Therefore, the play not only represents the people, but also functions as a voice for the people so that their cries can be heard. The unfair court system, the low wages and their repercussions are stated clearly in the work by anonymous persons acting as a uniting voice for the people. It forms an identity for the Black underclass majority, which was Mais's ultimate goal in his work.
A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly in small, nomadic bands; and lived so lightly on the land that the Americas was, for all practical purposes, still a vast wilderness. But as Charles C. Mann now makes clear, archaeologists and anthropologists have spent the last thirty years proving these and many other long-held assumptions wrong. In a book that startles and persuades, Mann reveals how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques came to previously unheardof conclusions. Among them: In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe . . . Certain cities-such as Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital-were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlán, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets . . . The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids . . . Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as ‘man’s first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering.’ . . . Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it-a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge . . . Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively ‘landscaped’ by human beings. Mann sheds clarifying light on the methods used to arrive at these new visions of the pre-Columbian Americas and how they have affected our understanding of our history and our thinking about the environment. His book is an exciting and learned account of scientific inquiry and revelation. With 56 photographs and 15 maps.
CHARLES C. MANN is a correspondent for Science and The Atlantic Monthly Press, and has cowritten four previous books including NOAH’S CHOICE: THE FUTURE OF ENDANGERED SPECIES AND THE SECOND CREATION. A three-time National Magazine Award finalist, he has won awards from the American Bar Association, the Margaret Sanger Foundation, the American Institute of Physics, and the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, among others. His writing was selected for The Best American Science Writing 2003 and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003. He lives with his wife and their children in Amherst, Massachusetts. .
First published in 1995, Caribbean Currents has become the definitive guide to the distinctive music of this region of the world. This third edition of the award-winning book is substantially updated and expanded, featuring thorough coverage of new developments, such as the global spread of reggaeton and bachata, the advent of music videos, the restructuring of the music industry, and the emergence of new dance styles. It also includes many new illustrations and links to accompanying video footage. The authors succinctly and perceptively situate the musical styles and developments in the context of themes of gender and racial dynamics, socio-political background, and diasporic dimensions. Caribbean Currents showcases the music of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, the lesser Antilles, and their transnational communities in the United States and elsewhere to provide an engaging panorama of the rich and diverse musics of the Caribbean region. Praise for the Revised and Expanded Edition of Caribbean Currents: 'The [second] edition addresses the most important and significant new developments in the 21st century Caribbean, and will be welcomed by those who enjoyed the original due to the considerable additions and enhancements in the revised edition.... undoubtedly a valuable resource.'—Ethnomusicology.
PETER MANUEL is Professor of Music at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of seven books and many articles on musics of India, the Caribbean, Spain, and elsewhere. He also plays sitar, jazz piano, and flamenco guitar. MICHAEL LARGEY is Professor of Music at Michigan State University, East Lansing.
A scathing indictment against Colonial rule in the French Congo. Winner of the Prix Goncourt and considered by students of African literature as the first work by a black writer to signal the break from mission literature and a movement toward an oppositional voice to the colonial enterprise. Maran, born in Martinique of French Guiana parents, is regarded as the fountainhead of black French intellectual thought in the Caribbean and Africa and is credited with encouraging a generation of writers during his career. In writing of blacks under colonial rule in Africa’s Congo region, Batouala triggered not only the harsh tone that black cultural expression was going to take from there on through the Negritude movement, but also set the pace for a universal idea of the black condition.
René Maran (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 8 November 1887 - 9 May 1960) was a French Guyanese poet and novelist, and the first black writer to win the French Prix Goncourt (in 1921). Born on the boat carrying his parents to Fort-de-France where he lived till the age of seven. After that he went to Gabon, where his father Héménéglide Maran was in the colonial service. After attending boarding school in Bordeaux, France, he joined the French Colonial service in French Equatorial Africa. It was his experience there that was the basis for many of his novels, including Batouala: A True Black Novel, which won the Prix Goncourt. Jean-Paul Sartre alluded to Maran in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, mocking the French establishment's complacent self-congratulation that they had ‘on one occasion given the Prix Goncourt to a Negro’.
A scathing indictment against Colonial rule in the French Congo. Winner of the Prix Goncourt and considered by students of African literature as the first work by a black writer to signal the break from mission literature and a movement toward an oppositional voice to the colonial enterprise. Maran, born in Martinique of French Guiana parents, is regarded as the fountainhead of black French intellectual thought in the Caribbean and Africa and is credited with encouraging a generation of writers during his career. In writing of blacks under colonial rule in Africa’s Congo region, Batouala triggered not only the harsh tone that black cultural expression was going to take from there on through the Negritude movement, but also set the pace for a universal idea of the black condition.
René Maran (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 8 November 1887 - 9 May 1960) was a French Guyanese poet and novelist, and the first black writer to win the French Prix Goncourt (in 1921). Born on the boat carrying his parents to Fort-de-France where he lived till the age of seven. After that he went to Gabon, where his father Héménéglide Maran was in the colonial service. After attending boarding school in Bordeaux, France, he joined the French Colonial service in French Equatorial Africa. It was his experience there that was the basis for many of his novels, including Batouala: A True Black Novel, which won the Prix Goncourt. Jean-Paul Sartre alluded to Maran in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, mocking the French establishment's complacent self-congratulation that they had ‘on one occasion given the Prix Goncourt to a Negro’.
ENGLISH PUBLISHER’S NOTE - BATOUALA, which gained the Goncourt Prize in 1921,is a genuine picture of negro life in the French Congo. If some passages here and there appear a little outspoken to English taste, they form nevertheless an integral part of this authentic portrayal of negro manners.
René Maran (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 8 November 1887 - 9 May 1960) was a French Guyanese poet and novelist, and the first black writer to win the French Prix Goncourt (in 1921). Born on the boat carrying his parents to Fort-de-France where he lived till the age of seven. After that he went to Gabon, where his father Héménéglide Maran was in the colonial service. After attending boarding school in Bordeaux, France, he joined the French Colonial service in French Equatorial Africa. It was his experience there that was the basis for many of his novels, including Batouala: A True Black Novel, which won the Prix Goncourt. Jean-Paul Sartre alluded to Maran in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, mocking the French establishment's complacent self-congratulation that they had ‘on one occasion given the Prix Goncourt to a Negro’.
This prize-winning novel is at once a poignant and exotic love story and a revolutionary indictment of imperialism. Its starkly simple and cadenced prose forcefully evokes both the sexual passion of the communal love feast of the Ganza and the tragedy of the love triangle that develops between the great chief Batouala, his beautiful wife, and her young lover. Now recognized as a timeless classic of world literature, the book reflects the intellectual currents that led to the twentieth-century revolution in African thought and politics.
René Maran (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 8 November 1887 - 9 May 1960) was a French Guyanese poet and novelist, and the first black writer to win the French Prix Goncourt (in 1921). Born on the boat carrying his parents to Fort-de-France where he lived till the age of seven. After that he went to Gabon, where his father Héménéglide Maran was in the colonial service. After attending boarding school in Bordeaux, France, he joined the French Colonial service in French Equatorial Africa. It was his experience there that was the basis for many of his novels, including Batouala: A True Black Novel, which won the Prix Goncourt. Jean-Paul Sartre alluded to Maran in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, mocking the French establishment's complacent self-congratulation that they had ‘on one occasion given the Prix Goncourt to a Negro’.
An account of life in a native village in French Equatorial Africa. Strongly anticolonial.
René Maran (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 8 November 1887 - 9 May 1960) was a French Guyanese poet and novelist, and the first black writer to win the French Prix Goncourt (in 1921). Born on the boat carrying his parents to Fort-de-France where he lived till the age of seven. After that he went to Gabon, where his father Héménéglide Maran was in the colonial service. After attending boarding school in Bordeaux, France, he joined the French Colonial service in French Equatorial Africa. It was his experience there that was the basis for many of his novels, including Batouala: A True Black Novel, which won the Prix Goncourt. Jean-Paul Sartre alluded to Maran in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, mocking the French establishment's complacent self-congratulation that they had ‘on one occasion given the Prix Goncourt to a Negro’.
A new translation of the edition. definitive (Paris: Michel, 1938). Reprinted - London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1973. 135 p.; Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1974).
René Maran (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 8 November 1887 - 9 May 1960) was a French Guyanese poet and novelist, and the first black writer to win the French Prix Goncourt (in 1921). Born on the boat carrying his parents to Fort-de-France where he lived till the age of seven. After that he went to Gabon, where his father Héménéglide Maran was in the colonial service. After attending boarding school in Bordeaux, France, he joined the French Colonial service in French Equatorial Africa. It was his experience there that was the basis for many of his novels, including Batouala: A True Black Novel, which won the Prix Goncourt. Jean-Paul Sartre alluded to Maran in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, mocking the French establishment's complacent self-congratulation that they had ‘on one occasion given the Prix Goncourt to a Negro’.
Two plays from one of Jamaica's most important feminists and dramatists. This first publication of Una Marson's insightful and engaging dramatic work is long overdue. Pocomania is among the most important Caribbean plays ever written. First staged at the dawn of the region's stride toward nationalism and independence, it heralded a new era of Jamaican and Caribbean drama, one unafraid of taking a serious look at the people, the culture, and the language. The play was the first to seriously deal with Jamaican Creole and the Jamaican religious form of Pocomania. Though London Calling features citizens from a fictional country, the play explores the all too real anxieties surrounding race, class, identity and migration in early twentieth century London. These plays grapple with class, race, gender, language and culture as they explore the tensions at the nexus of prejudice and the performance of blackness.
Una Maud Victoria Marson (6 February 1905 – 6 May 1965) was a Jamaican feminist, activist and writer, producing poems, plays and radio programmes. She travelled to London in 1932 and became the first black woman to be employed by the BBC during World War II. In 1942 she became producer of the programme Calling the West Indies, turning it into Caribbean Voices, which became an important forum for Caribbean literary work. Una Marson was born on 6 February 1905, in Santa Cruz, Jamaica, in the parish of St Elizabeth. She was the youngest of six children of Rev. Solomon Isaac Marson (1858–1916), a Baptist parson, and his wife Ada Wilhelmina Mullins (1863–1922). Una had a middle-class upbringing and was very close to her father, who influenced some of her fatherlike characters in her later works. As a child before going to school she was an avid reader of available literature, which at the time was mostly English classical literature. At the age of 10, Marson was enrolled in Hampton High, a girl's boarding school in Jamaica of which her father was on the board of trustees. However, that same year, Rev. Isaac died, leaving the family with financial problems, so they moved to Kingston. Una finished school at Hampton High, but did not go on to a college education. After leaving Hampton, she found work in Kingston as a volunteer social worker and used the secretarial skills, such as stenography, she had learned in school. In 1926, Marson was appointed assistant editor of the Jamaican political journal Jamaica Critic. Her years there taught her journalism skills as well as influencing her political and social opinions and inspired her to create her own publication. In fact, in 1928, she became Jamaica's first female editor and publisher of her own magazine, The Cosmopolitan. The Cosmopolitan featured articles on feminist topics, local social issues and workers' rights and was aimed at a young, middle-class Jamaican audience. Marson's articles encouraged women to join the work force and to become politically active. The magazine also featured Jamaican poetry and literature from Marson's fellow members of the Jamaican Poetry League, started by J. E. Clare McFarlane. In 1930, Marson published her first collection of poems, entitled Tropic Reveries, that dealt with love and nature with elements of feminism. It won the Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica. Her poems about love are somewhat misunderstood by friends and critics, as there is no evidence of a romantic relationship in Marson's life, although love continued to be a common topic in her work. In 1931, due to financial difficulties, The Cosmopolitan ceased publication, which led her to begin publishing more poetry and plays. In 1931, she published another collection of poetry, entitled Heights and Depths, which also dealt with love and social issues. Also in 1931, she wrote her first play, At What a Price, about a Jamaican girl who moves from the country into the city of Kingston to work as a stenographer and falls in love with her white male boss. The play opened in Jamaica and later London to critical acclaim. In 1932, she decided to go to London to find a broader audience for her work and to experience life outside of Jamaica. When she first arrived in the UK in 1932, she stayed in Peckham, south-east London, at the home of Harold Moody, who the year before had founded civil-rights organisation The League of Coloured Peoples. From 1932 to 1945, Marson moved back and forth between London and Jamaica. She continued to contribute to politics, but now instead of focusing on writing for magazines, she wrote for newspapers and her own literary works in order to get her political ideas across. In these years, Marson kept writing to advocate feminism, but one of her new emphases was on the race issue in England. Marson first moved to London in 1932. The racism and sexism she met there "transformed both her life and her poetry"; The voice in her poetry became more focused on the identity of black women in England. In this period then, Marson not only continued to write about women's roles in society, but also put into the mix the issues faced by black people who lived in England. In July 1933, she wrote a poem called "Nigger" that would appear in the League of Coloured Peoples' journal, The Keys; one of Marson's more forceful poems addressing racism in England, "Nigger" only saw light seven years later when it was published in 1940. Outside of her writing at that time, Marson was in the London branch of the International Alliance of Women, a global feminist organization. By 1935, she was involved with the International Alliance of Women based in Istanbul. Marson returned to Jamaica in 1936, where one of her goals was to promote national literature. One step she took in achieving this goal was to help create the Kingston Readers and Writers Club, as well as the Kingston Drama Club. She also founded the Jamaica Save the Children Fund, an organization that raised funds to give the poorer children money to get a basic education. In promoting Jamaican literature, Marson published Moth and the Star in 1937. Many poems in that volume demonstrate how despite the media's portrayal that black women have inferior beauty when compared to the whites, black women should still be confident in their own physical beauty. This theme is seen in "Cinema Eyes", "Little Brown Girl", "Black is Fancy" and "Kinky Hair Blues". However, Marson herself was affected by the stereotype of superior white beauty; Marson herself, her biographer tells us, within months of her arrival in Britain "stopped straightening her hair and went natural". Going along with her feminist principles, Marson worked with Louise Bennett to create another play called London Calling, which was about a woman who moved to London to further her education. However, the woman later became homesick and returned to Jamaica. This play shows how the main character is a "strong heroine" for being able to "force herself to return to London" in order to finish her education there. Also in the feminist vein, Marson wrote Public Opinion, contributing to the feminist column. Marson's third play, Pocomania, is about a woman named Stella who is looking for an exciting life. Critics suggest that this play is significant because it demonstrates how an "Afro-religious cult" affects middle-class women. Pocomania is also one of Marson's most important works because she was able to put the essence of Jamaican culture into it. Critics such as Ivy Baxter said that "Pocomania was a break in tradition because it talked about a cult from the country", and, as such, it represented a turning point in what was acceptable on the stage. In 1937, Marson wrote a poem called "Quashie comes to London", which is the perspective of England in a Caribbean narrative. In Caribbean dialect, quashie means gullible or unsophisticated. Although initially impressed, Quashie becomes disgusted with England because there is not enough good food there. The poem shows how, although England has good things to offer, it is Jamaican culture that Quashie misses, and therefore Marson implies that England is supposed to be "the temporary venue for entertainment". The poem shows how it was possible for a writer to implement Caribbean dialect in a poem, and it is this usage of local dialect that situates Quashie's perspective of England as a Caribbean perspective. Marson returned to London in 1938 to continue work on the Jamaican Save the Children project that she started in Jamaica, and also to be on the staff of the Jamaican Standard. In 1941, she was hired by the BBC Empire Service to work on the programme Calling the West Indies, in which World War II soldiers would have their messages read on the radio to their families, becoming the producer of the programme by 1942. During the same year, Marson turned the programme into Caribbean Voices, as a forum in which Caribbean literary work was read over the radio. More than two hundred authors appeared on Caribbean Voices, including V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and Derek Walcott. Through this show, Marson met people such as Clare McFarlane, Vic Reid, Andrew Salkey, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jomo Kenyatta, Haile Selassie, Marcus Garvey, Amy Garvey, Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Pankhurst, Winifred Holtby, Paul Robeson, John Masefield, Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, Tambimuttu and George Orwell. The latter helped Marson edit the programme before she turned it into Caribbean Voices. She also established a firm friendship with Mary Treadgold, who eventually took over her role when Marson returned to Jamaica. However, "despite these experiences and personal connections, there is a strong sense, in Marson's poetry and in Jarrett-Macauley's biography [The Life of Una Marson], that Marson remained something of an isolated and marginal figure". Nevertheless, Marson's radio show, Caribbean Voices, subsequently produced by Henry Swanzy, was described by Kamau Brathwaite as "the single most important literary catalyst for Caribbean creative writing in English". Since on radio the poems could only be appreciated orally, Caribbean Voices helped to influence later Caribbean poetry in having a more spoken form; as Laurence Breiner notes, through the medium of radio "much West Indian poetry was heard rather than seen". Details of Marson's life are limited, and those pertaining to her personal and professional life post-1945 are particularly hard to come by. In 1945, she published a poetry collection entitled Towards the Stars. This marked a shift in the focus of her poetry: while she once wrote about female sadness over lost love, poems from Towards the Stars were much more focused on the independent woman. Also at this time, Marson wrote at least one article entitled "We Want Books - But Do We Encourage Our Writers?" in an effort to spur Caribbean nationalism through literature. Her efforts outside of her writing seem to work in collaboration with these sentiments, though conflicting stories offer little concrete evidence about what she exactly did. Sources differ in outlining Marson's personal life during this time period. Author Erika J. Waters states that Marson was a secretary for the Pioneer Press, a publishing company in Jamaica for Jamaican authors. This source believes that she then moved in the 1950s to Washington, DC, where she met and married a dentist named Peter Staples. The two allegedly divorced, allowing Marson to travel to England, Israel, then back to Jamaica, where she died aged 60 in 1965, following a heart attack. Another source, written by Lee M. Jenkins, offers a very different tale for Marson's personal life and says that Marson was sent to a mental hospital following a breakdown during the years 1946–49. After being released, Marson founded the Pioneer Press. This source claims that she went in the 1950s to the US, where she had another breakdown and was admitted to St. Elizabeth's Asylum. Following this, Marson returned to Jamaica, where she rallied against Rastafarian discrimination. She then went to Israel for a women's conference, an experience that she discussed in her last BBC radio broadcast for Woman's Hour. The conflicting details regarding Marson's personal life show that there is very little information available about her. For example, Water's article quotes Marson's criticisms of Porgy and Bess, yet provides no citation for this work. In combination with this is the limited record of her writings during this time period. Many of her works were left unpublished or circulated only in Jamaica. Most of these writings are only available in the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston. Given these constraints, it is difficult to understand the whole of Marson's accomplishments during the final period of her life. Critics have both praised and dismissed Marson's poetry. She has been criticized for mimicking European style, such as Romantic and Georgian poetics. For example, Marson's poem "If" parodies the style of Kipling's original poem of the same title. Denise deCaires Narain has suggested that Marson was overlooked because poetry concerning the condition and status of females was not important to audiences at the time the works were produced. Other critics, by contrast, praised Marson for her modern style. Some, such as Narain, even suggest that her mimicking challenged conventional poetry of the time in an effort to criticize European poets. Regardless, Marson was active in the West Indian writing community during that period. Her involvement with Caribbean Voices was important to publicising Caribbean literature internationally, as well as spurring nationalism within the Caribbean islands that she represented.
"Tip Marugg’s The Roar of Morning has been widely praised as an intensely personal, often dreamlike literary masterpiece that balances Caribbean mysticism with the magical realism of Latin American fiction while reflecting the Calvinist sensibilities of the region’s Dutch colonial past. The story begins on a tropical Antilles night. A man drinks and awaits the coming dawn with his dogs, thinking he might well commit suicide in the roar of morning. While contemplating his possible end, the events of his life on Curaçao and on mainland Venezuela come rushing back to him. Some memories are recent, others distant; all are tormented by the politics of a colonialist gone native. He recalls sickness and sexual awakening as well as personal encounters with the extraordinary and unexplained. As the day breaks, he has an apocalyptic vision of a great fire engulfing the entire South American continent. The countdown to Armageddon has begun, in a brilliantly dissolute narrative akin to Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and the writings of Charles Bukowski.
Silvio Alberto (Tip) Marugg (Willemstad, Curaçao, 16 December 1923–22 April 2006) was a Dutch-Antillian writer and poet of Venezuelan/Swiss heritage. Marugg wrote three novels in Dutch: Weekendpelgrimage (1957), In de straten van Tepalka (1967); and De morgen loeit weer aan (1988), which was nominated for a major Dutch literature prize. His style is best characterized as a variation on magic realism. Marugg also wrote several poems (published in literary magazines as well as his book of poems Afschuw van Licht) and a Dikshonario Erotiko; a dictionary of all words with an erotic meaning used in Papiamentu. Paul Vincent has translated a wide variety of poetry, nonfiction and fiction from Dutch. In 2012 he was awarded the Vondel Translation Prize for his version of Louis Paul Boon’s My Little War.
The sixty thousand people who make up the population of Curacao, the small Dutch island in the Caribbean, contain among themselves a cross section of most of the races on our planet. And if Tip Marugg had confined himself only to a study of the colour problem confronting a sensitive, intelligent and cultured white man involved in the conflicts of a colonial system he would have written a remarkable novel, But he has done more and, as a consequence, has caused a Dutch reviewer justifiably to say: ‘This book, because of its subtle appreciation of what is essentially a world problem, ought to be translated into a world language’. This story of loves, of loneliness, of friendships, is coloured by a penetrating sensitivity, a dual vision which looks both inwards and outwards. There is, too, a satisfying narrative development, and the island setting is captured vividly in writing that is precise and evocative. And when these ingredients are blended together, we have a novel which has deep significance both literary and social. Tip Marugg was born and brought up in Curacao, where he has lived most of his life. From 1942-47 he served in the infantry, and he has traveled extensively, visiting Costa Rica, Canada, and the Netherlands, but still prefers his native Curacao. Henry Miller is among the writers he most admires. He has had a number of poems published in the literary journal, De Stoep, and he is the editor of the monthly magazine, De Passaat.
Silvio Alberto (Tip) Marugg (Willemstad, Curaçao, 16 December 1923–22 April 2006) was a Dutch-Antillian writer and poet of Venezuelan/Swiss heritage. Marugg wrote three novels in Dutch: Weekendpelgrimage (1957), In de straten van Tepalka (1967); and De morgen loeit weer aan (1988), which was nominated for a major Dutch literature prize. His style is best characterized as a variation on magic realism. Marugg also wrote several poems (published in literary magazines as well as his book of poems Afschuw van Licht) and a Dikshonario Erotiko; a dictionary of all words with an erotic meaning used in Papiamentu.
West Indians, as Ian McDonald comments, 'write poetry as well as they play cricket' and Heinemann's anthology is the most comprehensive and up-to-date selection of contemporary Caribbean poetry, including major names like Derek Walcott, John Agard, and Merle Collins, alongside new poets of the region. This collection is an invaluable academic selection and will provide a fine introduction for the general reader interested in the lyricism of Caribbean poetry.
Ian McDonald (born 18 April 1933) is a Caribbean-born writer who describes himself as "Antiguan by ancestry, Trinidadian by birth, Guyanese by adoption, and West Indian by conviction." His ancestry on his father's side is Antiguan and Kittitian, and Trinidadian on his mother’s side. His only novel The Humming-Bird Tree, first published in 1969, is considered a classic of Caribbean literature. Stewart Brown is a poet and critic who teaches African and Caribbean literature at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham.
A monumental literary event: the newly discovered final novel by seminal Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay, a rich and multilayered portrayal of life in 1930s Harlem and a historical protest for black freedom. The unexpected discovery in 2009 of a completed manuscript of Claude McKay’s final novel was celebrated as one of the most significant literary events in recent years. Building on the already extraordinary legacy of McKay’s life and work, this colorful, dramatic novel centers on the efforts by Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia, a crucial but largely forgotten event in American history. At once a penetrating satire of political machinations in Depression-era Harlem and a far-reaching story of global intrigue and romance, Amiable with Big Teeth plunges into the concerns, anxieties, hopes, and dreams of African-Americans at a moment of crisis for the soul of Harlem - and America.
Claude McKay, one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote several critically acclaimed works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Although he lived in New York City for much of his life, McKay produced many of his major books in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa during the 1920s and early 1930s. He died penniless in a Chicago hospital in 1948.
Lincoln Agrippa Daily, known on the 1920s Marseilles waterfront as ‘Banjo,’ prowls the rough waterfront bistros with his drifter friends, drinking, looking for women, playing music, fighting, loving, and talking - about their homes in Africa, the West Indies, or the American South and about being black. BANJO was noted in part for its portrayal of how the French treated people from its sub-Saharan African colonies. Aime Césaire stated that in BANJO, blacks were described truthfully and without ‘inhibition or prejudice‘.
Claude McKay was born in Jamaica on 15th September, 1890. He began writing poetry as a schoolboy. He worked as a policeman in Spanish Town and when he was twenty-two had his first volume of poems, SONGS OF JAMAICA (1912) published. In 1912 McKay moved to the United States where he attended Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and Kansas State University. He continued to write poetry and in 1918 his work was praised by both Frank Harris and Max Eastman. The following year, his poem, ‘If We Must Die,’ was published in Eastman's journal, The Liberator. Frank Harris encouraged McKay to obtain writing experience in England. In 1919 McKay travelled to England where he met George Bernard Shaw who introduced him to influential left-wing figures in journalism. This included Sylvia Pankhurst, who recruited him to write for her trade union journal, Workers' Dreadnought. While in London McKay read the works of Karl Marx and becomes a committed socialist. In 1921 McKay returned to New York and became associate editor of The Liberator. Over the next year the journal published articles by McKay such as ‘How Black Sees Green and Red’ and ‘He Who Gets Slapped.’ He also published his best known volume of verse, HARLEM SHADOWS (1922). In 1922 McKay went to Third International in Moscow where he represented the American Workers Party. He stayed in Europe where he wrote TRIAL BY LYNCHING: STORIES ABOUT NEGRO LIFE IN AMERICA (1925) and HOME TO HARLEM (1928), a novel about a disillusioned black soldier in the US Army who returns from the Western Front to live in a black ghetto. This was followed by other novels such as BANJO (1928), GINGERTOWN (1932) and BANANA BOTTOM (1933). McKay gradually lost faith in communism and returned to the United States in 1934. Employment was difficult to find and for a while he worked for the Federal Writers' Project. McKay's published work during this period included his autobiography, A LONG WAY FROM HOME (1937) and HARLEM: NEGRO METROPOLIS (1940). Unable to make a living from writing, McKay found work in a shipbuilding yard. In 1943 he suffers a stroke and the following year was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith. In 1945 his essay, On Becoming a Roman Catholic, was published. Claude McKay died in Chicago on May 22, 1948.
Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred published here for the first time, this unique collection showcases the range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican- born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest. His first poems were composed in rural Jamaican creole and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. McKay then migrated to New York, reinvigorating the standard English sonnet and helping to spark the Harlem Renaissance with poems such as ‘If We Must Die.’ Coming under scrutiny for his communism, McKay left America in 1922 and spent twelve years traveling through Europe and North Africa. When he returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin’s Soviet Union, his pristine ‘violent son- nets’ gave way to confessional lyrics informed by his newfound Catholicism. McKay’s verse eludes easy definition, which is why this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William J. Maxwell, is at once necessary and rewarding. Here readers can finally trace the complex transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.
CLAUDE MCKAY, a pioneer of the Harlem and Caribbean cultural renaissances, was the author of the novels Banjo, Home to Harlem, and Banana Bottom. His varied and influential poetry collections include Harlem Shadows and Songs of Jamaica. WILLIAM J. MAXWELL is an associate professor and the director of English Graduate Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of the award-winning New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars.
A collection of 12 short stories from the Jamaican-American writer and poet, Claude McKay. Six of the stories are set in Harlem and focus on issues of black exploitation and humiliation. Other stories are set in Jamaica and North Africa.
Claude McKay (born Festus Claudius McKay) (September 15, 1889 – May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican-American writer and poet, who was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote four novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), Banana Bottom (1933), and in 1941 a manuscript called Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem that has not yet been published. McKay also authored collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously), and a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise entitled Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His 1922 poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, in 1953. McKay was attracted to communism in his early life, but he always asserted that he never became an official member of the Communist Party. However, some scholars dispute the claim that he was not a communist at that time, noting his close ties to active members, his attendance at communist-led events, and his months-long stay in the Soviet Union in 1922-1923, which he wrote about very favorably. He gradually became disillusioned with communism, however, and by the mid-1930s, he had begun to write negatively about it. McKay's other noteworthy fiction publication during his final years abroad was Gingertown, a collection of twelve short stories. Six of the tales are devoted to Harlem life, and they reveal McKay's preoccupation with black exploitation and humiliation. Other tales are set in Jamaica and even in North Africa, McKay's last foreign home before he returned to the United States in the mid-1930s.McKay's other noteworthy fiction publication during his final years abroad was Gingertown, a collection of twelve short stories. Six of the tales are devoted to Harlem life, and they reveal McKay's preoccupation with black exploitation and humiliation. Other tales are set in Jamaica and even in North Africa, McKay's last foreign home before he returned to the United States in the mid-1930s.
HARLEM IN THE THIRTIES - Written in the late 1940s but unpublished till now, this superb portrayal of Black life during the Great Depression and the New Deal is virtually a sequel to the classic HOME TO HARLEM. McKay’s vivid, warm evocations of the omnipresent numbers racket, all-night jazz parties and the whole exuberant and cacophanous clash of social movements and ideologies - Black nationalism and industrial unionism as well as incipient Muslim and other heterodox religious formations - provide the context for a fast-paced narrative of love, work, play and revolt in Black America during one of the most stirring periods in U.S. history. Acutely sensitive to the extraordinary vitality and diversity of Black culture, and drawing on its author’s experiences in the IWW and the extreme Left of the socialist movement, HARLEM GLORY reveals Claude McKay at his very best.
Claude McKay, one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote several critically acclaimed works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Although he lived in New York City for much of his life, McKay produced many of his major books in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa during the 1920s and early 1930s. He died penniless in a Chicago hospital in 1948.
Jake is on the run. After serving overseas with the U.S. Army, he goes AWOL and makes his own way back home to Harlem. Back to the life he had before. Back to the basement joints, pool rooms and rent parties. Back to brown breasts throbbing with love and brown lips full and pouted for sweet kissing. No hero’s welcome awaits him. Only the same hard-drinking, hard-living scrabble for love and a home that he left behind. In this world of gamblers, loan sharks, lonely women and rivals in love, Jake seems to have it all. But the women of Harlem aren’t the only ones keen to make this fine-looking soldier their man. Uncle Sam wants him too!
Claude McKay, one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote several critically acclaimed works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Although he lived in New York City for much of his life, McKay produced many of his major books in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa during the 1920s and early 1930s. He died penniless in a Chicago hospital in 1948.
Jake is on the run. After serving overseas with the U.S. Army, he goes AWOL and makes his own way back home to Harlem. Back to the life he had before. Back to the basement joints, pool rooms and rent parties. Back to brown breasts throbbing with love and brown lips full and pouted for sweet kissing. No hero’s welcome awaits him. Only the same hard-drinking, hard-living scrabble for love and a home that he left behind. In this world of gamblers, loan sharks, lonely women and rivals in love, Jake seems to have it all. But the women of Harlem aren’t the only ones keen to make this fine-looking soldier their man. Uncle Sam wants him too!. Claude McKay (September 15, 1889 - May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican writer and communist. He was part of the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), and two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His book of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922) was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance. His book of collected poems, Selected Poems (1953), was published posthumously. Born in James Hill, Clarendon, Jamaica, McKay was the youngest in the family. His father, Thomas McKay, was a peasant, but had enough property to qualify to vote. Claude McKay came to the attention of Walter Jekyll, who helped him publish his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica, in 1912. These were the first poems published in Patois (Broken English). He was educated by his elder brother. McKay’s next volume, Constab Ballads, came out the same year and were based on his experience as a police officer in Jamaica. He also left for the U.S. that year, going to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. McKay was shocked by the intense racism he encountered in Charleston, South Carolina, where many public facilities were segregated. Disliking the ‘semi-military, machinelike existence there’, McKay quickly left to study at Kansas State University. His political involvement dates from these days. He also read W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk, which had a major impact on him. Despite doing well in exams, in 1914 McKay decided he did not want to be an agronomist and went to New York, where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Lewars. However, she grew weary of life in New York and returned to Jamaica in six months. McKay had two poems published in 1917 in Seven Arts under the pseudonym Eli Edwards. However, McKay continued to work as a waiter on the railways. In 1919 he met Crystal and Max Eastman, who produced The Liberator (where McKay would serve as Co-Executive Editor until 1922). It was here that he published one of his most famous poems, ‘If We Must Die’, during the ‘Red Summer’, a period of intense racial violence against black people in Anglo-American societies. This was among a page of his poetry which signaled the commencement of his life as a professional writer. During McKay’s time with The Liberator, he had affairs with both men and women, including Waldo Frank and Edward Arlington Robinson. Details on his relationships are few. McKay became involved with a group of black radicals who were unhappy both with Marcus Garvey’s nationalism and the middle class reformist NAACP. These included the African Caribbeans Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore and Wilfrid Domingo. They fought for black self-determination within the context of socialist revolution. Together they founded the semi-secret revolutionary organisation, the African Blood Brotherhood. McKay soon left for London, England. Hubert Harrison had asked McKay to write for Garvey’s Negro World, but only a few copies of the paper have survived from this period, none of which contain any articles by McKay. He used to frequent a soldier’s club in Drury Lane and the International Socialist Club in Shoreditch. It was during this period that McKay’s commitment to socialism deepened and he read Marx assiduously. At the International Socialist Club, McKay met Shapurji Saklatvala, A. J. Cook, Guy Aldred, Jack Tanner, Arthur McManus, William Gallacher, Sylvia Pankhurst and George Lansbury. He was soon invited to write for the Workers’ Dreadnought. In 1920 the Daily Herald, a socialist paper published by George Lansbury, included a racist article written by E. D. Morel. Entitled ‘Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine’, it insinuated gross hypersexuality on African people in general, but Lansbury refused to print McKay’s response. This response then appeared in Workers’ Dreadnought. This started his regular involvement with Workers’ Dreadnought and the Workers’ Socialist Federation, a Council Communist group active in the East End and which had a majority of women involved in it at all levels of the organisation. He became a paid journalist for the paper; some people claim he was the first black journalist in Britain. He attended the Communist Unity Conference which established the Communist Party of Great Britain. At this time he also had some of his poetry published in the Cambridge Magazine, edited by C. K. Ogden. When Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act for publishing articles ‘calculated and likely to cause sedition amongst His Majesty’s forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population,’ McKay had his rooms searched. He is likely to have been the author of ‘The Yellow peril and the Dockers’ attributed to Leon Lopez, which was one of the articles cited by the government in its case against the Workers’ Dreadnought. In 1928 McKay published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem (1928), which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. The novel, which depicted street life in Harlem, would have a major impact on black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe. Despite this, the book drew fire from one of McKay’s heroes, W.E.B. Du Bois. To Du Bois, the novel’s frank depictions of sexuality and the nightlife in Harlem only appealed to the ‘prurient demand[s]’ of white readers and publishers looking for portrayals of black ‘licentiousness.’ As Du Bois said, ‘Home to Harlem . . . for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.’ Modern critics now dismiss this criticism from Du Bois, who was more concerned with using art as propaganda in the struggle for African American political liberation than in the value of art to showcase the truth about the lives of black people. McKay’s other novels were Banjo (1930), and Banana Bottom (1933). McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), and two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His book of collected poems, Selected Poems (1953), was published posthumously. Becoming disillusioned with communism, McKay embraced the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and was baptized. He died from a heart attack at the age of 59. .
Claude McKay, one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote several critically acclaimed works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Although he lived in New York City for much of his life, McKay produced many of his major books in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa during the 1920s and early 1930s. He died penniless in a Chicago hospital in 1948.
First published in 1928 and long out of print, this classic novel gives voice to the alienation and frustration of urban blacks during an era when Harlem was in vogue. With sensual, often brutal accuracy, Claude McKay traces the parallel paths of two very different young men struggling to find their way through the suspicion and prejudice of American society in the early twentieth century. At the same time, this stark but moving story touches on the central themes of the Harlem Renaissance, including the urgent need for unity and identity among ordinary blacks - for a common thread even though ‘we ain’t nonetall the same.’ ‘A notable contribution, this, to American literature.’ - Chicago Daily Tribune. ‘Here is realism, stark, awful but somehow beautiful. McKay has left no stone unturned, no detail unmentioned in this telling of things as they are.’ - New York Herald Tribune. ‘Home to Harlem is a book to invoke pity and terror.’ – Bookman.
Claude McKay, one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote several critically acclaimed works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Although he lived in New York City for much of his life, McKay produced many of his major books in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa during the 1920s and early 1930s. He died penniless in a Chicago hospital in 1948.
The pioneering novel of physical disability, transatlantic travel, and black international politics. A vital document of black modernism and one of the earliest overtly queer fictions in the African American tradition. Published for the first time. Buried in the archive for almost ninety years, Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille traces the adventures of a rowdy troupe of dockworkers, prostitutes, and political organizers–collectively straight and queer, disabled and able-bodied, African, European, Caribbean, and American. Set largely in the culture-blending Vieux Port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age, the novel takes flight along with Lafala, an acutely disabled but abruptly wealthy West African sailor. While stowing away on a transatlantic freighter, Lafala is discovered and locked in a frigid closet. Badly frostbitten by the time the boat docks, the once-nimble dancer loses both of his lower legs, emerging from life-saving surgery as what he terms an amputated man. Thanks to an improbably successful lawsuit against the shipping line, however, Lafala scores big in the litigious United States. Feeling flush after his legal payout, Lafala doubles back to Marseille and resumes his trans-African affair with Aslima, a Moroccan courtesan. With its scenes of black bodies fighting for pleasure and liberty even when stolen, shipped, and sold for parts, McKay’s novel explores the heritage of slavery amid an unforgiving modern economy. This first-ever edition of Romance in Marseille includes an introduction by McKay scholars Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell that places the novel within both the stowaway era of black cultural politics and McKay’s challenging career as a star and skeptic of the Harlem Renaissance.
Claude McKay, one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote several critically acclaimed works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Although he lived in New York City for much of his life, McKay produced many of his major books in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa during the 1920s and early 1930s. He died penniless in a Chicago hospital in 1948.
The pioneering novel of physical disability, transatlantic travel, and black international politics. A vital document of black modernism and one of the earliest overtly queer fictions in the African American tradition. Published for the first time. Buried in the archive for almost ninety years, Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille traces the adventures of a rowdy troupe of dockworkers, prostitutes, and political organizers–collectively straight and queer, disabled and able-bodied, African, European, Caribbean, and American. Set largely in the culture-blending Vieux Port of Marseille at the height of the Jazz Age, the novel takes flight along with Lafala, an acutely disabled but abruptly wealthy West African sailor. While stowing away on a transatlantic freighter, Lafala is discovered and locked in a frigid closet. Badly frostbitten by the time the boat docks, the once-nimble dancer loses both of his lower legs, emerging from life-saving surgery as what he terms an amputated man. Thanks to an improbably successful lawsuit against the shipping line, however, Lafala scores big in the litigious United States. Feeling flush after his legal payout, Lafala doubles back to Marseille and resumes his trans-African affair with Aslima, a Moroccan courtesan. With its scenes of black bodies fighting for pleasure and liberty even when stolen, shipped, and sold for parts, McKay’s novel explores the heritage of slavery amid an unforgiving modern economy. This first-ever edition of Romance in Marseille includes an introduction by McKay scholars Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell that places the novel within both the stowaway era of black cultural politics and McKay’s challenging career as a star and skeptic of the Harlem Renaissance. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice/Staff Pick.
Claude McKay, one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote several critically acclaimed works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Although he lived in New York City for much of his life, McKay produced many of his major books in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa during the 1920s and early 1930s. He died penniless in a Chicago hospital in 1948.
Eighty poems from the Jamaican-born author of such classics as Home to Harlem and Banjo.
Claude McKay, one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote several critically acclaimed works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Although he lived in New York City for much of his life, McKay produced many of his major books in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa during the 1920s and early 1930s. He died penniless in a Chicago hospital in 1948.
A comprehensive selection of McKay's published and unpublished works, including a number of inaccessible articles and unpublished fiction and letters.
Claude McKay, one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote several critically acclaimed works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Although he lived in New York City for much of his life, McKay produced many of his major books in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa during the 1920s and early 1930s. He died penniless in a Chicago hospital in 1948.
The man who transports bees from hive to hive on his body, an acrobat who takes up a multitude of shapes and guises, a female stonebreaker who is completely deaf . . . Ossie meets them all in this imaginative collection of short stories. Behind beguilingly simple tales and extraordinary individuals McKenzie explores real political and social issues, proverbs, rituals and folklore. He writes with freshness and charm, of life in rural Jamaica: its humour, warmth and ambitions, as well as its terrors and tribulations. A BOY NAMED OSSIE is Earl McKenzie’s first book.
Earl McKenzie was born in rural Mount Charles, St. Andrew Jamaica in 1943. He attended Oberlin High School and Mico Teachers College. Then he lived for some years in the USA and Canada where he obtained a BA and MFA from Columbia University and a Ph D from the University of British Columbia. In Jamaica he taught in several high schools and at Church Teachers College. He currently lectures in Philosophy at the University of the West Indies, Mona. In addition to his poetry in Against Linearity (Peepal Tree, 1993), he is the author of the novel, A Boy Named Ossie: A Jamaican Childhood (Heinemann, 1991) and Two Roads to Mount Joyful & Other Stories (Longman, 1992). His work has appeared in the following anthologies: Caribbean New Wave; The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories and Perspectives. He is a quiet, seemingly shy man. He paints with distinction. A Jamaican reader of Against Linearity told Peepal Tree that he had captured the essence of Jamaica in his poems.
PITCH LAKE is one of the early classics of modern Caribbean writing in English. It focuses on the life of Joe Da Costa, his rise from the ordinariness of shopkeeping into the upper reaches of the Portuguese community in Trinidad. It is the story of a man who deliberately and disastrously turns away from his inner self towards a life of glitter which turns to ash. The novel probes the society’s commercialism, snobbery, its materialistic values and prejudices - attitudes stemming from the insecurities and uncertainties of the colonial society of the Caribb ean in the 1930s. This reprint is published with an introduction by Kenneth Ramchand. ‘. . . powerfully written . . . The characterisation is brilliant, and the story flows with a grim inevitability that has its logical climax in the final tragedy which ends the hook.’ - Saturday Review (1934).
Alfred Hubert Mendes (18 November 1897-1991), novelist and short-story writer, was a leading member of the 1930s ‘Beacon group’ of writers (named after the literary magazine The Beacon) in Trinidad that included Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James and Ralph de Boissière. Mendes is best known as the author of two novels - PITCH LAKE (1934) and BLACK FAUNS (1935) - and for his short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s. He was ‘one of the first West Indian writers to set the pattern of emigration in the face of the lack of publishing houses and the small reading public in the West Indies.’ Born in Trinidad the eldest of six children in a Portuguese Creole family, Mendes was educated in Port of Spain until 1912, then at the age of 15 went to continue his studies in the United Kingdom. His hopes of going on to university there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. After briefly returning to Trinidad in 1915, against his father’s wishes he joined the Merchants' Contingents of Trinidad - whose purpose was to enroll and transport to England young men who wished to serve in the war ‘for King and Country’ - and sailed back to Britain. He served in the 1st Rifle Brigade, and fought for two years in Flanders, along the Belgian Front, and was awarded a Military Medal for distinguishing himself on the battlefield. Towards the end of the war, he accidentally inhaled the poisonous gas used as a weapon by the German army, and was sent back to Britain to recover. Mendes returned to Trinidad in 1919, and worked in his wealthy father's provisions business, while spending his spare time writing poetry and fiction, and in establishing contact with other writers, artists and scholars. In 1933 he went to New York, remaining there until 1940. While in the USA he joined literary salons and associated with writers including Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, William Saroyan, Benjamin Appel, Tom Wolfe, Malcolm Lowry and Ford Madox Ford. He went back to Trinidad again in 1940. Together with C. L. R. James, Mendes produced two issues of a pioneering literary magazine called Trinidad (Christmas 1929 and Easter 1930). Several of his stories appeared in The Beacon, the journal edited by Albert Gomes from March 1931 until November 1933. Mendes was quoted as saying in 1972: ‘James and I departed from the convention in the selection of our material, in the choice of a strange way of life, in the use of a new dialect. And these departures are still with our Caribbean successors.’ In all Mendes published about 60 short stories in magazines and journals in Trinidad, New York, London and Paris. His first novel Pitch Lake appeared in 1934, with an introduction by Aldous Huxley, and was followed by BLACK FAUNS in 1935. Both novels are significant in the history of literature from the Caribbean region and are landmarks in the establishment of social realism in the West Indian novel. In 1940, Mendes abandoned writing and worked in Trinidad's civil service, becoming General Manager of the Port Services Department. He was one of the foundering members of the United Front, a party with socialist leanings that participated in the 1946 general elections. After his retirement in 1972, he lived in Mallorca and Gran Canaria and ultimately settled in Barbados. In 1972 he was awarded an honorary D. Litt. by the University of the West Indies for his contribution to the development of West Indian literature. He began writing his autobiography in 1975 and his unfinished drafts were edited by Michèle Levy and published in 2002 by the University of the West Indies Press as THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED H. MENDES 1897-1991. Mendes and his wife Ellen both died in 1991 in Barbados and are buried together there in Christ Church Cemetery. Mendes married in October 1919, and had a son, Alfred John, the following year. His first wife, Jessie Rodriguez, died of pneumonia after only two years of marriage. A second marriage, a year later, ended in divorce in 1938. His third wife was Ellen Perachini, mother of his last two sons, Peter and Stephen. He is the grandfather of film director Sam Mendes.
Alfred Hubert Mendes (1897–1991) was a member of the influential Beacon group of artists, writers and intellectuals in Trinidad in the 1930s. In common with other Beacon writers, including C.L.R. James and Ralph de Boissière, he set out to create a Trinidad-centred literature, and his extensive output of poetry, short stories, novels and journalism bears witness to his dedication to this goal. Selected Writings is an anthology of poetry, short fiction and journalism from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s which places Mendes’s literary development in the context of his life. It is accompanied by an introduction, appendices containing early letters to Mendes from C.L.R. James, Claude McKay, and the Canadian writer Hulbert Footner, explanatory notes, and a brief glossary of Trinidadian words and phrases. The sheer vitality of Mendes’s writing and the huge scope of his interests will attract both scholars and general readers keen to understand what life really was like in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially now, as Trinidad celebrates fifty years of independent self-government. Whereas Mendes’s poems and short stories tellingly illustrate the stresses of social life under colonial rule, the journalism contains much thought-provoking discussion of the development of a national identity and political maturity through his intensive examination of Trinidad’s cultural life.
Alfred Hubert Mendes (18 November 1897-1991), novelist and short-story writer, was a leading member of the 1930s ‘Beacon group’ of writers (named after the literary magazine The Beacon) in Trinidad that included Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James and Ralph de Boissière. Mendes is best known as the author of two novels - PITCH LAKE (1934) and BLACK FAUNS (1935) - and for his short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s. He was ‘one of the first West Indian writers to set the pattern of emigration in the face of the lack of publishing houses and the small reading public in the West Indies.’ Born in Trinidad the eldest of six children in a Portuguese Creole family, Mendes was educated in Port of Spain until 1912, then at the age of 15 went to continue his studies in the United Kingdom. His hopes of going on to university there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. After briefly returning to Trinidad in 1915, against his father’s wishes he joined the Merchants' Contingents of Trinidad - whose purpose was to enroll and transport to England young men who wished to serve in the war ‘for King and Country’ - and sailed back to Britain. He served in the 1st Rifle Brigade, and fought for two years in Flanders, along the Belgian Front, and was awarded a Military Medal for distinguishing himself on the battlefield. Towards the end of the war, he accidentally inhaled the poisonous gas used as a weapon by the German army, and was sent back to Britain to recover. Mendes returned to Trinidad in 1919, and worked in his wealthy father's provisions business, while spending his spare time writing poetry and fiction, and in establishing contact with other writers, artists and scholars. In 1933 he went to New York, remaining there until 1940. While in the USA he joined literary salons and associated with writers including Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, William Saroyan, Benjamin Appel, Tom Wolfe, Malcolm Lowry and Ford Madox Ford. He went back to Trinidad again in 1940. Together with C. L. R. James, Mendes produced two issues of a pioneering literary magazine called Trinidad (Christmas 1929 and Easter 1930). Several of his stories appeared in The Beacon, the journal edited by Albert Gomes from March 1931 until November 1933. Mendes was quoted as saying in 1972: ‘James and I departed from the convention in the selection of our material, in the choice of a strange way of life, in the use of a new dialect. And these departures are still with our Caribbean successors.’ In all Mendes published about 60 short stories in magazines and journals in Trinidad, New York, London and Paris. His first novel Pitch Lake appeared in 1934, with an introduction by Aldous Huxley, and was followed by BLACK FAUNS in 1935. Both novels are significant in the history of literature from the Caribbean region and are landmarks in the establishment of social realism in the West Indian novel. In 1940, Mendes abandoned writing and worked in Trinidad's civil service, becoming General Manager of the Port Services Department. He was one of the foundering members of the United Front, a party with socialist leanings that participated in the 1946 general elections. After his retirement in 1972, he lived in Mallorca and Gran Canaria and ultimately settled in Barbados. In 1972 he was awarded an honorary D. Litt. by the University of the West Indies for his contribution to the development of West Indian literature. He began writing his autobiography in 1975 and his unfinished drafts were edited by Michèle Levy and published in 2002 by the University of the West Indies Press as THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED H. MENDES 1897-1991. Mendes and his wife Ellen both died in 1991 in Barbados and are buried together there in Christ Church Cemetery. Mendes married in October 1919, and had a son, Alfred John, the following year. His first wife, Jessie Rodriguez, died of pneumonia after only two years of marriage. A second marriage, a year later, ended in divorce in 1938. His third wife was Ellen Perachini, mother of his last two sons, Peter and Stephen. He is the grandfather of film director Sam Mendes. Michèle Levy is an independent researcher and academic writer. She has taught at secondary and tertiary levels, and has tutored and lectured in the Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. She is the editor of The Autobiography of Alfred H. Mendes, 1897–1991 and of two collections of Mendes’s short stories: Pablo’s Fandango and Other Stories and The Man Who Ran Away and Other Stories of Trinidad in the 1920s and 1930s.
The Portuguese creole author Alfred H. Mendes (1897—1991) was among the most important members ofthe Beacon Group of writers in Trinidad in the 1930s, along with C.L.R. James and Ralph de Boissière. He is well known as a writer of short stories and for two novels, Pitch Lake and Black Fauns. He was made an honorary doctor of letters by the University of the West Indies in 1972 for his contribution to the development of West Indian literature. Mendes’s memories of life in Trinidad in the early twentieth century, his experiences as a rifleman in World War I, and his brief but intense sojourn in New York City during the Depression (often in the company of such prominent literary Figures as William Saroyan, Ford Madox Ford and Malcolm Lowry) are an invaluable resource for scholars. But ‘Alfy’ Mendes had other sides as well: civil servant in British colonial Trinidad, political activist, businessman who travelled regularly throughout the West Indies, and, especially, family man. His autobiography offers a unique private perspective of the man behind a popular West Indian personality. Michèle Levy’s introduction and annotations place the writer in his time and his place in West Indian literature, and Mendes’s own distinctive voice engages even the casual reader.
Alfred Hubert Mendes (18 November 1897-1991), novelist and short-story writer, was a leading member of the 1930s ‘Beacon group’ of writers (named after the literary magazine The Beacon) in Trinidad that included Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James and Ralph de Boissière. Mendes is best known as the author of two novels - PITCH LAKE (1934) and BLACK FAUNS (1935) - and for his short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s. He was ‘one of the first West Indian writers to set the pattern of emigration in the face of the lack of publishing houses and the small reading public in the West Indies.’ Born in Trinidad the eldest of six children in a Portuguese Creole family, Mendes was educated in Port of Spain until 1912, then at the age of 15 went to continue his studies in the United Kingdom. His hopes of going on to university there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. After briefly returning to Trinidad in 1915, against his father’s wishes he joined the Merchants' Contingents of Trinidad - whose purpose was to enroll and transport to England young men who wished to serve in the war ‘for King and Country’ - and sailed back to Britain. He served in the 1st Rifle Brigade, and fought for two years in Flanders, along the Belgian Front, and was awarded a Military Medal for distinguishing himself on the battlefield. Towards the end of the war, he accidentally inhaled the poisonous gas used as a weapon by the German army, and was sent back to Britain to recover. Mendes returned to Trinidad in 1919, and worked in his wealthy father's provisions business, while spending his spare time writing poetry and fiction, and in establishing contact with other writers, artists and scholars. In 1933 he went to New York, remaining there until 1940. While in the USA he joined literary salons and associated with writers including Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, William Saroyan, Benjamin Appel, Tom Wolfe, Malcolm Lowry and Ford Madox Ford. He went back to Trinidad again in 1940. Together with C. L. R. James, Mendes produced two issues of a pioneering literary magazine called Trinidad (Christmas 1929 and Easter 1930). Several of his stories appeared in The Beacon, the journal edited by Albert Gomes from March 1931 until November 1933. Mendes was quoted as saying in 1972: ‘James and I departed from the convention in the selection of our material, in the choice of a strange way of life, in the use of a new dialect. And these departures are still with our Caribbean successors.’ In all Mendes published about 60 short stories in magazines and journals in Trinidad, New York, London and Paris. His first novel Pitch Lake appeared in 1934, with an introduction by Aldous Huxley, and was followed by BLACK FAUNS in 1935. Both novels are significant in the history of literature from the Caribbean region and are landmarks in the establishment of social realism in the West Indian novel. In 1940, Mendes abandoned writing and worked in Trinidad's civil service, becoming General Manager of the Port Services Department. He was one of the foundering members of the United Front, a party with socialist leanings that participated in the 1946 general elections. After his retirement in 1972, he lived in Mallorca and Gran Canaria and ultimately settled in Barbados. In 1972 he was awarded an honorary D. Litt. by the University of the West Indies for his contribution to the development of West Indian literature. He began writing his autobiography in 1975 and his unfinished drafts were edited by Michèle Levy and published in 2002 by the University of the West Indies Press as THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED H. MENDES 1897-1991. Mendes and his wife Ellen both died in 1991 in Barbados and are buried together there in Christ Church Cemetery. Mendes married in October 1919, and had a son, Alfred John, the following year. His first wife, Jessie Rodriguez, died of pneumonia after only two years of marriage. A second marriage, a year later, ended in divorce in 1938. His third wife was Ellen Perachini, mother of his last two sons, Peter and Stephen. He is the grandfather of film director Sam Mendes. Michèle Levy is an independent researcher and academic writer. She has taught at secondary and tertiary levels, and has tutored and lectured in the Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. She is the editor of The Autobiography of Alfred H. Mendes, 1897–1991 and of two collections of Mendes’s short stories: Pablo’s Fandango and Other Stories and The Man Who Ran Away and Other Stories of Trinidad in the 1920s and 1930s.
Alfred H. Mendes was a member of the Beacon group of writers in Trinidad in the 1930s and friend and colleague of C.L.R. James and Ralph de Boissiere. He was a prolific writer, with a distinctive and engaging voice, and he wrote a significant number of short stories, many of which have never been published and most of which were written between 1920 and `940. THE MAN WHO RAN AWAY is a collection of twelve stories with an introduction and short glossary of Trinidadian Creole words and phrases. The book is useful as a text for university literature courses, with an introduction designed or students unfamiliar with Mendes’s work, but not so dauntingly academic as to discourage a general readership.
Alfred Hubert Mendes (18 November 1897-1991), novelist and short-story writer, was a leading member of the 1930s ‘Beacon group’ of writers (named after the literary magazine The Beacon) in Trinidad that included Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James and Ralph de Boissière. Mendes is best known as the author of two novels - PITCH LAKE (1934) and BLACK FAUNS (1935) - and for his short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s. He was ‘one of the first West Indian writers to set the pattern of emigration in the face of the lack of publishing houses and the small reading public in the West Indies.’ Born in Trinidad the eldest of six children in a Portuguese Creole family, Mendes was educated in Port of Spain until 1912, then at the age of 15 went to continue his studies in the United Kingdom. His hopes of going on to university there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. After briefly returning to Trinidad in 1915, against his father’s wishes he joined the Merchants' Contingents of Trinidad - whose purpose was to enroll and transport to England young men who wished to serve in the war ‘for King and Country’ - and sailed back to Britain. He served in the 1st Rifle Brigade, and fought for two years in Flanders, along the Belgian Front, and was awarded a Military Medal for distinguishing himself on the battlefield. Towards the end of the war, he accidentally inhaled the poisonous gas used as a weapon by the German army, and was sent back to Britain to recover. Mendes returned to Trinidad in 1919, and worked in his wealthy father's provisions business, while spending his spare time writing poetry and fiction, and in establishing contact with other writers, artists and scholars. In 1933 he went to New York, remaining there until 1940. While in the USA he joined literary salons and associated with writers including Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, William Saroyan, Benjamin Appel, Tom Wolfe, Malcolm Lowry and Ford Madox Ford. He went back to Trinidad again in 1940. Together with C. L. R. James, Mendes produced two issues of a pioneering literary magazine called Trinidad (Christmas 1929 and Easter 1930). Several of his stories appeared in The Beacon, the journal edited by Albert Gomes from March 1931 until November 1933. Mendes was quoted as saying in 1972: ‘James and I departed from the convention in the selection of our material, in the choice of a strange way of life, in the use of a new dialect. And these departures are still with our Caribbean successors.’ In all Mendes published about 60 short stories in magazines and journals in Trinidad, New York, London and Paris. His first novel Pitch Lake appeared in 1934, with an introduction by Aldous Huxley, and was followed by BLACK FAUNS in 1935. Both novels are significant in the history of literature from the Caribbean region and are landmarks in the establishment of social realism in the West Indian novel. In 1940, Mendes abandoned writing and worked in Trinidad's civil service, becoming General Manager of the Port Services Department. He was one of the foundering members of the United Front, a party with socialist leanings that participated in the 1946 general elections. After his retirement in 1972, he lived in Mallorca and Gran Canaria and ultimately settled in Barbados. In 1972 he was awarded an honorary D. Litt. by the University of the West Indies for his contribution to the development of West Indian literature. He began writing his autobiography in 1975 and his unfinished drafts were edited by Michèle Levy and published in 2002 by the University of the West Indies Press as THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED H. MENDES 1897-1991. Mendes and his wife Ellen both died in 1991 in Barbados and are buried together there in Christ Church Cemetery. Mendes married in October 1919, and had a son, Alfred John, the following year. His first wife, Jessie Rodriguez, died of pneumonia after only two years of marriage. A second marriage, a year later, ended in divorce in 1938. His third wife was Ellen Perachini, mother of his last two sons, Peter and Stephen. He is the grandfather of film director Sam Mendes. Michele Levy is an independent researcher and academic writer. She has taught at secondary and tertiary levels and has tutored and lectured in the Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Jamaica. Since 1994 she has been engaged in research into the life and writings of Alfred H. Mendes. She has edited another collection of his short stories, PABLO’S FANDANGO AND OTHER STORIES, and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED H. MENDES, 1897-1991.
ALFRED MENDES was born in Trinidad in 1897. Mendes’ creative writing belongs to ‘The Beacon’ period of Caribbean literature, which launched the early novels of the English-speaking Caribbean in the 1920s and 1930s. His first novel PITCH LAKE was published in 1934 and his second BLACK FAUNS followed a year later. In the capital of a Caribbean island, the BLACK FAUNS - Mamitz, Martha, Estelle, Christophine, Ma Christine, Miriam and Ethelrida - wash clothes for a living in the intimacy of their barrack yard. It is the 1930s. In two facing rows of rooms, each room a habitation, and separated by the expanse of communal yard, the women are quarrelsome, supportive and reflective, tender and fierce with one another. Memories and bitterness are green. Ma Christine with her obeah and speechifying about her dead husband; Miriam, the objective level-headed philosopher voraciously learned in her insights of the world; Etheirida, bristling with fire; Mamitz, secret but smart and ruthless in her determination to survive; and Martha, in fear of her shadow concealing deep springs of passion and love. It is Martha’s love affairs, first with Estelle, and then with Snakey, Ma Christine’s son, which finally lead to murder and the destruction of the yard community. Rhonda Cobham points out, in her compelling introduction to this reprint of BLACK FAUNS, the dominant role played by the women characters. They are the economic and emotional centre of West Indian lower class life.
Alfred Hubert Mendes (18 November 1897-1991), novelist and short-story writer, was a leading member of the 1930s ‘Beacon group’ of writers (named after the literary magazine The Beacon) in Trinidad that included Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James and Ralph de Boissière. Mendes is best known as the author of two novels - PITCH LAKE (1934) and BLACK FAUNS (1935) - and for his short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s. He was ‘one of the first West Indian writers to set the pattern of emigration in the face of the lack of publishing houses and the small reading public in the West Indies.’ Born in Trinidad the eldest of six children in a Portuguese Creole family, Mendes was educated in Port of Spain until 1912, then at the age of 15 went to continue his studies in the United Kingdom. His hopes of going on to university there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. After briefly returning to Trinidad in 1915, against his father’s wishes he joined the Merchants' Contingents of Trinidad - whose purpose was to enroll and transport to England young men who wished to serve in the war ‘for King and Country’ - and sailed back to Britain. He served in the 1st Rifle Brigade, and fought for two years in Flanders, along the Belgian Front, and was awarded a Military Medal for distinguishing himself on the battlefield. Towards the end of the war, he accidentally inhaled the poisonous gas used as a weapon by the German army, and was sent back to Britain to recover. Mendes returned to Trinidad in 1919, and worked in his wealthy father's provisions business, while spending his spare time writing poetry and fiction, and in establishing contact with other writers, artists and scholars. In 1933 he went to New York, remaining there until 1940. While in the USA he joined literary salons and associated with writers including Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, William Saroyan, Benjamin Appel, Tom Wolfe, Malcolm Lowry and Ford Madox Ford. He went back to Trinidad again in 1940. Together with C. L. R. James, Mendes produced two issues of a pioneering literary magazine called Trinidad (Christmas 1929 and Easter 1930). Several of his stories appeared in The Beacon, the journal edited by Albert Gomes from March 1931 until November 1933. Mendes was quoted as saying in 1972: ‘James and I departed from the convention in the selection of our material, in the choice of a strange way of life, in the use of a new dialect. And these departures are still with our Caribbean successors.’ In all Mendes published about 60 short stories in magazines and journals in Trinidad, New York, London and Paris. His first novel Pitch Lake appeared in 1934, with an introduction by Aldous Huxley, and was followed by BLACK FAUNS in 1935. Both novels are significant in the history of literature from the Caribbean region and are landmarks in the establishment of social realism in the West Indian novel. In 1940, Mendes abandoned writing and worked in Trinidad's civil service, becoming General Manager of the Port Services Department. He was one of the foundering members of the United Front, a party with socialist leanings that participated in the 1946 general elections. After his retirement in 1972, he lived in Mallorca and Gran Canaria and ultimately settled in Barbados. In 1972 he was awarded an honorary D. Litt. by the University of the West Indies for his contribution to the development of West Indian literature. He began writing his autobiography in 1975 and his unfinished drafts were edited by Michèle Levy and published in 2002 by the University of the West Indies Press as THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED H. MENDES 1897-1991. Mendes and his wife Ellen both died in 1991 in Barbados and are buried together there in Christ Church Cemetery. Mendes married in October 1919, and had a son, Alfred John, the following year. His first wife, Jessie Rodriguez, died of pneumonia after only two years of marriage. A second marriage, a year later, ended in divorce in 1938. His third wife was Ellen Perachini, mother of his last two sons, Peter and Stephen. He is the grandfather of film director Sam Mendes.
ALFRED MENDES was born in Trinidad in 1897. Mendes’ creative writing belongs to ‘The Beacon’ period of Caribbean literature, which launched the early novels of the English-speaking Caribbean in the 1920s and 1930s. His first novel PITCH LAKE was published in 1934 and his second BLACK FAUNS followed a year later. In the capital of a Caribbean island, the BLACK FAUNS - Mamitz, Martha, Estelle, Christophine, Ma Christine, Miriam and Ethelrida - wash clothes for a living in the intimacy of their barrack yard. It is the 1930s. In two facing rows of rooms, each room a habitation, and separated by the expanse of communal yard, the women are quarrelsome, supportive and reflective, tender and fierce with one another. Memories and bitterness are green. Ma Christine with her obeah and speechifying about her dead husband; Miriam, the objective level-headed philosopher voraciously learned in her insights of the world; Etheirida, bristling with fire; Mamitz, secret but smart and ruthless in her determination to survive; and Martha, in fear of her shadow concealing deep springs of passion and love. It is Martha’s love affairs, first with Estelle, and then with Snakey, Ma Christine’s son, which finally lead to murder and the destruction of the yard community.
Alfred Hubert Mendes (18 November 1897-1991), novelist and short-story writer, was a leading member of the 1930s ‘Beacon group’ of writers (named after the literary magazine The Beacon) in Trinidad that included Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James and Ralph de Boissière. Mendes is best known as the author of two novels - PITCH LAKE (1934) and BLACK FAUNS (1935) - and for his short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s. He was ‘one of the first West Indian writers to set the pattern of emigration in the face of the lack of publishing houses and the small reading public in the West Indies.’ Born in Trinidad the eldest of six children in a Portuguese Creole family, Mendes was educated in Port of Spain until 1912, then at the age of 15 went to continue his studies in the United Kingdom. His hopes of going on to university there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. After briefly returning to Trinidad in 1915, against his father’s wishes he joined the Merchants' Contingents of Trinidad - whose purpose was to enroll and transport to England young men who wished to serve in the war ‘for King and Country’ - and sailed back to Britain. He served in the 1st Rifle Brigade, and fought for two years in Flanders, along the Belgian Front, and was awarded a Military Medal for distinguishing himself on the battlefield. Towards the end of the war, he accidentally inhaled the poisonous gas used as a weapon by the German army, and was sent back to Britain to recover. Mendes returned to Trinidad in 1919, and worked in his wealthy father's provisions business, while spending his spare time writing poetry and fiction, and in establishing contact with other writers, artists and scholars. In 1933 he went to New York, remaining there until 1940. While in the USA he joined literary salons and associated with writers including Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, William Saroyan, Benjamin Appel, Tom Wolfe, Malcolm Lowry and Ford Madox Ford. He went back to Trinidad again in 1940. Together with C. L. R. James, Mendes produced two issues of a pioneering literary magazine called Trinidad (Christmas 1929 and Easter 1930). Several of his stories appeared in The Beacon, the journal edited by Albert Gomes from March 1931 until November 1933. Mendes was quoted as saying in 1972: ‘James and I departed from the convention in the selection of our material, in the choice of a strange way of life, in the use of a new dialect. And these departures are still with our Caribbean successors.’ In all Mendes published about 60 short stories in magazines and journals in Trinidad, New York, London and Paris. His first novel Pitch Lake appeared in 1934, with an introduction by Aldous Huxley, and was followed by BLACK FAUNS in 1935. Both novels are significant in the history of literature from the Caribbean region and are landmarks in the establishment of social realism in the West Indian novel. In 1940, Mendes abandoned writing and worked in Trinidad's civil service, becoming General Manager of the Port Services Department. He was one of the foundering members of the United Front, a party with socialist leanings that participated in the 1946 general elections. After his retirement in 1972, he lived in Mallorca and Gran Canaria and ultimately settled in Barbados. In 1972 he was awarded an honorary D. Litt. by the University of the West Indies for his contribution to the development of West Indian literature. He began writing his autobiography in 1975 and his unfinished drafts were edited by Michèle Levy and published in 2002 by the University of the West Indies Press as THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED H. MENDES 1897-1991. Mendes and his wife Ellen both died in 1991 in Barbados and are buried together there in Christ Church Cemetery. Mendes married in October 1919, and had a son, Alfred John, the following year. His first wife, Jessie Rodriguez, died of pneumonia after only two years of marriage. A second marriage, a year later, ended in divorce in 1938. His third wife was Ellen Perachini, mother of his last two sons, Peter and Stephen. He is the grandfather of film director Sam Mendes.
Pablo’s Fandango is a collection of previously unpublished and published by Alfred H. Mendes. Alfred Mendes, together with C. L. R. James, is regarded as one of the founders of Caribbean Literature. In this new collection of short stories, Mendes makes wry and pointed social comments on the attitudes and prejudices of the different section of Trinidadian society. His pioneering use of dialogue coherently and vividly depicts the Chinese, Indian, African, Spanish, Portuguese and Venezuelan populations in Trinidad. His genius for description gives depth to the wide variety of the settings for his stories the barrack-yard, the dance hall, the upper class milieu, the provisions shop, the plantation, the smallholding, the smuggling seas. Michele Levy’s clear and comprehensive introduction locates Mendes’s stories in their cultural and historical context and comments on his style and concerns. Michele Levy, a former teacher and lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, is now engaged in research into Mendes’s life and writings.
Alfred Hubert Mendes (18 November 1897-1991), novelist and short-story writer, was a leading member of the 1930s ‘Beacon group’ of writers (named after the literary magazine The Beacon) in Trinidad that included Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James and Ralph de Boissière. Mendes is best known as the author of two novels - PITCH LAKE (1934) and BLACK FAUNS (1935) - and for his short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s. He was ‘one of the first West Indian writers to set the pattern of emigration in the face of the lack of publishing houses and the small reading public in the West Indies.’ Born in Trinidad the eldest of six children in a Portuguese Creole family, Mendes was educated in Port of Spain until 1912, then at the age of 15 went to continue his studies in the United Kingdom. His hopes of going on to university there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. After briefly returning to Trinidad in 1915, against his father’s wishes he joined the Merchants' Contingents of Trinidad - whose purpose was to enroll and transport to England young men who wished to serve in the war ‘for King and Country’ - and sailed back to Britain. He served in the 1st Rifle Brigade, and fought for two years in Flanders, along the Belgian Front, and was awarded a Military Medal for distinguishing himself on the battlefield. Towards the end of the war, he accidentally inhaled the poisonous gas used as a weapon by the German army, and was sent back to Britain to recover. Mendes returned to Trinidad in 1919, and worked in his wealthy father's provisions business, while spending his spare time writing poetry and fiction, and in establishing contact with other writers, artists and scholars. In 1933 he went to New York, remaining there until 1940. While in the USA he joined literary salons and associated with writers including Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, William Saroyan, Benjamin Appel, Tom Wolfe, Malcolm Lowry and Ford Madox Ford. He went back to Trinidad again in 1940. Together with C. L. R. James, Mendes produced two issues of a pioneering literary magazine called Trinidad (Christmas 1929 and Easter 1930). Several of his stories appeared in The Beacon, the journal edited by Albert Gomes from March 1931 until November 1933. Mendes was quoted as saying in 1972: ‘James and I departed from the convention in the selection of our material, in the choice of a strange way of life, in the use of a new dialect. And these departures are still with our Caribbean successors.’ In all Mendes published about 60 short stories in magazines and journals in Trinidad, New York, London and Paris. His first novel Pitch Lake appeared in 1934, with an introduction by Aldous Huxley, and was followed by BLACK FAUNS in 1935. Both novels are significant in the history of literature from the Caribbean region and are landmarks in the establishment of social realism in the West Indian novel. In 1940, Mendes abandoned writing and worked in Trinidad's civil service, becoming General Manager of the Port Services Department. He was one of the foundering members of the United Front, a party with socialist leanings that participated in the 1946 general elections. After his retirement in 1972, he lived in Mallorca and Gran Canaria and ultimately settled in Barbados. In 1972 he was awarded an honorary D. Litt. by the University of the West Indies for his contribution to the development of West Indian literature. He began writing his autobiography in 1975 and his unfinished drafts were edited by Michèle Levy and published in 2002 by the University of the West Indies Press as THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED H. MENDES 1897-1991. Mendes and his wife Ellen both died in 1991 in Barbados and are buried together there in Christ Church Cemetery. Mendes married in October 1919, and had a son, Alfred John, the following year. His first wife, Jessie Rodriguez, died of pneumonia after only two years of marriage. A second marriage, a year later, ended in divorce in 1938. His third wife was Ellen Perachini, mother of his last two sons, Peter and Stephen. He is the grandfather of film director Sam Mendes.
PITCH LAKE is one of the early classics of modern Caribbean writing in English. It focuses on the life of Joe Da Costa, his rise from the ordinariness of shopkeeping into the upper reaches of the Portuguese community in Trinidad. It is the story of a man who deliberately and disastrously turns away from his inner self towards a life of glitter which turns to ash. The novel probes the society’s commercialism, snobbery, its materialistic values and prejudices - attitudes stemming from the insecurities and uncertainties of the colonial society of the Caribb ean in the 1930s. This reprint is published with an introduction by Kenneth Ramchand. ‘. . . powerfully written . . . The characterisation is brilliant, and the story flows with a grim inevitability that has its logical climax in the final tragedy which ends the hook.’ - Saturday Review (1934).
Alfred Hubert Mendes (18 November 1897-1991), novelist and short-story writer, was a leading member of the 1930s ‘Beacon group’ of writers (named after the literary magazine The Beacon) in Trinidad that included Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James and Ralph de Boissière. Mendes is best known as the author of two novels - PITCH LAKE (1934) and BLACK FAUNS (1935) - and for his short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s. He was ‘one of the first West Indian writers to set the pattern of emigration in the face of the lack of publishing houses and the small reading public in the West Indies.’ Born in Trinidad the eldest of six children in a Portuguese Creole family, Mendes was educated in Port of Spain until 1912, then at the age of 15 went to continue his studies in the United Kingdom. His hopes of going on to university there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. After briefly returning to Trinidad in 1915, against his father’s wishes he joined the Merchants' Contingents of Trinidad - whose purpose was to enroll and transport to England young men who wished to serve in the war ‘for King and Country’ - and sailed back to Britain. He served in the 1st Rifle Brigade, and fought for two years in Flanders, along the Belgian Front, and was awarded a Military Medal for distinguishing himself on the battlefield. Towards the end of the war, he accidentally inhaled the poisonous gas used as a weapon by the German army, and was sent back to Britain to recover. Mendes returned to Trinidad in 1919, and worked in his wealthy father's provisions business, while spending his spare time writing poetry and fiction, and in establishing contact with other writers, artists and scholars. In 1933 he went to New York, remaining there until 1940. While in the USA he joined literary salons and associated with writers including Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, William Saroyan, Benjamin Appel, Tom Wolfe, Malcolm Lowry and Ford Madox Ford. He went back to Trinidad again in 1940. Together with C. L. R. James, Mendes produced two issues of a pioneering literary magazine called Trinidad (Christmas 1929 and Easter 1930). Several of his stories appeared in The Beacon, the journal edited by Albert Gomes from March 1931 until November 1933. Mendes was quoted as saying in 1972: ‘James and I departed from the convention in the selection of our material, in the choice of a strange way of life, in the use of a new dialect. And these departures are still with our Caribbean successors.’ In all Mendes published about 60 short stories in magazines and journals in Trinidad, New York, London and Paris. His first novel Pitch Lake appeared in 1934, with an introduction by Aldous Huxley, and was followed by BLACK FAUNS in 1935. Both novels are significant in the history of literature from the Caribbean region and are landmarks in the establishment of social realism in the West Indian novel. In 1940, Mendes abandoned writing and worked in Trinidad's civil service, becoming General Manager of the Port Services Department. He was one of the foundering members of the United Front, a party with socialist leanings that participated in the 1946 general elections. After his retirement in 1972, he lived in Mallorca and Gran Canaria and ultimately settled in Barbados. In 1972 he was awarded an honorary D. Litt. by the University of the West Indies for his contribution to the development of West Indian literature. He began writing his autobiography in 1975 and his unfinished drafts were edited by Michèle Levy and published in 2002 by the University of the West Indies Press as THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED H. MENDES 1897-1991. Mendes and his wife Ellen both died in 1991 in Barbados and are buried together there in Christ Church Cemetery. Mendes married in October 1919, and had a son, Alfred John, the following year. His first wife, Jessie Rodriguez, died of pneumonia after only two years of marriage. A second marriage, a year later, ended in divorce in 1938. His third wife was Ellen Perachini, mother of his last two sons, Peter and Stephen. He is the grandfather of film director Sam Mendes.
Set in Haiti in 1949, this richly poetic novel by one of Haiti's leading contemporary writers describes the saga of a middle class family and affirms with sensual brilliance the life force of the Haitian people. Haitian novelist Jean Metellus's latest, The Vortex Family, is a political drama in which a family of intellectuals get slowly drawn into a coup d'etat. Metellus, who lives in France (where he also practices neurology), affirms the endurance of the Haitian people in the face of political machinations. Originally published in Paris in 1982, the novel is translated from the French and introduced by Michael Richardson.
Jean Metellus (30 April 1937 - 4 January 2014) was a Haitian neurologist, poet, novelist and playwright. Jean Metellus was born in Jacmel, Haiti. After completing his education in Haiti, he worked as a teacher. In 1959 he moved to Paris to escape the Duvalier dictatorship, where he studied linguistics and medicine, specializing in neurology. In 1973 the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles published his poem "Au pipirite chantant," beginning his career as a poet and writer. Some of Metellus's early poems were also published by Jean-Paul Satre in his Les Temps Modernes. Metellus' plays include Anacoana, which was produced in Paris at the Thèâtre National de Chaillot by Antoine Vitez. Metellus published several novels, books of poetry and plays. He dedicated his books to wife Anna-Marie. He died on January 4, 2014
The office is in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Within its four walls, during the course of a single morning, we see chance and human nature busily at work upon the lives of ordinary people. The fourteen employees, white and coloured, of Essential Products Limited are as fascinating as they are diverse—from Horace Xavier, the Negro office boy who is infatuated with the Manager's West Indian secretary, to the lackadaisical English chief accountant; from the prying, much-hated Mr. Jagabir to the enchanting Miss Bisnauth with her single-minded determination to think the best of everybody. Mr. Mittelhölzer explores the strength and weakness of his characters with understanding, with a lively humour and a shrewd eye for eccentricity; his writing has pace, colour and crispness. The result is a strikingly original novel, rich in human interest, and as readable as it is unusual.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
What happens every morning in any office? Well, a number of things-most of them petty and even, seemingly, a little dull-yet, added together, they often form a mosaic that is as changeable as a chameleon, elusive to pin down as quicksilver. Add all this to a Trinidad setting and season it liberally with West Indian mores of caste and color, but keep your cheek in close contact with the tip of your tongue, and you will be in for several hours of sheer reading pleasure. A MORNING IN TRINIDAD concerns particularly the office of Essential Products Ltd., whose employees included George Waley, manager, and Everard Murrain, his assistant, both English and white; Horace Xavier, a poor but studious Negro boy; Jagabir, an East Indian and the office snoop; and the various other East Indian, Creole, and Chinese personnel. Perhaps the considerations of caste and color made this office somewhat unique, but the general atmosphere was the same as that of any office anywhere in the world. And when Horace impulsively placed an ardent love poem on Mrs. Hinckson’s desk, the entire office seemed to know about it. And so started a very strange day in this curious office.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
The first-born, a swarthy boy – not a very auspicious start for the son of a negrophobe; with a mother who molly-coddled her children unmercifully, but who was severe as she was sentimental and meted out punishment with a leather thong called Tickle Toby; against the background of the middle class in British Guiana, with its conventions and taboos. The right school had to be chosen, the right relationship with the neighbours established. Edgar survived the rigidity of his upbringing, the terrifying Aunt Eugenie, with whom he had his first schooling, and the many humiliations he suffered from his mother. His childhood was not unhappy, for he was naturally resilient. He was also serious and brooding and everything he did he attacked with intensity – stamp-collecting, altar serving at church, scouting and reading. Now he vividly evokes that narrow world which he passionately felt and brilliantly remembers. He left school at seventeen, but with no ‘godfather’ to get him into the Civil Service, he had to wait for a post. While he waited, he started to write in earnest. With characteristic determination he bombarded English publishers with story after story. After each repulse he stormed the literary bastions again. And so A SWARTHY BOY becomes the first chapter in the story of an important novelist.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
Brian Liddard is a bookseller, with a shop in the Paddington district of London. He is a solitary man, living as a recluse in the rooms over his shop. Five years before the story opens he had renounced the sensual life of his youth and developed a deep interest in Yoga. Much of his time is now spent in private meditation and concentration, training his mind for the more acute awareness and extra temporal experiences promised by the masters of esoteric Indian thought. Every evening he goes for a regular walk, talking occasionally with the prostitutes who have their regular beat on the streets around Paddington. It is on one of these walks, and when he suddenly finds himself at the home of one of these girls, that Liddard has his first thoroughly uncomfortable experience of the world that has captured him - a world which though ghostly is all too real when he has to continue to live as a respectable bookseller. Mr. Mittelholzer’s writing is never ordinary. In ‘Tinkling in the Twilight’ it is the combination of humour with the supernatural which gives the book its distinctive quality. Liddard’s friendship with his shop assistant, Miss Gregg, and his more ambiguous relationship with Margaret Beavar in the village of Middenshot in Surrey, provide scenes of pure laughter that are quite unexpected when reading the opening chapters of the book. But this is not a novel for men of timid fancy. It is abundant, immoderate, and has to do with the supernatural. The laughter is like the tarts on the corner - a gloss on the serious business of living.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
Like the author's brilliant SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM, this new novel is set in British Guiana. Kaywana was the daughter of an Indian mother and an English sailor who came over with Sir Walter Raleigh. ‘A jet of fire,’ she mated with a Dutch trader. The final fruit of this union, generations later, is the woman Hendrickje. From then on the story is hers. Sparkling, powerful, even cruel, she takes in youth the man she wants, and later she takes the lover she wants. She moves through storms of violence, much of it of her own ruthless making. In her ‘the old blood holds.’ But she judges her artist husband a weakling, and in her two sons creep conflicting strains, torture to them and to her. Around them and her grandchildren swirl currents of raw passion, natural and perverted. The ruling white men, French and Dutch, have their own struggle, and invaders come from outside. The native Indians and the African Negroes press upon the little settlements and their feeble forts. But Hendrickje year upon year insists that the family never runs away from anything. In the climax comes the nightmare rebellion of the slaves, inevitable, diabolical, almost unimaginable to the cloistered; but there the woman stands, resolved that if she must fall she will go down fighting. No brief description can do more than touch the magnetic points of this story, supercharged with the emotions of men and women who live amid the heat, the terrors, the swarming creatures and the quick tragedies of the jungle.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
Ramgolall, a cow-minder on the coast of Guyana has slowly hoarded shillings in a canister in his hut and slowly increased his herd of cows. Each of his two wives has been kept short of money and the fact that Sosee, a daughter by his first marriage, has gone to live with a white planter, Big Man Weldon, is a source of financial satisfaction. Sosee’s eldest son, Geoffry, is light-skinned and ambitious. He is mildly fascinated by his peasant relations. He starts an affair with his half-sister, Kattree, and ruthlessly drops her when she is pregnant, lest she spoil his chances. The book rides toward a crisis when it seems certain that another peasant, Jannee, has murdered the cheerful and provoking Boorharry on a dark night of thunder and lightning. Jannee’s life is saved by an expensive lawyer, but it costs the life of Ramgolall. Corentyne Thunder was published in 1941 by Eyre & Spottiswoode but, according to journalist Colin Rickards, a German bomb destroyed warehouse where the books resided, leaving only a few advance copies sent out for review to survive.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
This compendium of Edgar Mittelholzer's mostly uncollected writings brings together his early collection of sketches of Georgetown life, Creole Chips, his speculative novella, The Adding Machine, twenty-four short stories, five plays, his published and unpublished poetry and essays covering travel, literature and his personal beliefs. This is mostly work written before Mittelholzer came to England in search of publishing opportunities. It shows a writer still deeply concerned with the Caribbean, a writer of playful humour who is committed to entertain, not to preach as some of his later work tends to do, and a writer who wrote in a variety of genres (speculative fiction, crime, and the Gothic) that contemporary Caribbean writers are rediscovering. Old friends recall Edgar Mittelholzer pursuing them on the streets of New Amsterdam to sell them copies of his self-published collection of sketches of Guyanese life, Creole Chips. This was in 1937, long before he began the sequence of novels that established him as a pioneer of Caribbean writing in the 1950s and 60s. This compendium, collected and introduced by Juanita Cox, brings together the early, mostly Caribbean-based Mittelholzer: the strikingly speculative anti-capitalist novella, The Adding Machine; the wealth of short stories published in journals such as Bim, Kyk-over-Al, Caribia and broadcast on the BBC Caribbean Voices programme; his often witty plays and the poetry that shows Mittelholzer to have been a much more modernist voice than much of the Caribbean poetry of those years. In addition, this collection gives access to unpublished material, seen only by the most assiduous researcher, including essays that express Mittelholzer’s ideas about Caribbean writing and his philosophy of life. But beyond bringing a hidden, more rootedly Caribbean Mittelholzer into the light, Creole Chips and Other Writings offers a wealth of pleasurable and engrossing reading. There is a playful good humour that rather disappears from Mittelholzer’s later work, and the 24 short stories first collected here show that in this form, at this time, Mittelholzer had few rivals. Contemporary Caribbean writers have been establishing speculative fiction and the Gothic as new ways of exploring the complex realities of the region; Mittelholzer was there long before them. His work is full of ideas and psychological insights, but he never loses sight of his mission to tell good stories and entertain. This compendium contains: Fiction: Creole Chips, The Adding Machine. Short Stories: Miss Clarke is Dying, Something Fishy, Breakdown, Samlal, The Cruel Fate of Karl and Pierre, Jasmine and the Angels, West Indian Rights, The Pawpaw Tree, The Burglar, Tacama, We Know Not Whom to Mourn, Sorrow Dam and Mr Millbank, Mr Jones of Port of Spain, The Amiable Mr Britten, A Plague of Kindnesses, The Sibilant and Lost, Wedding Day, Portrait with a Background, Only a Ghost We’ll Need, Hurricane Season, Towards Martin’s Bay, Gerald, Heat in the Jungle, Herr Pfangle. Children's Story: Poolwana's Orchids. Drama: The Sub-Committee, Before the Curtain Rose, Village in Guyana, Boarderline Buisness, The Twisted Man. Poetry: Colonial Artist in War-time, Afternoon Reflections, Death in Prospect, Evening at Staubles, Epithalamium, Farewell to a Woman, For Better things, Just between us, Mazaruni Rocks, Poet Creating, Reality at Midday, Remembrances, To the Memory of Ken Johnson, Mood of February 11th 1940, Reality, For Me – the Backyard, Dove on Gasparee, In the Beginning – Now – and Then, Pitch-walk Mood, Meditations of a Man, Slightly Drunk, The Virgin, October 7th, Island Tints. Essays & Personal Writing: Of Casuarinas and Cliffs, Carnival Close-up, Christmas, Romantic Promenade, Van Batenberg of Berbice, Roger Mais, Literary Criticism and the Creative Writer, At 43, A Personal View of the World.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
Among the most versatile of all living novelists, Mr. Mittelholzer, after his controversially experimental novel Latticed Echoes, now gives us a study in the macabre in the manner of his earlier ghost story My Bones and My Flute. But Eltonsbrody is not a ghost-story. It is an attempt to paint in words a picture of an old house and of the landscape immediately surrounding it. Every house has a spirit of its own, and old houses especially seem to possess an atmosphere expressive of the people who have inhabited them and of the dramas that have been enacted in them throughout the years. Some houses leave more ' exciting ' impressions than others—wield a more strange and oppressive influence, and such a house is Eltonsbrody in the hilly north-eastern corner of the island of Barbados. A young English painter, Woodsley, on holiday in the island, is invited by the charming old lady who owns and occupies Eltonsbrody to spend a few days in her home. He settles down to paint a study of the house in its setting of casuarina and mahogany trees, only to discover that he is in the midst of odd happenings—happenings as odd as his hostess and her negro servants. The house lives up to his early impression of it, producing not only strange and blood-curdling events but yielding up eventually some grisly relics.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
This is the second book in the author’s Kaywana trilogy, three works of historical fiction set in the author’s native British Guiana (Guyana). Mittelholzer’s ‘Kwayana’ series imagines the real life of Guyana centuries ago, presenting the history of the Van Groenwegel family from the seventeenth century to agitation for independence in British Guiana in 1953.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
This is the story of two couples, Richard Lehrer and his wife, Lydia, a Yorkshire girl, and Tommy Rowleyson, also of Yorkshire, and his German wife, Lindy. The scene is a small town in British Guiana - New Amsterdam, and between this quartet a drama of human relations builds up to a high peak, nearly ending in tragedy. Richard Lehrer is an architect, and Tommy Rowleyson a road engineer. Tommy happens to be sterile, but his wife, Lindy, unaware of this, blames herself when she finds herself unable to have a child. Richard, though British, is of German extraction, and finds himself instantly drawn to Lindy, even though he is in love with his Yorkshire wife. It is his affair with Lindy that sparks off the trouble and that nearly ruins both marriages.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
In his new novel Mr. Mittelholzer returns for his setting to British Guiana. When Mr. Nevinson, head of the Barbice-Timber Company, asks the young artist Milton Woodsley to accompany him, his wife, and his daughter Jessie on a trip up the Barbice River to visit the company’s jungle factory the purpose, so far as Milton knows, is solely so that he shall paint pictures to adorn the boardroom walls. Nor was Milton more than amused when, on the steamer, Jessie kept hearing the sound of a flute which to him was inaudible. And when later that day Mr. Nevinson told him the story of the parchment and the curse on those who touched it he still had no inkling of what was to follow. It was in a spirit largely of bravado that he put his hand on the parchment himself. That night and for many succeeding days of suspense and nights of mounting terror he heard the flute. For he too had been caught in the grip of the occult, face to face with the unseen forces of evil which had been unleashed two centuries before by the death of a Dutchman who had dabbled in the black arts. Mr. Mittelholzer has called this book ‘A Ghost story in the old-fashioned manner ‘. If My Bones and My Flute is adjudged old-fashioned, then modernity had better look to its laurels. For so skillfully does the author unfold his tale that even the most sceptical will be persuaded at the time to suspend disbelief and to follow with increasing excitement the fortunes of this haunted and seemingly doomed quartet. Suspense is heightened by the setting -the dank, all-pervading jungle, the bark of the baboon, at night the fireflies and the whole cacophony of insects, the all-pervading sense of loneliness. But to reveal the plot would be unfair to author and readers alike. It may be advisable to leave a time gap between putting the book down at bedtime and turning off the light.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
The only thing that marred the perfection of the first weeks spent by the young Worts in Barbados was Patricia’s recurring nightmare; and to start with, neither she nor Roger took it really seriously. For the rest, they had a bungalow with servants; the neighbours, coloured, olive or white, with their intricate class system, promised amusement, and there was always the fascination of the trees - manchineel, casuarina, cordia - and the sea. And then odd things started to happen. Old Mr Drencher, the 81-year-old coloured man who lived down the road, began to exercise a strange fascination over Patricia; and 19-year-old Daphne, daughter of the poor-white Sedge family, made no bones about her frontal assault on Roger’s virtue. In the village old Broome, the shoemaker, renowned through the island for his communings with the Lord Jehovah, told Daphne that Patricia was enceinte by Beelzebub. And in his recluse’s cottage in Ashley’s Gap, Colonel Heather was reputed to be brewing some strange drug from sea-weed, a drug capable of changing humans into trees or vice versa. The island was full of strange noises too - the sighing of the wind in the manchineel trees that surrounded the Worts’ house, the pounding of the breakers on the beach, and the weird braying at nights that gave rise to the legend of the Atomic Mule. Mutual jealousy and guilt began to build a barrier between Roger and Patricia, and the latter’s nightmare grew so potent that all one alarming day she believed herself in reality a murderess. But in the end all was happily resolved by old Mr Drencher in a series of startling and highly immoral revelations. OF TREES AND THE SEA is Mr Mittelholzer in lighter vein. Most skillfully he blends the eerie and the farcical. Colonel Heather summed it all up when he remarked: ‘What other form could a book on Barbados take but poetical comedy-fantasy, with marine, botanical and religious overtones as a matter of course? Come inside and have a drink.’ Mr Mittelholzer is a most stimulating cocktail.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
A SAGA OF SIN. . . This is a shocking book, the violent, panoramic chronicle of the incredible van Groenwegels of British Guiana, a family born of vice and brutality, bred to arrogance and lust and greed. . . . Beginning with Kaywana, half civilized daughter of an English father and a native mother, the author creates with stark reality a powerful narrative of 150 years in a strange culture, set against a background of war, tropical passions and jungle rebellions. This is a novel charged with the defiant brutality of the van Groenwegels, it moves with relentless fury through debauchery and endless conflict from its first page to its last.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
This is fare to surprise and delight the most exacting reader, a distinguished and original novel by a writer with an unusually fertile mind. In the atmosphere of haunted jungles in British Guiana the author has placed a group of English characters as strange and almost as terrifying as the jungle fauna which he so vividly describes. Dictator of this tropical demi-paradise, the highly eccentric Reverend Gerald Harmston dispenses his home-brewed religion to overawed natives and his own peculiar family. His Sunday sermons are ghost stories, he flogs and chains offenders against his laws, while in the background the memory of Dutch settlers massacred by their Negro slaves lurks as ‘local influence.’ Into this bizarre Eden comes a nerve-racked relative from England, who becomes fascinated, as well he might, by the parson’s two precocious and uninhibited daughters. There develops a strange and absorbing story, a story like nothing else in current fiction. Full of pagan gaiety and bubbling humor, here is a completely refreshing book.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
‘The most original, the most peculiar and in some ways the most diverting novel I have read this year.’ - ORVILLE PRESCOTT, New York Times . . . ‘SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM is the story of an emigré colony of Britishers who are escapists from the evils of modern civilization. The little community is released from many of civilization’s most difficult taboos. They are not ashamed of sex. . . they regard physical modesty as a silly form of self-consciousness, egoism, and exhibitionism. And love is, in a manner of speaking, free. . . As I trust you have gathered by now, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM is a delicious - and very fresh - literary morsel.’ - THE NEW YORK Herald-Tribune . . . ‘Mark this book down as a charmer, full of bizarre conceits, and a curiously mad view of men, morals and society that has a persuasive air of sanity about it. This is the kind of entertainment find that people delight to come upon and tell their friends about. I foresee many an evening when a new discoverer will be reading to me his favorite passage. It will be a pleasure.’ - EDWARD J. FITZGERALD, Book Find News.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
The one man she loved . . . Her father rose and gripped her shoulder. His thumb sank hard into her flesh, and hurt. His eyes were cold; he might have been about to murder her. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve known him. You slap him if he gets fresh. Hear me? Lam into him. He’s foul.’ She found herself getting warm in the face. She turned her back hastily and pulled on her nightgown.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
In this novel, whose ultimate tragedy calls so vividly to mind the tragedy of Mr. Mittelholzer's own death, the theme is the crisis in the lives of four people. The dramatis personae: Colonel Harry Jilkington, conventional, easy-going, disinclined to overmuch speculation; his son Garvin, in many ways the exact opposite of his father, growing ever more bewilderingly moody, still brooding over the death of his much-loved wife; Harry's mistress Katherine Friedlander, voluptuous and untroubled by moral scruple, and, completing the quartet, Katherine's proud, inviolate daughter Lilli, still very much aware of her German upbringing and childhood and increasingly burdened by her consciousness of the gravity of her mother's sin. Against the quiet background of an unpretentious Georgian farmhouse in peaceful English countryside, these four ill-assorted individuals play out their story. For two of them the circumstances of their way of life are becoming intolerable. Their actions and decisions, combined with the conflict of the emotions of all four against the restraints of their formal relationships one with another, lead inexorably to the fierce and terrible climax, as inevitable as any in classical drama. The late Edgar Mittelholzer has created an unforgettable story, shifting, ever-changing in mood, remarkable for the depth and tenderness of its insight and catholic in its sympathy; remarkable, too, for its technique. Starkly objective, its purpose is to achieve a clean and uncluttered economy, creating the effect of a play on a stage. The reader watches rather than reads. Conscious or subconscious, half recognized and acknowledged or wholly denied, character and motivation are subtly interwoven. Tragically, the novel foretells Mittelholzer’s own suicide by fire.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
Telling the tragic story of a young Sylvia Ann Russell, this novel focuses on the dilemmas of a young woman of mixed race in 1930s Guyana. After the death of her English father, Sylvia constantly struggles for economic survival and against attempts to exploit her sexually. Impossibly torn between her desire for emotional closeness and the integrity of her independence, Sylvia willfully accepts her dark fate when she falls ill. This brilliant and moving novel explores the plight of a Caribbean woman who demands more meaning from her life than her society will give her. About the Author - Edgar Mittelholzer is the author of numerous novels, including My Bones and My Flute and A Swarthy Boy, his autobiography.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
The heroine of Mr. Mittelholzer's new novel is the child of a mixed marriage. Sylvia's father is English, her mother half negro, half Guiana Indian. The scene is Georgetown, the capital of British Guiana, and THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA gives us an unforgettable picture of the polyglot society the Whites, Eurasians, South American Indians, half-castes and negroes - which inhabits this strange exotic land. Georgetown, in the pages of this novel, is a city where love and hate, sex and violence, jealousy and deceit, are covered only by the thinnest veneer of civilisation. It is a vibrant, dangerous world and into it Sylvia is plunged defenceless while still on the threshold of adolescence. Her childhood is happy. Though with her whining, slattern mother she has nothing in common, she adores her father. And then, when she is thirteen, her world is shattered by her father's death—murdered in the company of his mistress by an unknown hand. What happens to her subsequently - her struggle against poverty, her fight to preserve her virginity, her glimpse of security and her death when that glimpse seems to vanish—makes up a novel whose exceptional emotional force cannot be conveyed in a brief synopsis. Mr. Mittelholzer is a born story-teller, and his characters come magnificently alive: Charlotte, Sylvia's mother, is tremendous, animal in her torpor interrupted by sudden fears and rages. Sylvia's father, the unregenerate womanizer; her friend Naomi, the good-hearted, free-living Eurasian who is beaten up by her motor-mechanic lover and loves it; Diego, the Portuguese boy who loves Sylvia but will not sleep with her before they can be married: these and a host of minor characters fill out the canvas. And above all there is Sylvia, coming to precarious maturity in a world whose harshness and animal instincts she is powerless to combat. Here is a portrait so touching and true that it gives this novel the significance of tragedy.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
‘An unforgettable epic.’ - BOSTON HERALD . . . In the blazing jungles of the Guianas, the sun was no hotter than Dirk van Groenwegel’s blood, the storms no more’ violent than his passion - for even in love he knew only violence. Obsessed by a merciless family pride, driven by his hatred and fear of the taint of alien blood, he swore never to touch a black woman. But he had not reckoned on the tantalizing and beautiful mulatto girl whose dark passions he could neither resist nor destroy. ‘Lush, steaming and stormy as its tropical setting.’ - WINSTON-SALEM JOURNAL AND COURIER.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
The Guianas lie like an extravagantly green patch of fungi on the northeast coast of South America, their jungles lush, stinking, and hot. There, only the strong have survived - whether trees or men. The equatorial sun of the Guianas was no hotter than Dirk van Groenwegel’s blood, the jungle’s ironwood no harder than his will, and the storms that broke over the green land no more violent than his passion - for even in love, he knew only violence. Dirk was born to be a part of the Guianas, like the tree that must one day dominate the forest around it, stunting, deforming the lesser trees by its shadow. And it was a long shadow Dirk cast - long enough to darken his family’s fortunes from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Around this Dirk - a man driven to protect his family ‘against contamination from African blood,’ yet impassioned by a beautiful mulatto - Edgar Mittelholzer has written this complex and thrilling novel of the decline and fall of the flamboyant van Groenwegels, as explosive social changes swept across their chaotic and colorful British Guiana.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
The suffering of children at the hands of sexual maniacs is a problem that haunts out time. This story is about it – and it is a horrifying story, not from any explicit violence or grimness, but because the author explores the roots of guilt with patient insight, and finds them more widely spread than most of us would like to think. Mr Mittelholzer’s novel concerns an ordinary – but alert and interesting – suburban family, husband and wife, with one growing daughter. Peter Elmfold is sharply aware of contemporary political and social problems, and holds strong views on how they should be tackled. For ‘pseudo-liberals’ and the advocates of gentleness he has nothing but scorn, calling them ‘would-rotters’, people possessed with a ‘fade-out wish.’ In the course of a few summer weeks, the clouds pile up over this couple with – for all Peter’s talk – their real tolerance and easy-going sexual morality; and eventually the terrible storm breaks.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
Mr. Jarrow, the central character in Mr. Mittelholzer’s new novel, lives on the outskirts of a village in England not far from the Broadmoor lunatic asylum. He lives with his wife and his daughter Grace. But Mr. Jarrow maintains that his wife is dead. Only at the weekly seances which he insists on staging and at which Mrs. Jarrow ‘materializes’ will he consent to speak to her. For the rest of the week he ignores her. For Mr. Jarrow, ever since his bad motor smash 17 years before, has been harmlessly but undoubtedly mad. To reveal the surprising things that happened to Mr. Jarrow during the few winter weeks covered by this story and the even more surprising things that Mr. Jarrow did, would be to spoil the reader’s enjoyment of the plot in which excitement and laughter, horror and pathos are skilfully balanced. Mr. Jarrow dominates the scene, but the author is equally adept with Grace, whose hatred of change in any form condemns her to a lifetime’s spinsterhood, with the neighbor, the ex-policeman with a passion for growing orchids, with his servant, young Hyacinth, who is rightly convinced that her shapely rump will be her fortune, and with the boisterous North and the moralizing Southerby - the two private detectives who are called in when murder strikes down five innocent victims. Foul winter weather sets the scene and brings the title to the book. Rain and gales sweep through the early chapters. Fog shrouds the middle section and hidden by it murder is done. The soft patter of snow accents the climax. Such is the stuff of which imaginative fiction is woven.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
Suicide is no longer regarded as a crime, but as a tragedy for which society is partly responsible. What drives people—ordinary people—to try to end their lives? And if they fail once, what can prevent them from trying again? These are the questions tackled by Edgar Mittelholzer in his latest novel, a tale of suspense and the supernatural, which is also a study of the psychology of those who try to take the 'easy way out.' To organize a house party of people on the basis of their suicidal tendencies would seem to be inviting disaster; but Fanny Newbold is prepared to take the risk. Herself a victim of the same despair, she hopes to solve her own problems by helping others like her. These are the 'wounded and the worried'—misfits, for whom life has somewhere gone wrong. Gwen Wellings, a retired teacher, struggles against loneliness and frustration; Stella Burges, a young American divorcee, whose toughness is only skin-deep, craves for the 'clean' sexual experience she never had; while Tom Dellow, ex-priest and mystic, and magnetically attractive, cannot bear ridicule by others of what he believes and knows to be the truth. Can these ill-assorted people satisfy each other's needs? Or will they turn to suicide again?
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
Though complete in itself, this new novel in Mr. Mittelholzer's Leitmotiv trilogy treats of the same characters introduced in Latticed Echoes. It carries the story a stage further forward, and the tragedy which seemed so narrowly averted in the previous book now looms inevitable. On the one hand, there is Richard Lehrer, architect, whose wife, Lydia, obsessively jealous, is unable to forgive her husband for his affair with Lindy Rowleyson eight months previously. Lydia, six months pregnant when the story begins, is on the verge of a hysteria that almost borders on the psychopathic. Despite Richard's attempts to reassure her of his devotion, she becomes progressively worse, and even makes a vicious personal attack on Lindy in an attempt to injure Lindy and cause her to lose her baby. Lindy, eight months pregnant, lives sixty miles away with her husband, Tommy, a road engineer. They live in New Amsterdam, a small town in British Guiana—the scene of the first story, as readers of Latticed Echoes will know. It is on a visit to George- town by Lindy and her husband that Lydia invites Lindy to tea and then makes her attack, Richard comes in from work, and from this point a new situation is created which leads on to further emotional complications and eventual tragedy, a tragedy exacerbated by Tommy's drinking orgies and extreme self-pity which earn him Lindy's contempt. Mr. Mittelholzer has written a foreword explaining the technique employed, and has also provided, at the end of the book, a glossary of key-words to the Leitmotivs which should be helpful to those readers interested in this new form of writing.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
To every man comes a moment of opportunity and recognition. At thirty-six, Paul Mankay has reached this point. His conflicting feelings about his racial origins-part Jewish, part Aryan-are paralleled by his ambiguous political allegiances, and his refusal to commit himself to a settled career. It is his perverse involvement with a neo-Fascist organization, whose headquarters he wrecks, which precipitates the crisis. To escape his past momentarily and to find time to face his future, he seeks shelter with his sister Freya whom he has not seen for ten years. Burying himself in the peace of the Hampshire countryside, Paul tries to resolve the violent dilemmas of his fate. He finds a new sense of responsibility in accepting the innocent love of the young girl Valerie and in his relationship with his mistress Delia. But the pastoral is threatened by the incursion of Paul’s past in the shape of the pursuing Fascists: the indifference point is of its nature temporary. Now at last Paul must determine his crisis of loyalties. With this novel we welcome to our list Edgar Mittelholzer who is particularly remembered for his Kaywana trilogy and for his recent novel Latticed Echoes. Pamela Hansford Johnson said of him: ‘Everything that Edgar Mittelholzer writes is blazing with life.’ Uncle Paul shares this illumination.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
Northerners who have written books about the Caribbean colonies are people who have generally set out intentionally to ‘cover’ the area. They have spent perhaps a week or two in, say, British Honduras, Cuba,Jamaica, Haiti, Antigua, Trinidad, Barbados and British Guiana, touching briefly at Grenada, St. Kitts, Dominica, the Virgin Islands and the Bahamas. They made notes, and took photographs of palm-fringed beaches, facing page calypsonians, smiling black girls and voodoo worshippers, then returned home and wrote ‘colourful’ accounts of their travels. In almost every case, the resulting book has been one strongly influenced by the writer’s preconceived notions of tropical countries. The strange and the ‘exotic’ have always been high-lighted, and rarely has a balanced, authentic picture of the region been presented. The Caribbean resident, unlike the northerner, is fortunate if in his lifetime he sees as many as two other neighbour-islands or colonies. In my own case, I can be considered more lucky than the average, for I was born and brought up in British Guiana, spent six years in Trinidad, three in Barbados, and have visited St. Lucia and Grenada and passed through Jamaica. My view has been confined strictly to the British Caribbean, and even then it took in only a part of the southern region. But that is the whole point. The eye of the average Caribbean resident has a limited range. Ninety-eight per cent of Jamaicans have seen as much of Trinidad and British Guiana as Londoners or New Yorkers. And the same percentage probably applies to Trinidadians and British Guianese in respect to Jamaica. Yet the political and social backgrounds of these colonies are so closely interrelated that what the physical Caribbean eye cannot see the mental eye can envisage with a fair amount of accuracy. The present work, it must be understood, therefore, makes no claim to be comprehensive, but is merely an attempt to present a picture of the British Caribbean scene as viewed specifically though the eye of one born and bred in the region.
Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).
Discussing new Jamaican poems we had seen and liked, we found that many were women. Pam suggested the anthology, and, disclaiming chauvinist intentions, asked Mervyn to share in the project. These are some poems we like. Each author is a woman who has not yet published a separate volume of her poems. This anthology, we feel, is accessible anybody in the community of readers. We hope that many of these poems give you pleasure in your contact with things that matter to the poets. That is the point.
Pamela (Pam) Mordecai was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and educated there at Convent of Mercy Alpha Academy. Alpha was one of the first places in the island to develop indigenous theatre and had a strong creative tradition, especially of performance in the arts. At Alpha she acted in many plays, developing an early love for theatre. As a child she played Cobweb in Midsummer Night's Dream, as a teenager, Hecuba in The Trojan Women. In 1960 she went to a small Catholic college for women in Newton, MA., one of a few women of colour. Returning to Jamaica, she taught at high school and then teacher training college. She also worked part-time in TV, hosting shows like "Saturday Magazine" and "Bambu-Tambu" for the Jamaica Information Service, where she met husband (and fellow writer), Martin Mordecai, whom she married in 1966. In 1974 she went to work at the University of the West Indies as Publications Officer in the Faculty of Education. During her time at UWI, she began a writing partnership with the late Grace Walker Gordon that lasted over twenty-five years. She also began a PhD (part-time) on the poetry of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite that would take her 18 years to finish, every minute of which she enjoyed. Her first publication in 1987 was a book of children's poems, extension reading for Ginn & Company's highly successful Reading 360 Series. In addition to stories and poetry for children, she has written a play, "El Numero Uno," which had its world premiere in Toronto in 2010. Pam and her family emigrated to Canada in 1994. She and Martin live in Kitchener, Ontario. Mervyn Morris (b, 1937) remains one of the most resourceful and technically brilliant of Caribbean poets. After studying at the University College of the West Indies, and winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, he embarked on an academic career which would eventually take him back to Mona as a teacher and later Professor of Creative Writing. Alongside his own collections he has written extensively on West Indian literature, and edited various anthologies, as well as the selected poems of Louise Bennett, the iconic Jamaican Creole poet ‘Miss `Lou’. In 2009 he was awarded Jamaica’s Order of Merit. In 2014, he was appointed the first post-independence Poet Laureate of Jamaica. In the Sixties and Seventies he belonged to a small group of young poets who met up in Kingston, reading each other’s work, exchanging political and poetic ideas, ambitious for the future and struggling to get noticed and published. Thus most of Morris’s literary life has been lived in the post-colonial era of independence and its subsequent political struggles, characterised by tensions and choices between personal and collective commitment which are explored in a variety of ways throughout his work. Despite a keen awareness of continuing injustice, he has always taken a philosophically long view, bound by smouldering restraint, convinced that discovering or reinventing identity is better than shackling it to a disinterred tragic past. So he is probably less popular with angrier figures, and never writes the big political poem, the propagandist’s occasional poem or the slogan-filled doggerel of the uncompromising activist. He often tells painful truths, but without rancour. His poetry eschews obvious historical causes, rather taking up the abiding concerns of all men: sexual desire and spiritual love; mutability and mortality; friendship and betrayal; joy and grief. He is a supreme poet of the everyday, the potency of the familiar with its safety and its limitations, its disappointments and consolations. Many of his poems are shards of personal memory, fragments of autobiography. Like a melancholy comedian, he moves from social observation to fleeting introspection with ironic detachment, his craft and intellect joined in refining language and feeling to tellingly spare effect. His poems of domestic life compel with their familial routines masking deeper frustrations; yet his intimacy avoids sentimentality, pares down the emotional truth, always alive to the ambiguity in close relationships. This is especially revealing in his sequence of poems On Holy Week, where the Crucifixion is flecked with Caribbean colour, and peopled with locals. Turning from sacred to profane, Morris inhabits his amorous verses with intense self-awareness and erotic power, which is to say he writes sexy poems about lust. love, seduction, deception and conquest. And of course he has a fine ear for nuanced shifts from Standard English to Jamaican Creole, transpositions which give locality and music to those poems at once linguistically conscious of their origins yet unconstrained by them. But although he is a serious poet, Morris is also a performer, a wisecracking cynical versifier with a sharp wit and a sparkling gift for ingenious rhymes. He conjures resolution out of tension with satisfying aplomb. In telling his brief narratives he can be a subtle, even sly, master of tiny, wounding reversals. He can also shift from satirical flair to magical reflection with sureness of delicate touch, as in the haiku ‘Garden’: after a shower/ blackbirds preening on the grass/ dressing for heaven. Complex simplicity, with faint echoes of Blake and Clare, captures a moment of epiphany in this exquisite Franciscan benediction. Mervyn Morris has chosen a dozen poems from his recording specially made for the Archive, and they give some flavour of his marvellous facility and range. The Creole comicality of ‘Peelin Orange’ dissolving into bitter resignation, the surprising epigrammatic depth of ‘Walk Good’ and the wonderful Caribbean Garden of Eden hinted at in ‘Eve’ – these wryly amuse where ‘Cabal’ appals, with its conversational cruelty, a bleak morality tale about cronies and corruption. Among the rest, ‘Casanova’ is a perfect exposure of the vanity and self-delusion mingling in the damaged heart-throb, while ‘The Day My Father Died’ speaks of death’s finality and the birth of grief, a new life for the living to bear, especially so for the poet’s mother. Morris reads his work beautifully, with memorable clarity, in a warm, richly hued voice, colloquial, declamatory, always attuned to music as well as meaning. The recording was made for The Poetry Archive on September 7th, 2010 at The Audio Workshop, London, and was produced by Richard Carrington.
Like the scattered islands themselves, these fragments from thirty-one women writers display both the range and variety of Caribbean cultures and traditions, and their underlying tenacity and cohesion. From memories of turn-of-the-century Dominica to the contemporary USA, Africa and Britain, writers from Haiti to Cuba to Jamaica express the longing and the loss, the pride and the passion of the Caribbean identity. Their writings are a search for and ultimately a celebration of, that precious secret of survival and strength that even slavery could not stamp out. Differences of language—English, French and Spanish—point to a common history of migration and. imperialism. The precision of 'standard English' and the poetry of creole embody the rich contradictions of that heritage. Rooted in African folk-tradition, a modern self-defining consciousness insists on calling itself by its 'true-true name'.
Pamela (Pam) Mordecai was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and educated there at Convent of Mercy Alpha Academy. Alpha was one of the first places in the island to develop indigenous theatre and had a strong creative tradition, especially of performance in the arts. At Alpha she acted in many plays, developing an early love for theatre. In 1974 she went to work at the University of the West Indies as Publications Officer in the Faculty of Education. During her time at UWI, she began a writing partnership with the late Grace Walker Gordon that lasted over twenty-five years. She also began a PhD (part-time) on the poetry of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite that would take her 18 years to finish, every minute of which she enjoyed. Her first publication in 1987 was a book of children's poems, extension reading for Ginn & Company's highly successful Reading 360 Series. In addition to stories and poetry for children, she has written a play, "El Numero Uno," which had its world premiere in Toronto in 2010.
This collection offers a sample of poems by seven Jamaicans. Some of the poems have been published before; many have not. This little book could serve as an introduction to recent Jamaican verse; but as it includes work by only seven poets, it will hardly be mistaken for a comprehensive anthology. Poets include: A. L. Hendriks, Basil McFarlane, R. L. C. McFarlane, Edward Bough, Mervyn Morris; Dennis Scott, Anthony McNeill.
Mervyn Eustace Morris OM (Jamaica) (born 21 February 1937) is a poet and professor emeritus at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. According to educator Ralph Thompson, "In addition to his poetry, which has ranked him among the top West Indian poets, he was one of the first academics to espouse the importance of nation language in helping to define in verse important aspects of Jamaican culture." Mervyn Morris was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and studied at the University College of the West Indies (UWI) and as a Rhodes Scholar at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. In 1970, he began lecturing at UWI, where he went on to be appointed a Reader in West Indian Literature. In 1992 he was a UK Arts Council Visiting Writer-in-Residence at the South Bank Centre. He lives in Kingston, Jamaica, where he is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & West Indian Literature. In 2009, Morris was awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit. In 2014, Morris was appointed the Poet Laureate of Jamaica, the first to be accorded the title since the country Independence (the previous holders being Tom Redcam, who was appointed posthumously in 1933, and John Ebenezer Clare McFarlane, appointed in 1953). The investiture ceremony took place at King's House on 22 May. Morris has published several volumes of poetry, and has edited the works of other Caribbean writers. His collections include The Pond (revised edition, New Beacon Books, 1997), Shadowboxing (New Beacon Books, 1979), Examination Centre (New Beacon Books, 1992) and On Holy Week (a sequence of poems for radio, Dangaroo Press, 1993). He also edited The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories and published "Is English We Speaking", and other essays. In 2006 Carcanet Press published his I been there, sort of: New and Selected Poems. The best known poems by Morris include: "Little Boy Crying", "Family Pictures", "Love Is", "One, Two", "Home", "The Roaches", "The Pond" and "Critic".
Stories by V.S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, Austin Clarke, Andrew Salkey, Neil Bissoondath, Olive Senior, Jan Carew, Clyde Hossein and others - as noted in the introduction by Morris, the authors come from Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, St Lucia, etc, but half of them now live and work abroad. Among the selections are 'Veins Visible' by Neil Bissoondath; 'The Spirit Thief' by Erna Brodber; 'An Honest Thief' by Timothy Callender; 'Easter Sunday Morning' by Hazel D. Campbell; 'Tilson Ezekiel Alias Ti-Zek' by Jan Carew; T'My Mother' by Jamaica Kincaid, and more. Glossary and notes on the authors.
Mervyn Eustace Morris OM (Jamaica) (born 21 February 1937) is a poet and professor emeritus at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. According to educator Ralph Thompson, "In addition to his poetry, which has ranked him among the top West Indian poets, he was one of the first academics to espouse the importance of nation language in helping to define in verse important aspects of Jamaican culture." Mervyn Morris was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and studied at the University College of the West Indies (UWI) and as a Rhodes Scholar at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. In 1970, he began lecturing at UWI, where he went on to be appointed a Reader in West Indian Literature. In 1992 he was a UK Arts Council Visiting Writer-in-Residence at the South Bank Centre. He lives in Kingston, Jamaica, where he is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing & West Indian Literature. In 2009, Morris was awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit. In 2014, Morris was appointed the Poet Laureate of Jamaica, the first to be accorded the title since the country Independence (the previous holders being Tom Redcam, who was appointed posthumously in 1933, and John Ebenezer Clare McFarlane, appointed in 1953). The investiture ceremony took place at King's House on 22 May. Morris has published several volumes of poetry, and has edited the works of other Caribbean writers. His collections include The Pond (revised edition, New Beacon Books, 1997), Shadowboxing (New Beacon Books, 1979), Examination Centre (New Beacon Books, 1992) and On Holy Week (a sequence of poems for radio, Dangaroo Press, 1993). He also edited The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories and published "Is English We Speaking", and other essays. In 2006 Carcanet Press published his I been there, sort of: New and Selected Poems. The best known poems by Morris include: "Little Boy Crying", "Family Pictures", "Love Is", "One, Two", "Home", "The Roaches", "The Pond" and "Critic".
‘From his first major novel, A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS, landscapes – rendered with the eye of one who has been intimate with them momentarily, has consigned them to the imagination, and is intimate with them no longer – have figured prominently in Naipaul’s work. Mr. Biswas’ Trinidad, the very different Trinidad of Ralph Singh (THE MIMIC MEN) and his London, the still-different London of Mr. Stone and his London suburbs, and the endless and changing stretches of road in the Africa of ‘In A Free State’ show a hypersensitivity to place that one does not frequently find in writers who take their native ground for granted. Perhaps to the expatriate artist, who is always homeless and always at home, every place must be encountered again as though it had never been encountered before. This is the world outlook I associate with Naipaul, and the objectivity and sympathy of the man combine further to create the singular fusion of reality and imagination that characterize him as an artist.’ – From PARADOXES OF ORDER by Robert K. Morris.
Robert K. Morris is Professor of English at The City College of The City University of New York and is a native of Greenwich, Connecticut. He received his B.A. (1954) and his M.A. (1958) from Cornell University, and his Ph.D. (1963) from the University of Wisconsin. His publications include The Novels of Anthony Powell (Pittsburgh, 1968) and Continuance and Change (Southern Illinois, 1972) and he reviewed regularly for The Nation.
With this wonderful song book, you can now play and sing the irresistible folks songs of the Caribbean. From Trinidad, Haiti, Jamaica ,The Bahamas, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guadeloupe, Martinque, Barbados, and Venezuela, here are the words and the tunes with simple self-teaching guitar accompaniments for all the songs you love and many new and strange ones. And more! - descriptions of all the fascinating places, their musical traditions and instruments. . . complete record listing. . . unique entertainment guide to the spots throughout the U.S. and the Caribbean where authentic native music is performed.
This volume collects work from authors such as Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas, Frank Herbert Marshall, and other well- and lesser-known African-American poets. Includes selections by Jean Brierre (Haiti). Reprinted - Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1968.
Editor and poet Beatrice M. Murphy was a regular columnist for the Associated Negro Press and founded the Negro Bibliographic and Research Center, editing its associated journal Bibliographic Survey: The Negro in Print.
This book-the first to analyze Haiti after the U.S. Occupation--gathers together the most reliable informaion and most comprehensive analysis of Haiti that the U.S. Left has to offer. The Haitian crisis has its roots in colonial times, came of age in the era of gun-boat diplomacy, and exemplified Cold War policy. Its denouement today is paradigmatic of the "new world order." It is therefore essential reading not only for those wanting to gain a deeper understanding of Haiti, but also for anyone trying to grasp the complexities of post-Cold War geopolitics.
The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) is an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1966 that works toward a world in which the nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean are free from oppression and injustice, and enjoy a relationship with the United States based on mutual respect, free from economic and political subordination.
In 1943 V. S. Naipaul, aged eleven, watched his father Seepersad correcting the proofs of a booklet of short stories. Seepersad was publishing them at his own expense in an edition of iooo, which took up a great deal of space in a bedroom. Only three or four copies of that booklet now survive. In those days a Trinidadian writer was a lonely man. Seepersad’s son, and one perceptive English journalist, provided his only sounding-board, and he had to struggle for a living. Nevertheless he continued to write when he could, and his son continued to encourage and criticize - though eventually from a distance because he won a scholarship which took him away to England. Some of his father’s stories were broadcast on the BBC’s Caribbean Service, but there was never another book. Only a manuscript: revised versions of the stories in the booklet, together with later work, which Seepersad sent to V. S. in 1953, shortly before he died. His son treasured it, but thought no English publisher would take it. He himself was yet to become pre-eminent among those who demolished the image of ‘West Indian writing’ as a cottage industry. Over the years V. S. Naipaul became increasingly aware of the extent to which his close, private and loving relationship with his father’s writing influenced his own development. And now that Seepersad’s manuscript has at last become a book, it is not only the account V.S. gives in his foreword which shows why this is so. The stories themselves provide ample demonstration. They are very good. It is true that Seepersad Naipaul had an old-fashioned belief in happy endings even when they were unlikely, but apart from a few such endings he wrote with unfailing truth to life. His vision was compassionate and humorous, and the sensitive naturalness of his style is almost miraculous in one who was writing in an acquired language (Hindi was his first language) and whose formal education had ended when he left an elementary school. At a time when no one else was doing so, he took for his subject-matter the village life of Trinidad’s Indian community, into which he had been born, and by writing so unselfconsciously from within this community, he opens it effortlessly to the outsider. He wrote in a letter to his son, ‘a man is doing his work well when people begin liking him’: and people will indeed like reading these stories. There can hardly be a more touching father-son relationship in the history of writing than that revealed by Seepersad Naipaul’s stories and V. S. Naipaul’s foreword to them. The father did more than bequeath talent to his son. He also, by example, showed him the truth about his own background and the tone in which to write about that truth. And V. S. Naipaul, who on his side gave so much precious support, now fully acknowledges the value of what he received from his father.
Seepersad Naipaul (1906-1953) was a writer of Indo-Trinidadian and Tobagonian heritage. He was the father of V. S. Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Kamla Tewari (née Naipaul), and Sati Bissoondath (née Naipaul), and married into the influential Indo-Trinidadian and Tobagonian Capildeo family. Seepersad Naipaul worked as a journalist on the Trinidad Guardian. He was the first Indo-Trinidadian reporter for the Trinidad Guardian. His only book, The Adventures of Gurudeva, is a collection of linked short stories that was first published in Trinidad and Tobago in 1943 (under the title Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales). The elder Naipaul wanted his son "Vido" (as he called him) to try to get his story collection published in London, in the hope that any money it earned would help the family escape from the poverty in which they lived in Trinidad and Tobago. The book was not published in London until after Seepersad's death. Between Father and Son: Family Letters (edited by Gillon Aitken), correspondence with V. S. Naipaul, and other family members, dating from around the time Vidia won a scholarship to Oxford University until the older Naipaul's death, was published in 1999, and extracted in The New Yorker.
A HOT COUNTRY - Shiva Naipaul's first novel in eleven years - reveals him at the height of his powers. In Cuyama, ‘a tract of land perched uneasily on the sloping shoulder of South America, a degree or two north of the Equator,’ the constitution is about to be overthrown and replaced by a dictatorship One Nation, One Party, One Redeemer. Politics barely touch Dina St Pierre, a woman caught up in her own personal tragedy, unhappy as mother and wife, ‘tethered on a very short rope . . . allowed so little.’ But Aubrey, her earnest, conscience-stricken husband, believes he has a part to play. Sitting in the back room of his failing bookshop, he sends letters of protest to foreign newspapers and magazines. Into their oppressive lives comes Alexander Richer, an old university friend of Aubrey's. A journalist, he plans to write a piece on the upcoming plebiscite and instead finds himself drawn into the complicated relationship between Dina and Aubrey. Wonderfully evocative, beautifully written, A HOT COUNTRY is a brilliant and subtle exploration of failure and loss.
Shiva Naipaul (25 February 1945 – 13 August 1985), born Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist. Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul. He went first to Queen's Royal College and St Mary's College in Trinidad, then emigrated to Britain, having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford. At Oxford, he met and later married Jenny Stuart, with whom he had a son, Tarun. With Jenny's support, Shiva Naipaul wrote his first novel, FIREFLIES, and followed it with THE CHIP-CHIP GATHERERS. He then decided to concentrate on journalism, and wrote two non-fiction works, North of South and Black & White, before returning to the novel form in the 1980s with A Hot Country, a departure from his two earlier comic novels set in Trinidad, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction, BEYOND THE DRAGON'S MOUTH: STORIES AND PIECES. Both his fiction and nonfiction were characterized by a starkly pessimistic view of Commonwealth societies that attacked the post-imperial native hierarchies for their crassness and mimicry of the West, and in turn the banality and diffidence of Western liberalism. On the morning of 13 August 1985, at the age of 40, Naipaul had a fatal heart attack while working at his desk. The Spectator Magazine, for whom his wife Jenny had worked as a secretary, and which had published many of his articles, established the since-discontinued Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize. In his book SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW, Paul Theroux's memoir of Shiva's older brother, V.S Naipaul, Theroux described Shiva as a 'sot', shrunken by the towering figure of his famous brother, with a penchant for drunken partying and a need to have his meals made for him. Theroux also took issue with Shiva's skills as a writer, particularly as a travel writer. Recently, SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW has come under attack for its demonstrable inaccuracies. A radically more positive appreciation of Shiva Naipaul by the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Spectator is backed up by the novelist Martin Amis, who wrote that ‘Shiva Naipaul was one of those people who caused your heart to lift when he entered the room. .in losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius.’A recent Arena documentary on his brother V. S. Naipaul reproduced footage of Shiva from an earlier documentary from the early 1980s, in which Shiva returned to Trinidad to see his mother.
'Naipaul shares with Evelyn Waugh the same eye for the ridiculous, the same dark humour, the same ultimate cynicism about the human race' - Elspeth Huxley. Sharply observed, wryly comic yet touched with sadness, these eight stories were written between 1969 and 1974. `A Man of Mystery' charts the tragic downfall of Mr Green, a shoemaker overtaken by commercialization. Other stories range from the hilarious rivalry of a group of competitors in ‘The Beauty Contest' to the heartbreaking disintegration of a marriage in `The Dolly House'. Masterpieces of storytelling, they successfully capture the absurdities and pathos of human behaviour. `Shiva Naipaul is a skillful storyteller . . . He draws [his characters] sympathetically and yet never loses his artistic detachment' - Christian Science Monitor.
Shiva Naipaul (25 February 1945 – 13 August 1985), born Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist. Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul. He went first to Queen's Royal College and St Mary's College in Trinidad, then emigrated to Britain, having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford. At Oxford, he met and later married Jenny Stuart, with whom he had a son, Tarun. With Jenny's support, Shiva Naipaul wrote his first novel, FIREFLIES, and followed it with THE CHIP-CHIP GATHERERS. He then decided to concentrate on journalism, and wrote two non-fiction works, North of South and Black & White, before returning to the novel form in the 1980s with A Hot Country, a departure from his two earlier comic novels set in Trinidad, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction, BEYOND THE DRAGON'S MOUTH: STORIES AND PIECES. Both his fiction and nonfiction were characterized by a starkly pessimistic view of Commonwealth societies that attacked the post-imperial native hierarchies for their crassness and mimicry of the West, and in turn the banality and diffidence of Western liberalism. On the morning of 13 August 1985, at the age of 40, Naipaul had a fatal heart attack while working at his desk. The Spectator Magazine, for whom his wife Jenny had worked as a secretary, and which had published many of his articles, established the since-discontinued Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize. In his book SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW, Paul Theroux's memoir of Shiva's older brother, V.S Naipaul, Theroux described Shiva as a 'sot', shrunken by the towering figure of his famous brother, with a penchant for drunken partying and a need to have his meals made for him. Theroux also took issue with Shiva's skills as a writer, particularly as a travel writer. Recently, SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW has come under attack for its demonstrable inaccuracies. A radically more positive appreciation of Shiva Naipaul by the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Spectator is backed up by the novelist Martin Amis, who wrote that ‘Shiva Naipaul was one of those people who caused your heart to lift when he entered the room. .in losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius.’A recent Arena documentary on his brother V. S. Naipaul reproduced footage of Shiva from an earlier documentary from the early 1980s, in which Shiva returned to Trinidad to see his mother.
AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY is a posthumous collection of essays by Shiva Naipaul, published by Hamish and Hamilton in 1986. The foreword is written by the author's father-in-law, Douglas Stuart, who creates a short biographical sketch of the author, describing Shiva as a writer who gained in discipline but was painfully slow, even at times spending an entire afternoon trying to finish a sentence. He also asked Naipaul why he had lost the comic tone in his writing, and wrote that Naipaul attributed it to the arresting horror of witnessing the aftermath of the Jonestown Massacre, part of his research for the book BLACK & WHITE. The essays in the collection are in part autobiographical, such as those on Shiva's relationship with his brother V. S. Naipaul, and his experiences in Australia and other countries. The titular essay is the beginning of an unfinished (due to death) travel book about South East Asia. Also included is an essay called The Illusion of the Third World originally commissioned by Channel 4 Television.
Shiva Naipaul (25 February 1945 – 13 August 1985), born Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist. Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul.
From the highly praised Shiva Naipaul (‘A novelist of rare gifts and great authority,’ Newsweek; ‘A masterful writer,’ The New York Times Book Review; ‘A modern George Orwell,’ the London Sunday Times) comes a brilliant collection of pieces-many never before published In America-bringing together autobiography, short fiction, and essays. In 1964, at the age of eighteen, Shiva Naipaul left Trinidad for England. Ahead lay Oxford and his beginnings as a writer. He describes that leavetaking In the opening piece of this book with the clarity and keenness of vision provided by his perspective of twenty years. Here too are stories filled with compassion, humor, and sadness, and a stunning array of essays in which the author remembers his early encounters with prejudice; explores the rise of the Rastaman and the charismatic personality of Sanjay -Gandhi-and-describes-Fez, Liverpool, Bombay, Puerto Rico, and the Seychelles, among other places, with startling insights and a novelist’s sensibility. Written from 1969 to the present, BEYOND THE DRAGON’S MOUTH is both a telling chronicle of the development of a writer and an incisive account of Third World culture and politics. SH1VA NA1PAIJL was born In 1945 In Port of Spain, Trinidad. He was educated at Queen’s Royal College and St. Mary’s College In Trinidad, and at University College, Oxford. He makes his home in London. The recipient of a number of literary awards, Mr. Naipaul is the author of three novels, FIREFLIES, THE CHIP-CHIP GATHERERS, and LOVE AND DEATH IN A HOT COUNTRY, and two books of nonfiction, NORTH OF SOUTH: AN AFRICAN JOURNEY and JOURNEY TO NOWHERE: A NEW WORLD TRAGEDY.
Shiva Naipaul (25 February 1945 – 13 August 1985), born Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist. Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul. He went first to Queen's Royal College and St Mary's College in Trinidad, then emigrated to Britain, having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford. At Oxford, he met and later married Jenny Stuart, with whom he had a son, Tarun. With Jenny's support, Shiva Naipaul wrote his first novel, FIREFLIES, and followed it with THE CHIP-CHIP GATHERERS. He then decided to concentrate on journalism, and wrote two non-fiction works, North of South and Black & White, before returning to the novel form in the 1980s with A Hot Country, a departure from his two earlier comic novels set in Trinidad, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction, BEYOND THE DRAGON'S MOUTH: STORIES AND PIECES. Both his fiction and nonfiction were characterized by a starkly pessimistic view of Commonwealth societies that attacked the post-imperial native hierarchies for their crassness and mimicry of the West, and in turn the banality and diffidence of Western liberalism. On the morning of 13 August 1985, at the age of 40, Naipaul had a fatal heart attack while working at his desk. The Spectator Magazine, for whom his wife Jenny had worked as a secretary, and which had published many of his articles, established the since-discontinued Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize. In his book SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW, Paul Theroux's memoir of Shiva's older brother, V.S Naipaul, Theroux described Shiva as a 'sot', shrunken by the towering figure of his famous brother, with a penchant for drunken partying and a need to have his meals made for him. Theroux also took issue with Shiva's skills as a writer, particularly as a travel writer. Recently, SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW has come under attack for its demonstrable inaccuracies. A radically more positive appreciation of Shiva Naipaul by the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Spectator is backed up by the novelist Martin Amis, who wrote that ‘Shiva Naipaul was one of those people who caused your heart to lift when he entered the room. .in losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius.’A recent Arena documentary on his brother V. S. Naipaul reproduced footage of Shiva from an earlier documentary from the early 1980s, in which Shiva returned to Trinidad to see his mother.
From the highly praised Shiva Naipaul (‘A novelist of rare gifts and great authority,’ Newsweek; ‘A masterful writer,’ The New York Times Book Review; ‘A modern George Orwell,’ the London Sunday Times) comes a brilliant collection of pieces-many never before published In America-bringing together autobiography, short fiction, and essays. In 1964, at the age of eighteen, Shiva Naipaul left Trinidad for England. Ahead lay Oxford and his beginnings as a writer. He describes that leavetaking In the opening piece of this book with the clarity and keenness of vision provided by his perspective of twenty years. Here too are stories filled with compassion, humor, and sadness, and a stunning array of essays in which the author remembers his early encounters with prejudice; explores the rise of the Rastaman and the charismatic personality of Sanjay -Gandhi-and-describes-Fez, Liverpool, Bombay, Puerto Rico, and the Seychelles, among other places, with startling insights and a novelist’s sensibility. Written from 1969 to the present, BEYOND THE DRAGON’S MOUTH is both a telling chronicle of the development of a writer and an incisive account of Third World culture and politics. . SHIVA NAIPAUL was born In 1945 In Port of Spain, Trinidad. He was educated at Queen’s Royal College and St. Mary’s College In Trinidad, and at University College, Oxford. He makes his home in London. The recipient of a number of literary awards, Mr. Naipaul is the author of three novels, FIREFLIES, THE CHIP-CHIP GATHERERS, and LOVE AND DEATH IN A HOT COUNTRY, and two books of nonfiction, NORTH OF SOUTH: AN AFRICAN JOURNEY and JOURNEY TO NOWHERE: A NEW WORLD TRAGEDY. .
Shiva Naipaul (25 February 1945 – 13 August 1985), born Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist. Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul. He went first to Queen's Royal College and St Mary's College in Trinidad, then emigrated to Britain, having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford. At Oxford, he met and later married Jenny Stuart, with whom he had a son, Tarun. With Jenny's support, Shiva Naipaul wrote his first novel, FIREFLIES, and followed it with THE CHIP-CHIP GATHERERS. He then decided to concentrate on journalism, and wrote two non-fiction works, North of South and Black & White, before returning to the novel form in the 1980s with A Hot Country, a departure from his two earlier comic novels set in Trinidad, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction, BEYOND THE DRAGON'S MOUTH: STORIES AND PIECES. Both his fiction and nonfiction were characterized by a starkly pessimistic view of Commonwealth societies that attacked the post-imperial native hierarchies for their crassness and mimicry of the West, and in turn the banality and diffidence of Western liberalism. On the morning of 13 August 1985, at the age of 40, Naipaul had a fatal heart attack while working at his desk. The Spectator Magazine, for whom his wife Jenny had worked as a secretary, and which had published many of his articles, established the since-discontinued Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize. In his book SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW, Paul Theroux's memoir of Shiva's older brother, V.S Naipaul, Theroux described Shiva as a 'sot', shrunken by the towering figure of his famous brother, with a penchant for drunken partying and a need to have his meals made for him. Theroux also took issue with Shiva's skills as a writer, particularly as a travel writer. Recently, SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW has come under attack for its demonstrable inaccuracies. A radically more positive appreciation of Shiva Naipaul by the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Spectator is backed up by the novelist Martin Amis, who wrote that ‘Shiva Naipaul was one of those people who caused your heart to lift when he entered the room. .in losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius.’A recent Arena documentary on his brother V. S. Naipaul reproduced footage of Shiva from an earlier documentary from the early 1980s, in which Shiva returned to Trinidad to see his mother.
‘Mr. Shiva Naipaul's first novel is a delight, a miracle of enjoyment.’ This, from The Spectator, perfectly sums up the joy of reading FIREFLIES - and the burst of praise that has greeted its publication in England. It is a novel both cheerfully satirical and profoundly touching as it brings to life a pretentious family (their decline and fall) and the dauntless, lovable woman who is their poor relation. The pomposity of the Khoja family is glorious to behold. They are the (slipping) social leaders of Trinidad's Hindu community - celebrated not for their achievements but for their awesome backwardness and eccentricity. Their efforts to buttress their fading status are hilariously played out as a formidable phalanx of Khoja sisters surrounds the one (all thumbs) Khoja brother, revering him, protecting him, proclaiming him through a progression of weddings, funerals, festivals, hopeless political campaigns, and absurd social intrigues. In counterpoint: the sweetness and strength of the novel's endearing heroine. She is the baby of the family, barely tolerated, married off carelessly to the penniless, not quite respectable Mr. Lutchman, a bus driver. Accommodating herself to her husband's fads and dalliances (he is a foolish man - and he drinks), trying to help her wayward children up in the world, she grows in humanity. It is her nature to serve and to support, and she emerges from every setback unruffled, more accepting of life, more alive - in a novel that is ‘beautifully written, funny, sensitive’ (Sunday Express), ‘irrepressibly sunny and sweet-tempered’ ( The Listener), ‘a masterpiece’ (The Spectator).`
Shiva Naipaul (25 February 1945 – 13 August 1985), born Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist. Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul. He went first to Queen's Royal College and St Mary's College in Trinidad, then emigrated to Britain, having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford. At Oxford, he met and later married Jenny Stuart, with whom he had a son, Tarun. With Jenny's support, Shiva Naipaul wrote his first novel, FIREFLIES, and followed it with THE CHIP-CHIP GATHERERS. He then decided to concentrate on journalism, and wrote two non-fiction works, North of South and Black & White, before returning to the novel form in the 1980s with A Hot Country, a departure from his two earlier comic novels set in Trinidad, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction, BEYOND THE DRAGON'S MOUTH: STORIES AND PIECES. Both his fiction and nonfiction were characterized by a starkly pessimistic view of Commonwealth societies that attacked the post-imperial native hierarchies for their crassness and mimicry of the West, and in turn the banality and diffidence of Western liberalism. On the morning of 13 August 1985, at the age of 40, Naipaul had a fatal heart attack while working at his desk. The Spectator Magazine, for whom his wife Jenny had worked as a secretary, and which had published many of his articles, established the since-discontinued Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize. In his book SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW, Paul Theroux's memoir of Shiva's older brother, V.S Naipaul, Theroux described Shiva as a 'sot', shrunken by the towering figure of his famous brother, with a penchant for drunken partying and a need to have his meals made for him. Theroux also took issue with Shiva's skills as a writer, particularly as a travel writer. Recently, SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW has come under attack for its demonstrable inaccuracies. A radically more positive appreciation of Shiva Naipaul by the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Spectator is backed up by the novelist Martin Amis, who wrote that ‘Shiva Naipaul was one of those people who caused your heart to lift when he entered the room. .in losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius.’A recent Arena documentary on his brother V. S. Naipaul reproduced footage of Shiva from an earlier documentary from the early 1980s, in which Shiva returned to Trinidad to see his mother.
BLACK & WHITE is a non-fiction book written by Shiva Naipaul and published by Hamish Hamilton in the U.K. in 1980. It was published with the title JOURNEY TO NOWHERE: A NEW WORLD TRAGEDY in the U.S. The book is based on Naipaul's trip to Guyana in the aftermath of the Jonestown Massacre, and his subsequent trip to the United States, in which he explored links between the People's Temple and other groups and individuals. Naipaul attempted to connect Rev. Jim Jones, founder of the People's Temple, with disparate parts of California's counterculture, and Guyanese and other Third World governments and the revolutionary ideologies which supported them. Naipaul was highly critical of these and other movements, including the U.S. Civil Rights movement, black liberation, and the nascent New Age movement, Including EST, in as much as they helped, in his analysis, to create fertile ground for the People's Temple to flourish on the two continents. The book's US paperback cover tagline reads ‘How American ideas and ideologies led to the mass suicide of 900 people in Jonestown, Guyana.’ Naipaul would later tell his father-in-law of the arresting effects visiting Jonestown had had on him, saying that the dissipation of the earlier comic, lighter tone in his work was due to this.
Shiva Naipaul (25 February 1945 – 13 August 1985), born Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist. Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul.
LOVE AND DEATH IN A HOT COUNTRY - Shiva Naipaul's first novel in eleven years - reveals him at the height of his powers. In Cuyama, ‘a tract of land perched uneasily on the sloping shoulder of South America, a degree or two north of the Equator,’ the constitution is about to be overthrown and replaced by a dictatorship One Nation, One Party, One Redeemer. Politics barely touch Dina St Pierre, a woman caught up in her own personal tragedy, unhappy as mother and wife, ‘tethered on a very short rope . . . allowed so little.’ But Aubrey, her earnest, conscience-stricken husband, believes he has a part to play. Sitting in the back room of his failing bookshop, he sends letters of protest to foreign newspapers and magazines. Into their oppressive lives comes Alexander Richer, an old university friend of Aubrey's. A journalist, he plans to write a piece on the upcoming plebiscite and instead finds himself drawn into the complicated relationship between Dina and Aubrey. Wonderfully evocative, beautifully written, LOVE AND DEATH IN A HOT COUNTRY is a brilliant and subtle exploration of failure and loss.
Shiva Naipaul (Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul - 1945-1985), brother of V.S. Naipaul. Studied at Oxford and graduated with a degree in Chinese. Naipaul then worked as a journalist. His first novel, FIREFLIES, appeared in 1970. After the second novel, THE CHIP-CHIP GATHERERS (1973), Naipaul started his career as a travel writer, publishing many articles in the Spectator. Naipaul died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty. In his memory the Spectator founded Shiva Naipaul Prize, awarded each year for a travel essay by a writer under thirty-five. - Works: NORTH AND SOUTH: AN AFRICAN JOURNEY (1978); BLACK AND WHITE (1980), A HOT COUNTRY (1983); BEYOND THE DRAGON’S MOUTH (1984); UNFINISHED JOURNEY (1986): MAN OF MYSTERY (1995).
At the centre of Shiva Naipaul’s magnificent story of the Settlement, a crowded, ramshackle community in Trinidad, stands Egbert Ramsaran, the proud owner of the Ramsaran Transport Company. Sheer bloody-minded strength of will has made him the richest man in the Settlement, a capricious, eccentric tyrant who loves nobody and whom nobody can afford to ignore. There is his son, Wilbert, bullied into passivity and failure; Vishnu Bholai, the downtrodden grocer without grace or hope; Julian Bholai, hoping to escape his father’s fate by becoming a doctor; the beautiful, unpredictable Sushila, who briefly wields her seductive powers over Ramsaran; and her daughter, Sita, intelligent enough to know that escape is impossible. Their intricately woven lives are perfectly captured in all their pathos, comedy and humanity.
Shiva Naipaul (25 February 1945 – 13 August 1985), born Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist. Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul. He went first to Queen's Royal College and St Mary's College in Trinidad, then emigrated to Britain, having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford. At Oxford, he met and later married Jenny Stuart, with whom he had a son, Tarun. With Jenny's support, Shiva Naipaul wrote his first novel, FIREFLIES, and followed it with THE CHIP-CHIP GATHERERS. He then decided to concentrate on journalism, and wrote two non-fiction works, North of South and Black & White, before returning to the novel form in the 1980s with A Hot Country, a departure from his two earlier comic novels set in Trinidad, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction, BEYOND THE DRAGON'S MOUTH: STORIES AND PIECES. Both his fiction and nonfiction were characterized by a starkly pessimistic view of Commonwealth societies that attacked the post-imperial native hierarchies for their crassness and mimicry of the West, and in turn the banality and diffidence of Western liberalism. On the morning of 13 August 1985, at the age of 40, Naipaul had a fatal heart attack while working at his desk. The Spectator Magazine, for whom his wife Jenny had worked as a secretary, and which had published many of his articles, established the since-discontinued Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize. In his book SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW, Paul Theroux's memoir of Shiva's older brother, V.S Naipaul, Theroux described Shiva as a 'sot', shrunken by the towering figure of his famous brother, with a penchant for drunken partying and a need to have his meals made for him. Theroux also took issue with Shiva's skills as a writer, particularly as a travel writer. Recently, SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW has come under attack for its demonstrable inaccuracies. A radically more positive appreciation of Shiva Naipaul by the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Spectator is backed up by the novelist Martin Amis, who wrote that ‘Shiva Naipaul was one of those people who caused your heart to lift when he entered the room. .in losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius.’A recent Arena documentary on his brother V. S. Naipaul reproduced footage of Shiva from an earlier documentary from the early 1980s, in which Shiva returned to Trinidad to see his mother.
Shiva Naipaul’s first novel, FIREFLIES, won three major British literary prizes: the Jock Campbell-New Statesman Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Award, and the Winifred Holtby Prize. In his second novel, Mr. Naipaul again records the complexities and vexations of small-town life in Trinidad. Here is the intricate, maddening relationship between the Ramsaran family (Egbert made his fortune with the red-and-black trucks of the Ramsaran Transport Company) and the Bholais (a big step down the social ladder, but they hope to close the gap by sending young Julian to England to become a doctor). The Bholais and the Ramsarans hate each other, marry each other, can’t leave each other alone, and yet can’t bring themselves to help each other in the desperate effort to escape from the narrow confines and inevitable boredom of life in the Settlement. Even Sita-the illegitimate daughter of Egbert Ramsaran’s raffish housekeeper-can only use her rapidly developing intelligence to conclude that she might as well have been born stupid for all the chance of escape she will ever have. What makes all this extraordinary is Shiva Naipaul’s uncanny ability to identify with these people without losing his detachment. They are never patronized, and yet they are seen in all their absurdity, pathos, and comedy. They are brought alive, not made a spectacle of. It is hard to think of another writer with just this power of doing two things at once: observing with an apparently calm and judicious amusement while raging underneath with grief and pity that any society should mold the lives of human beings in this way. The resulting tension gives his work the vitality of the best fiction. Chip-chip: a small shellfish found along the tideline of Trinidadian beaches. Gathering chip-chip is a weary task, bringing almost no reward.
Shiva Naipaul (25 February 1945 – 13 August 1985), born Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist. Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul. He went first to Queen's Royal College and St Mary's College in Trinidad, then emigrated to Britain, having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford. At Oxford, he met and later married Jenny Stuart, with whom he had a son, Tarun. With Jenny's support, Shiva Naipaul wrote his first novel, FIREFLIES, and followed it with THE CHIP-CHIP GATHERERS. He then decided to concentrate on journalism, and wrote two non-fiction works, North of South and Black & White, before returning to the novel form in the 1980s with A Hot Country, a departure from his two earlier comic novels set in Trinidad, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction, BEYOND THE DRAGON'S MOUTH: STORIES AND PIECES. Both his fiction and nonfiction were characterized by a starkly pessimistic view of Commonwealth societies that attacked the post-imperial native hierarchies for their crassness and mimicry of the West, and in turn the banality and diffidence of Western liberalism. On the morning of 13 August 1985, at the age of 40, Naipaul had a fatal heart attack while working at his desk. The Spectator Magazine, for whom his wife Jenny had worked as a secretary, and which had published many of his articles, established the since-discontinued Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize. In his book SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW, Paul Theroux's memoir of Shiva's older brother, V.S Naipaul, Theroux described Shiva as a 'sot', shrunken by the towering figure of his famous brother, with a penchant for drunken partying and a need to have his meals made for him. Theroux also took issue with Shiva's skills as a writer, particularly as a travel writer. Recently, SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW has come under attack for its demonstrable inaccuracies. A radically more positive appreciation of Shiva Naipaul by the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Spectator is backed up by the novelist Martin Amis, who wrote that ‘Shiva Naipaul was one of those people who caused your heart to lift when he entered the room. .in losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius.’A recent Arena documentary on his brother V. S. Naipaul reproduced footage of Shiva from an earlier documentary from the early 1980s, in which Shiva returned to Trinidad to see his mother.
The setting is Africa today, in a country somewhere in the interior that has recently suffered revolution and civil war and is now under the authority of a new President-a man whose immense, almost insane energy and untempered crudity have made his power felt even in the remotest villages. Youth squads have sprouted up everywhere. There is a whole new apparatus in the university-scholars devoted to chronicling the wars and coups of ‘the new Africa.’ Property changes hands mysteriously, and overnight. People are there one day and gone the next. There are executions. No relationship, however private, passionate or casual, is free of an unhinging insecurity. Naipaul takes us completely into the existence of one isolated man who has come to live in an isolated village at ‘a bend in the river.’ He is restless, edgy, reflective-strangely, almost deliberately passive in relation to the world around him; to his work, to his sexuality, to both his past and his future. And it is the remarkable achievement of the novel that through the uneasy submission of this one man to the events and conditions that have come to define his life, we ourselves become submerged in, and held by, his reality, and the reality of his time and place. A Bend in the River is the most convincing vision we have yet been given of what ‘ordinary’ life is like in Africa today. Its publication is an important literary event.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
With his extraordinary talent for profound observation, V. S. Naipaul again draws on his unique social and geographic background to create these eleven stories, each a brilliantly jarring commentary on one of the three worlds with which he is so intimately familiar: England, the West Indies, and India. All eleven display the originality and distinction of imagination, and the mastery of method that have made Naipaul one of the world's leading novelists. The title story originated as a story for a film whose only requirements were action and sex—requirements interpreted by Naipaul with irony, humor, bitterness, and delicate nostalgia. The inner conflicts and outward manifestations of cultural, racial, and religious adaptation are explored, also with irony, in ‘A Christmas Story’ and ‘My Aunt Goldteeth,’ both set in Trinidad, both revealing the impact of Christianity on the Hindu state of mind. In ‘The Baker's Story,’ a black West Indian. makes a fortune from a Chinese bakery because, though he himself does all the baking in the back, he is smart enough to hire Chinese to do the selling out front. An apparently simple story of a boy and his dog slowly scales the heights of horror in ‘The Heart.’ And in ‘Greenie and Yellow’ and ‘The Perfect Tenants,’ the mock gentility of middle-class England plays surprising tricks on a pair of unforgettable boardinghouse keepers. Each of Naipaul's stories has that unexpectedly disturbing quality that distinguishes all his work. And each displays that consummate literary style that Simon Gray characterized in The New Statesman as ‘a prose that belongs to an immediately recognizable tradition - Henry James, Graham Greene - with echoes of Eliot's poetry.’
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
`Naipaul has written literature of the very highest order. It took much ambition to achieve it. And Mr Biswas struck the first blow' - Ian Buruma. `A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS can be seen as the struggle of a man not naturally rebellious, but in whom rebellion is inspired by the forces of ritual, myth and custom . . . Though he has married into the family (the Tulsis), Mr Biswas remains an outsider and refuses to follow the family in their habitual devotions . . . He is not submissive, and may times in the novel makes a solitary stand against the others . . . A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS has the Dickensian largeness and luxuriance without any of the Dickensian sentimentality, apostrophizing or preaching' - Paul Theroux. `Naipaul has constructed a marvellous prose epic that matches the best nineteenth-century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power' – Newsweek. `Conceived and executed within the great tradition of the humanistic novel, A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS is as subtle and comprehensive an analysis of the colonial situation as anything in imaginative literature' - Francis Wyndham. 'A work of great comic power qualified with firm and unsentimental compassion' - Anthony Burgess.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, (born 17 August 1932), is a Trinidad-born Nobel Prize-winning British writer known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker later novels of the wider world, and his autobiographical chronicles of life and travels. Naipaul has published more than 30 books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over some 50 years. Naipaul was married to Patricia Ann Hale from 1955 until her death in 1996. She served as first reader, editor, and critic of his writings. Naipaul dedicated his A House for Mr. Biswas to her. Naipaul married Nadira Naipaul, a former Pakistani journalist, in 1996.
Mr Biswas is a gentle man, thoughtful and fastidious, with a taste for privacy - a pleasant thing if one happens to have money, which he does not. He is a Hindu of high caste but very low fortune, living in the West Indies, and A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS is the story of his longing for independence and a house of his own, which becomes for him a symbol of everything that life has denied him. V. S. Naipaul tells how, in the end, Mr Biswas gets his house. Mr Biswas has been brought up on the haphazard charity of relatives. He is lucky to have his talent for sign writing, as the shopkeepers in Trinidad like to make a show and Mr Biswas earns a kind of living. Literally forced by reason of his high caste to marry into the Tulsi family, he becomes almost part of their furniture in a teeming establishment ruled by old Mrs Tulsi. Mr Biswas might as well have been embraced by an octopus, for to be private, thoughtful, or fastidious is to be a traitor among Tulsis. Following him from birth to death, the author writes with the delicate, dry humour that has attracted great critical acclaim wherever his books have appeared. He gives not only a wonderfully detailed and colourful picture of Hindu life in the West Indies, but also a picture of humanity anywhere as it contends with hardship and loneliness, pushing out its frail but stub- born shoots of hope and dignity. It was clear from his earlier novels that V. S. Naipaul was one of the most distinguished writers to emerge from the West Indies. Now with A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS, he has written unquestionably the best regional novel about them that has yet appeared - a book which triumphantly transcends geographical considerations, and a tale so true, so exact, and so deeply compassionate, that it put him among the most highly regarded authors in the world on the day it was published.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
‘Of all my books this is the one that is closest to me. It is the most personal, created out of what I saw and felt as a child. It also contains, I believe, some of my funniest writing.’ - V. S. NAIPAUL, in his foreword to this edition. A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS is the novel in which V. S. Naipaul’s prodigious talent as a comic writer has found its largest and fullest expression to date. Here, through the story of one man, one circumscribed life, we are given an entire world-a rich, funny, moving, generous vision of the human experience. The setting is Trinidad. The hero is Mr. Mohun Biswas, whom we follow from the moment of his inauspicious entry into the world (‘six-fingered, and born in the wrong way’) to that of his happy death-happy because it finds Mr. Biswas, at last, in a house of his own. Mr. Biswas’s pursuit of his particular dream- his progress through a variety of (unsatisfactory) households toward his domestic ideal, his successive attempts at finding a suitable occupation (sign-painter? shopkeeper? estate driver? newspaperman?), his persistent striving in the face of circumstances both comic and grave, as he is alternately aided and impeded by neighbors, friends, family (including a hilarious brood of bullying in-laws)-is a tale remarkable for its subtle power, deep feeling, and gentle wit. When it first appeared in 1961, A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS, Naipaul’s fourth novel, was embraced by readers and critics as a work that brilliantly fulfilled its author’s promise and marked him as one of the most gifted writers of his generation. Today, after two decades of major works that have won him extraordinary worldwide acclaim (‘There can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him’ - Irving Howe, The New York Times Book Review), this novel still stands as one of Naipaul’s finest books. With the publication of this new edition, new readers are invited to discover its special pleasures. . Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir. .
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
‘Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.’ So observes the opening narrator of A WAY IN THE WORLD, and it is this conundrum - that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp - which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction, the first in seven years by one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL, and writing here in the classic form of linked narrations, Naipaul constructs a story of remarkable resonance and power, remembrance and invention. It is the story of a writer's lifelong journey towards an understanding of both the simple stuff of inheritance - language, character, family history - and the long interwoven strands of a deeply complicated historical past: ‘things barely remembered, things released only by the act of writing.’ What he writes - and what his release of memory enables us to see - is a series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh's final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda's disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary. Each episode is viewed through the clarifying lens of the narrator's own post-colonial experience as a Trinidadian of Indian descent who, during the twilight of the Empire, immigrates to England, reinventing himself in order to escape the very history he is intent upon telling. With Proustian reflective power, with infinite warmth and humour, and with an acute intelligence, Naipaul has created a monumental tale of identity recovered and remade from undated time and historical darkness. A WAY IN THE WORLD is the work of a master.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
Born in Trinidad of Indian descent, a resident of England for his entire adult life, and a prodigious traveler, Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul has always faced the challenges of ‘fitting one civilisation to another.’ Here, in his first book of nonfiction since 2003, he gives us an eloquent, candid, wide-ranging narrative that delves into this sometimes inadvertent process of creative and intellectual assimilation. He discusses the writers he read early on: Derek Walcott, Gustave Flaubert and his own father among them. He explains how Anthony Powell and Francis Wyndham influenced his first encounters with literary culture. He looks at what we have retained - and forgotten - of the world portrayed in Caesar’s THE GALLIC WAR and Virgil’s AENEID. He illuminates the ways in which the writings of Gandhi, Nehru and other Indian writers both reveal and conceal the authors and their nation. And he brings the same scrutiny to bear on his own life: his years in Trinidad; the gaps in his family history; the ‘private India’ kept alive in his family through story, ritual, religion and culture; his ever-evolving reaction to the more complicated and demanding true India he would encounter for the first time when he was thirty. Part meditation, part remembrance, as elegant as it is revelatory, A WRITER’S PEOPLE allows us privileged insight - full of incident, humor and feeling - into the mind of one of our greatest writers.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
One of the most brilliant and astute writers of our time here gives us-on the basis of his own intensive seven-month journey across the Asian continent-an unprecedented revelation of the Islamic world today. With all the narrative power and intellectual authority that have distinguished his earlier books and won him international acclaim (‘There can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him’-Irving Howe, The New York Times Book Review), Naipaul explores the life, the culture, the current ferment inside the nations of Islam-in a book that combines the fascinations of the great works of travel literature with the insights of a uniquely sharp, original, and idiosyncratic political mind. He takes us into four countries now in the throes of ‘Islamization’-countries that, in their ardor to build new societies based entirely on the fundamental laws of Islam, have violently rejected the ‘materialism’ of the technologically advanced nations that have long supported (and, ironically, still support) them. He brings us close to the people of Islam-how they live and work, the role of faith in their lives, how they see their place in the modern world. We accompany him through: Iran, where the modern streets of Tehran (the walls of office buildings and hotels plastered with posters proclaiming revolution, emphasizing blood) are bustling not with industry but with hysteria; where, in the sacred cities of Qom and Mashhad, ‘rage was what I saw . . . the holy city was also a city of rage; Pakistan, a pioneer of the twentieth-century Islamic revival-now, thirty-two years after its founding as a homeland for the Muslims of India, still tragically undeveloped: an Islamizing military government unresponsive to the populace; the national leader recently executed; the fundamentalists, apparently blind to the political chaos in their country, fomenting a fever of faith; Malaysia, amazingly prosperous thanks to oil and rubber and the skills of the Chinese who have been there for decades and constitute one-half of the population-but governed by the other half, and pressured by a new generation of Muslims crazed by their confused faith, awaiting the emergence of a homebred Ayatollah Khomeini to lead the entire country into Islamic purity. Indonesia, confused about its Muslim roots, confused about its national roots-confused into virtual quiescence by the successive rule of four regimes (two of them foreign) in less than four decades. Naipaul takes us into cities and villages, schools and homes, temples and offices; into conversations with Muslim students, merchants, journalists, religious leaders, laborers, and intellectuals. He shows us the real human and political condition today of countries where Islam is ‘a complete way of life,’ where the past is being selectively forgotten (‘history has to serve theology’), where all laws and social institutions established in the recent pre-Islamic past are being abolished-and, so far, replaced with nothing but an implacable determination to Believe.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
A dazzling illumination, full of passionate love and compassionate anger, written by a man with an Indian heart and a Western mind-this is V. S. Naipaul’s record of his sojourn in the land of his fathers, to which, Trinidad-born, he came as a stranger. His book is naked, heartrending, profound. It explores, probes, reveals. Throughout, Naipaul’s intense perceptions sweep the reader into the turmoil and fabulous richness of the length and breadth of India. For this superb book is a challenge to India-an exposé and an appeal. Here is the land of poverty and stubborn filth, of conscientious degradation. Here are people of arrogant humility and lyrical sweetness. Here is the society that insists that to try to rise above one’s caste station is not only hubris but bad taste; that to taint one’s wealth with social awareness is an insult to the gods who made one rich. This book takes the reader from Bombay to Kashmir, from Delhi to Madras to Calcutta. With Naipaul as guide, the reader participates in scenes of anguish and wild comedy that he would have missed alone. He stands by as an American girl searching for mystic revelation discovers terrifying passion. He observes the India that has rejected Gandhi by making him a saint. ‘It is,’ Naipaul writes, ‘as if in England Florence Nightingale [had been] honoured by statues . . . her name on every lip; and the hospitals had remained as she had described them.’ What Naipaul sees, in its infinite variety of sense and experience, is spellbinding and extraordinary. But what he feels about this subcontinent-the aftermath of Empire; the tensions within the society-is the miracle of this book. Not only does it involve the reader in an India he has never before been allowed to experience-a turbulent area of darkness-but it compels him to look at the whole vastness of the non-Western world with new, awe-struck eyes. . Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir. .
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
A dazzling illumination, full of passionate love and compassionate anger, written by a man with an Indian heart and a Western mind-this is V. S. Naipaul’s record of his sojourn in the land of his fathers, to which, Trinidad-born, he came as a stranger. His book is naked, heartrending, profound. It explores, probes, reveals. Throughout, Naipaul’s intense perceptions sweep the reader into the turmoil and fabulous richness of the length and breadth of India. For this superb book is a challenge to India-an exposé and an appeal. Here is the land of poverty and stubborn filth, of conscientious degradation. Here are people of arrogant humility and lyrical sweetness. Here is the society that insists that to try to rise above one’s caste station is not only hubris but bad taste; that to taint one’s wealth with social awareness is an insult to the gods who made one rich. This book takes the reader from Bombay to Kashmir, from Delhi to Madras to Calcutta. With Naipaul as guide, the reader participates in scenes of anguish and wild comedy that he would have missed alone. He stands by as an American girl searching for mystic revelation discovers terrifying passion. He observes the India that has rejected Gandhi by making him a saint. ‘It is,’ Naipaul writes, ‘as if in England Florence Nightingale [had been] honoured by statues . . . her name on every lip; and the hospitals had remained as she had described them.’ What Naipaul sees, in its infinite variety of sense and experience, is spellbinding and extraordinary. But what he feels about this subcontinent-the aftermath of Empire; the tensions within the society-is the miracle of this book. Not only does it involve the reader in an India he has never before been allowed to experience-a turbulent area of darkness-but it compels him to look at the whole vastness of the non-Western world with new, awe-struck eyes.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
In 1950, after winning a scholarship from the government of Trinidad, V. S. Naipaul, aged seventeen, left home for the first time. Following a two-week journey by steamer, he arrived in Oxford, England, a world utterly removed from the one he had longed to escape and to which he would never really return. This extraordinary collection of letters gives us, as nothing published previously has, an intimate view of Naipaul’s formative years. It is a story of family members oceans apart, clinging to one another against the sadness of dislocation and isolation: The young Naipaul, desperate not for a degree but to become a writer and make his way in the world. His beloved sister Kamla, anxious and bewildered, away at school in India. And his melancholy but loving father, whose own broken dream of succeeding as a writer would be realized in the singular achievement of his son. With the satisfactions of a novel, BETWEEN FATHER AND SON portrays a deeply affecting family drama, even as it bears witness to the flowering of one of the great literary geniuses of the century. Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir. .
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
V.S. Naipaul has felt that his acceptance of his religion is a rejection of the culture he lives in. And, similarly, his distance from the Arab world -- for he believes Islam is fundamentally an Arabic religion -- is also a distance from his faith. In the early 1980s, Naipaul published AMONG THE BELIEVERS, a collection of reflections on his travels in Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, and Malaysia. At that time, the fundamentalist revolution in Iran was at its peak, Pakistan was a struggling and repressive South Asian nation, and Indonesia and Malaysia were trying to adapt to the demands of Western capitalism. Now, 15 years later, with Iran ever-so-slowly liberalizing, Pakistan making moves to be a world power, and Indonesia and Malaysia at the heart of both the Asian miracle and the Asian crisis, Naipaul returns to these countries in BEYOND BELIEF. With one or more of these countries making the front pages of newspapers around the world almost every day, understanding the philosophical and practical expressions of religion is crucial to both understanding the nations and interpreting the news.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
One of the most brilliantly original and widely acclaimed writers of our time (‘For sheer abundance of talent there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V. S. Naipaul.’ - Irving Howe, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us two narratives of discovery: works that, beyond their fascination as ‘stories,’ reveal how the very process of writing is for Naipaul an act of exploration - a way of penetrating, and finding the center of, worlds both familiar and foreign. In ‘Prologue to an Autobiography,’ the springboard for a rush of memories is the initial sentence of Naipaul's early novel MIGUEL STREET - the sentence that introduces a fictional character named Bogart. Taking us back to the day when the sentence was written, and from there back to the years when his family lived as neighbors of the ‘real-life’ Bogart in Trinidad, Naipaul immerses us both in the life of the hopeful and ambitious young writer in London (‘I stuck to the magic of the previous day: the non-rustle BBC paper, the typewriter set at single space’) and in the world of his childhood: the great Indian-style estate of his mother's extended family, the city house in which the desk of his father (a journalist, an occasional writer of fiction) became for him a sort of playground. And he brings us forward again to the present, sharing with us the knowledge and understanding born of middle age that have prompted these reflections, and taking us along on a recent visit to Venezuela, to his reunion with the man named Bogart. ‘The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro’ is a journey into Africa today. The Ivory Coast, whose president has constructed on the site of his ancestral village an ultramodern metropolis conceived as a future world capital, is the setting of an intellectual adventure. We watch as the writer starts to live in a ‘little novel’ of his own making - opening himself to, and selectively pursuing, new experiences and people. We are with him as he meets expatriates men and women, black and white - who now, settled in Africa, find themselves at the limit of their own (non-African) civilization. And we see how the imposed new society - so insistently, compellingly real by virtue of its physical landmarks (broad avenues lined with half-vacant office towers, a vast golf course for tourists)—appears to have less reality for most Africans than the ‘night world’ of spirits and magic that prevails in the tribal villages, a world whose existence offers evidence of Africa's unassailable self-sufficiency, its essential completeness, and seems to negate the possibility of true change in Africa. FINDING THE CENTER projects a striking vision of the human and political flux of our time. It is, as well, Naipaul's most personal book - spanning, in a sense, his career to date, allowing us to see how he emerged as a writer, how and why through the years his interests have shifted and evolved, and the ways in which he has transmuted (and continues to transmute) his own experience into narrative art.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
In GUERRILLAS, V. S. Naipaul directly addresses himself to his most essential themes: exile, displacement, and the agonizing cruelty and the pain of colonialism, both for those who rule and those who are their victims. Set on a troubled Caribbean island, where ‘everybody wants to fight his own little war,’ where ‘everybody is a guerrilla,’ the novel centers on an Englishman named Roche, once a hero of the South African resistance, who has come to the island - subdued now, almost withdrawn - to work and to help. Soon his English mistress arrives: casually nihilistic, bored, quickly enticed – excited - by fantasies of native power and sexuality, and blindly unaware of any possible consequences of her acts. At once Roche and Jane are drawn into fatal connection with a young half-breed guerrilla leader named Jimmy Ahmed, a man driven by his own raging fantasies of power, of perverse sensuality, and of the England he half remembers, half sentimentalizes. Against the larger anguish of the world they inhabit, these three act out a drama of death, hideous sexual violence, and political and spiritual impotence that profoundly reflects the ravages history can make on human lives.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018), most commonly known as V. S. Naipaul, was an Indo-Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels.
One of the finest living writers in the English language, V. S. Naipaul gives us a tale as wholly unexpected as it is affecting, his first novel since the exultantly acclaimed A WAY IN THE WORLD, published seven years ago. HALF A LIFE is the story of Willie Chandran, whose father, heeding the call of Mahatma Gandhi, turned his back on his brahmin heritage and married a woman of low caste - a disastrous union he would live to regret, as he would the children that issued from it. When Willie reaches manhood, his flight from the travails of his mixed birth takes him from India to London, where, in the shabby haunts of immigrants and literary bohemians of the 1950s, he contrives a new identity. This is what happens as he tries to defeat self-doubt in sexual adventures and in the struggle to become a writer - strivings that bring him to the brink of exhaustion, from which he is rescued, to his amazement, only by the love of a good woman. And this is what happens when he returns with her - carried along, really - to her home in Africa, to live, until the last doomed days of colonialism, yet another life not his own. In a luminous narrative that takes us across three continents, Naipaul explores his great theme of inheritance with an intimacy and directness unsurpassed in his extraordinary body of work. And even as he lays bare the bitter comical ironies of assumed identities, he gives us a poignant spectacle of the enervation peculiar to a borrowed life. In one man's determined refusal c what he has been given to be, Naipaul reveals the way of all our experience. As Willie comes to see, ‘Every thing goes on a bias. The world should stop, but it goes on.’ A masterpiece of economy and emotional nuance, HALF A LIFE is an indelible feat of the imagination.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
The short novel at the heart of this original and masterly book is possibly the finest work until now by this immensely distinguished writer. It is set in an emergent African nation where there is still no peace between two warring tribes, nor between the Africans and the Europeans, who secretly still consider themselves superior in every way. Two English people—a homosexual government official and the wife of a colleague—are driving from the capital back to their safe expatriates' compound. Neutral, white, protected, they might seem to be ‘in a free state,’ yet what happens to them and between them in the face of sudden danger is as complex and difficult as the realities of the Africa that in some way has given them a kind of freedom. It is one of the conditions of men in a free state that their roles and relationships ceaselessly shift. Mr. Naipaul's Africa is not the Africa of guilt or romance or ‘the service,’ but something more ambiguous and challenging. In a Free State, brilliant on every level (simply as Adventure it is hypnotic in its mounting menace), is a profound comment on colonialism and its consequences. And it is given even subtler meaning by two studies of other men looking for liberation far from home. In Washington, ‘capital of the world’ torn by 'racial violence, an Indian diplomat's servant (on a salary of $3.75 a week) attempts to redefine his personality and his fate. In London, two brothers arrive from the West Indies, one to ‘pursue his studies,’ one to work – both to confront failure. These superb fictions, striking in themselves, enhanced by each other, are enclosed by two documentary fragments in which the writer – V.S. Naipaul – speaks for himself, and, finally acts.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
The short novel at the heart of this original and masterly book is possibly the finest work until now by this immensely distinguished writer. It is set in an emergent African nation where there is still no peace between two warring tribes, nor between the Africans and the Europeans, who secretly still consider themselves superior in every way. Two English people—a homosexual government official and the wife of a colleague—are driving from the capital back to their safe expatriates' compound. Neutral, white, protected, they might seem to be ‘in a free state,’ yet what happens to them and between them in the face of sudden danger is as complex and difficult as the realities of the Africa that in some way has given them a kind of freedom. It is one of the conditions of men in a free state that their roles and relationships ceaselessly shift. Mr. Naipaul's Africa is not the Africa of guilt or romance or ‘the service,’ but something more ambiguous and challenging. In a Free State, brilliant on every level (simply as Adventure it is hypnotic in its mounting menace), is a profound comment on colonialism and its consequences. And it is given even subtler meaning by two studies of other men looking for liberation far from home. In Washington, ‘capital of the world’ torn by 'racial violence, an Indian diplomat's servant (on a salary of $3.75 a week) attempts to redefine his personality and his fate. In London, two brothers arrive from the West Indies, one to ‘pursue his studies,’ one to work – both to confront failure. These superb fictions, striking in themselves, enhanced by each other, are enclosed by two documentary fragments in which the writer – V.S. Naipaul – speaks for himself, and, finally acts.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
With the publication of GUERRILLAS (which The New York Times Book Review hailed as ‘probably the best novel of 1975’), V. S. Naipaul achieved the recognition in America that has long been granted him elsewhere as one of the foremost writers in the English language. Born in Trinidad, he now returns to the land of his family's past and, in a series of fascinating personal encounters, reveals with extraordinary brilliance the India of Indira Gandhi, the ‘wounded civilization’ that is at last facing its own inadequacies, its lack of coherent political ideals, the blankness of its decayed civilization, the pressures of its crumbling democracy, the possibility of a new India emerging in the modem world. He brings us to the shattering India of huge, overpopulated cities (1,500 more people crowding into Bombay each day, over 100,000 sleeping on the streets), into the conversations of intellectuals, of confused, frightened middle-class people (‘For people who live like us, it's all over’), of journalists (forfeiting freedoms while enlarging their responsibilities, finally presenting the realities of India to the Indian people), of theorists, bureaucrats, the engineers and other enthusiastic doers trying to import from the larger, restless world the crucial tools of survival. He makes us perceive the delicate problems of intermediate technology: irrigation as not just a matter of land-leveling but of remaking men so that they can appreciate the simplest advances, of bringing them back from the self-wounding that comes with established destitution, with a society where rituals totally regulate the will, where caste and clan totally define an individual, inducing a collective amnesia, blurring the past to the people. He makes evident the pervasive influence of Hinduism, which has exposed Indians to a thousand years of stagnation and defeat, teaching them to relish distress as religious theater, as the arena of karma. He brings us close to the Gandhi of South Africa and to the man who, returning to India, failed to carry with him that racial awareness which marked his greatest political creativity and which alone might have helped Indians to formulate a coherent political ideology. And he shows how the spirituality Gandhi turned into a form of national assertion eventually soured into the nihilism it always was, encouraging a nightmare of modernity, ‘Indianization,’ drastically misapplied technology. We begin to sense the Indian past continuously clouding perception, numbing distress in bad times, circumscribing life, encouraging the people to surrender the organization of the world to others even as their needs demand that larger world's sophistication and success. ‘Old India has its special cruelties,’ writes Naipaul. ‘Not all of its people are people.’ Independence, the Emergency, the pressures of population, Indira Gandhi's government suppressing dissent and itself the victim of the overwhelming problems and agonies it must alleviate if the nation is to survive - this is the India we come to know, for the first time, its problems related and interpreted, its psychology searchingly illumined. As parts of this book appeared in The New York Review of Books, it attracted immense attention and praise. A product of the clearest vision and the most passionate concern, it should stand as the most important and revealing book about India we shall have in our time.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
FROM A MASTER of the English language-winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature - a collection of essays about reading, writing, and identity. In these eleven pieces-brought together for the first time - Naipaul charts more than half a century of personal inquiry into the mysteries of written expression and of fiction in particular. Here are his boyhood experiences of reading books and his first youthful efforts at writing them; the early glimmers and the evolution of ideas about the proper relation of particular literary forms to particular cultures and identities. Here, too, is Naipaul’s famous comment on his putative literary forebear Conrad, and a less familiar but no less intriguing preface to the only book Naipaul’s father ever published. Finally, in his celebrated Nobel Lecture, ‘Two Worlds,’ Naipaul reflects on the full scope of his career, rounding off the volume as an intellectual autobiography. Sustained by extraordinary powers of expression and thought, Literary Occasions is a stirring contribution to the fading art of the critic, and a revelation as well of a life in letters, in its many exemplary instances.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
From the Nobel laureate-a spare, searing new novel about identity and idealism, and their ability to shape or destroy us. Willie Chandran-whom we first met in Half a Life-is a man in his early forties who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him, as if he could truly know himself by becoming what others imagine him to be. His life has taken him from his native India to England, Africa in its last colonial moment, and Berlin, until finally it returns him to his homeland. Succumbing to the demanding encouragement of his sister-and his own listlessness-Willie joins an underground movement in India ostensibly devoted to unfettering the lower castes. But seven years of revolutionary campaigns and several years in jail convince him that the revolution ‘had nothing to do with the village people we said we were fighting for…[that] our ideas and words were more important than their lives and their ambitions for themselves.’ And, as well, he feels himself further than ever ‘from his own history and…from the ideas of himself that might have come to him with that history.’ When Willie returns to England where, thirty years before, his psychological and physical wanderings began, he finds the fruit of another unexpected social revolution (more magic seeds), and comes to see himself as a man ‘serving an endless prison sentence’-a revelation that may finally release him into his true self. MAGIC SEEDS is a masterpiece, written with all the depth and resonance, the clarity of vision and precision of language, that are the hallmarks of this brilliant writer.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
Here is Miguel Street, the Catfish Row of Trinidad, land of laughter and Calypso. Not since Porgy and Bess has an artist captured so well the humor and pathos of a sunstruck world. The inhabitants of Miguel Street tumble through the pages of Mr. Naipaul’s new novel with a glorious lack of inhibition. Here is Laura, whose eight children had seven fathers (‘is a damn nuisance,’ Laura said), but her heart is big enough for all of them; here is black Wordsworth selling pages of immortality on the street corners; here is Morgan, exploding into flashing laughter like the fireworks he makes. We encounter Man-man at the corner, where he paints, as he has done always, the campaign slogan, rote for Man-man. No one does, of course, but it is a pleasure to vote for Elias, the boy who turns from literature to garbage collecting, and thereby becomes an aristocrat of the stage; or Titus Hoyt, who teaches ‘Latin,’ a language he makes up as he goes along; or Bhakcu, the mechanical genius who ruins even new cars. Love, wisdom, joy, passion-all beat with a tropical rhythm in this enchanting story of the Caribbean. In the language of laughter, of Calypso, MIGUEL STREET is wonderful, man, is wonderful.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
The vibrant community of Miguel Street is brought to life through the eyes of a child. Characters, such as Bogart, Big Foot and Man-man refuse to be confined by the limitations of their everyday existence and create a more romantic version of reality. The growing boy delights in their humour and eccentricity, but he gradually becomes aware that no one can run from reality forever. MIGUEL STREET is both a nostalgic view of childhood recalled in exile and a study of the limitations 'of life in 1940s Trinidad.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
Here is Miguel Street, the Catfish Row of Trinidad, land of laughter and Calypso. Not since Porgy and Bess has an artist captured so well the humor and pathos of a sunstruck world. The inhabitants of Miguel Street tumble through the pages of Mr. Naipaul’s new novel with a glorious lack of inhibition. Here is Laura, whose eight children had seven fathers (‘is a damn nuisance,’ Laura said), but her heart is big enough for all of them; here is black Wordsworth selling pages of immortality on the street corners; here is Morgan, exploding into flashing laughter like the fireworks he makes. We encounter Man-man at the corner, where he paints, as he has done always, the campaign slogan, rote for Man-man. No one does, of course, but it is a pleasure to vote for Elias, the boy who turns from literature to garbage collecting, and thereby becomes an aristocrat of the stage; or Titus Hoyt, who teaches ‘Latin,’ a language he makes up as he goes along; or Bhakcu, the mechanical genius who ruins even new cars. Love, wisdom, joy, passion-all beat with a tropical rhythm in this enchanting story of the Caribbean. In the language of laughter, of Calypso, MIGUEL STREET is wonderful, man, is wonderful.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
The vibrant community of Miguel Street is brought to life through the eyes of a child. Characters, such as Bogart, Big Foot and Man-man refuse to be confined by the limitations of their everyday existence and create a more romantic version of reality. The growing boy delights in their humour and eccentricity, but he gradually becomes aware that no one can run from reality forever. MIGUEL STREET is both a nostalgic view of childhood recalled in exile and a study of the limitations 'of life in 1940s Trinidad.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018), most commonly known as V. S. Naipaul, was an Indo-Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels.
‘We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new.’ Just forty, Ralph Singh - a disgraced colonial minister exiled from the Caribbean island of his birth - writes his biography in a genteel hotel in a run-down London suburb. As he writes, he finds that he was born to disorder; even as a boy 'sunk in the taint of fantasy' ... a fantasy which Singh acts out in real life: as precocious schoolboy, randy London student and property speculator. Supremely confident, Singh turns to politics - and finds himself caught up in the upheaval of empire, in the turmoil of too-large events which move too fast.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
Anthony Powell has called V. S. Naipaul Britain’s ‘most talented and promising young writer’. Mr Stone and the Knights Companion is the first of Mr Naipaul’s books to turn away from his native West Indies and to deal with English characters in an English scene. In this novel he tells the story of Mr Stone’s last months before his retirement from his post as librarian in a large commercial firm. At such a time, however well regulated a man s life has been, he begins to feel a chill creeping in from the future. Mr Stone, whose life has been well-regulated to the point of eccentricity, becomes so rattled by intimations of mortality that at sixty-two, in spite of having enjoyed his existence as a bachelor, he gets married. And as though that were not astonishing enough, he goes on to have an inspiration which changes the tenor of his life. The creative spirit seizes him; he conceives an idea, embodies it in a plan, and persuades his firm to turn it into fact. In practice this idea proves to be a success, and incredulously Mr Stone tastes the joys of achievement. But V. S. Naipaul, the least sentimental of writers, does not cheat. He brings great charm to this story, and the humour for which he is already celebrated, but he faces the truth that no achievement can hold back time. Having been tickled, delighted, absorbed and touched, you find when you put this book down that you have been persuaded into a ruthless study of the human condition, and you will never forget it.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
‘I was eleven, no more, when the wish came to me to be a writer; and then very soon it was a settled ambition.’ But for the young V. S. Naipaul, there was a great distance between the wish and its fulfillment. To become a writer, he would have to find ways of understanding three very different cultures: his family's half-remembered Indian homeland, the West Indian colonial society in which he grew up, and the wholly foreign world of the English novels he read. In this essay of literary autobiography, V. S. Naipaul sifts through memories of his childhood in Trinidad, his university days in England, and his earliest attempts at writing, seeking the experiences of life and reading that that shaped his imagination and his growth a writer. He pays particular attention to the traumas of India under its various conquerors and the painful sense of dereliction and loss that shadows writers' attempts to capture the country and its people in prose. Naipaul’s profound reflections on the relations between personal or historical experience and literary form, between the novel and the world, reveal how he came to discover both his voice and the subjects of his writing, and how he learned to turn sometimes to fiction, sometimes to the travel narrative, to portray them truthfully. Along the way he offers insights into the novel's prodigious development as a form for depicting and interpreting society in the nineteenth century and its diminishing capacity to do the same in the twentieth - a task that, in his view, passed to the creative energies of early cinema.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
Here, in his first work of fiction since A BEND IN THE RIVER, V. S. Naipaul - one of the most highly acclaimed writers in the English language today - distills his wide experience of countries and peoples into a moving account of the rites of passage endured by all people and all communities undergoing change or decay. It is the story of a writer's singular journey—from one place to another, and from one state of mind to another. At the midpoint of the century, the narrator leaves the British colony of Trinidad and comes to the ancient countryside of England. And from within the story of this journey - of departure and arrival, alienation and familiarity, home and homelessness - the writer reveals how, cut off from his ‘first’ life in Trinidad, he enters a ‘second childhood of seeing and learning.’ Twenty years after his first arrival, he settles in a cottage outside Salisbury, on the grounds of an Edwardian estate whose derelict condition makes it an oddity among the other, well maintained estates in the valley - an oddity the writer feels reflected in his own circumstances. He is a man from another hemisphere, another background, a man unanchored, an anomaly in the place he has come to. He watches the physical world around him, acclimating himself slowly to the gardens, the rivers, the bare plains, the farms; and he studies the people who complete the landscape, in whose lives he sees mirrored the changing of seasons, of the skies and fields. It is a world seemingly untouched since the time of Thomas Hardy, but the narrator senses that the ties which once linked the people to the land and to each other are falling away, and that his own presence in the old valley is part of ‘something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country,’ a portent of the past coming undone. Yet, everything he observes—personal histories, work undertaken, landscapes, homes, even colors, patterns, shapes—is reinterpreted through an artistic vision whose development we are witnessing, and through which he is able, finally, to see his own past connect with the present in the ‘fulfillment of a child's dream of a safe house in the wood.’ Clearly autobiographical, yet woven through with remarkable invention, THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL is as rich and complex as any novel we have had from this exceptional writer.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
In the sixteenth century the New World contained cities of gold and men with heads beneath their shoulders: when the Spanish soldier Antonio de Berrio undertook the quest for El Dorado these wonders, replacing the real ones the Spaniards had just destroyed, seemed only a short march away. Berrio was dispossessed by Ralegh, but the city he had founded on an island in the mouth of the Orinoco—`the port they call of Spain' —survived: a few Spaniards in straw huts, subject to raids by cannibals and corsairs. In the late eighteenth century South America became a market requiring only liberation from Spain to open it to British manufactures: El Dorado again. Berrio's city, now British, a primitive society of French and English planters living off their Negro slaves, became the base for the Venezuelan revolution which, it was hoped, would bring this about. It was the archetypal South American revolution, beginning with fraud, borrowed principles and self-deception, and ending in blood: El Dorado finally lost. The Venezuelans have dealt with their revolution, the Spaniards and the British with their empires, social historians and protest writers with slavery. V. S. Naipaul is the first writer to mesh together these disparate elements and create a continuous novel-like narrative in which events reveal their true significance. Only a novelist of his quality and range could have made such illuminating and entertaining use of the people involved: Berrio, whose stoicism turned to lunacy; Ralegh, cut down to human size but in no way diminished; Picton, the middle-aged general who had fought no battle, encouraging then suppressing the revolution, a slave owner and a burner and mutilator of Negroes who was to become a hero of Waterloo; Commissioner Fullarton, his persecutor, right but ridiculous, dishonoured by his cause; the London-based Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco Miranda, the classic uprooted colonial; his comic and treacherous fellow-conspirators with their vivid disguises; the jailer and professional torturer, Vallot, and Luisa Calderon, his fourteen-year old mulatto victim; the slave Jacquet. The picture grows, much subtle and surprising comedy within the tragedy of its interwoven imperial themes: the nature of colonialism and exploitation, the nature of dreams and the nature of their corruption. It is an astonishing performance. Perhaps it is history as it should be written: an artist has chosen to explore a clearly-defined aspect of events because it is one which he can interpret according to his own genius, using scrupulous scholarship to ends beyond documentation. It is unique, and uniquely illuminating.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
In the sixteenth century the New World contained cities of gold and men with heads beneath their shoulders: when the Spanish soldier Antonio de Berrio undertook the quest for El Dorado these wonders, replacing the real ones the Spaniards had just destroyed, seemed only a short march away. Berrio was dispossessed by Ralegh, but the city he had founded on an island in the mouth of the Orinoco—`the port they call of Spain' —survived: a few Spaniards in straw huts, subject to raids by cannibals and corsairs. In the late eighteenth century South America became a market requiring only liberation from Spain to open it to British manufactures: El Dorado again. Berrio's city, now British, a primitive society of French and English planters living off their Negro slaves, became the base for the Venezuelan revolution which, it was hoped, would bring this about. It was the archetypal South American revolution, beginning with fraud, borrowed principles and self-deception, and ending in blood: El Dorado finally lost. The Venezuelans have dealt with their revolution, the Spaniards and the British with their empires, social historians and protest writers with slavery. V. S. Naipaul is the first writer to mesh together these disparate elements and create a continuous novel-like narrative in which events reveal their true significance. Only a novelist of his quality and range could have made such illuminating and entertaining use of the people involved: Berrio, whose stoicism turned to lunacy; Ralegh, cut down to human size but in no way diminished; Picton, the middle-aged general who had fought no battle, encouraging then suppressing the revolution, a slave owner and a burner and mutilator of Negroes who was to become a hero of Waterloo; Commissioner Fullarton, his persecutor, right but ridiculous, dishonoured by his cause; the London-based Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco Miranda, the classic uprooted colonial; his comic and treacherous fellow-conspirators with their vivid disguises; the jailer and professional torturer, Vallot, and Luisa Calderon, his fourteen-year old mulatto victim; the slave Jacquet. The picture grows, much subtle and surprising comedy within the tragedy of its interwoven imperial themes: the nature of colonialism and exploitation, the nature of dreams and the nature of their corruption. It is an astonishing performance. Perhaps it is history as it should be written: an artist has chosen to explore a clearly-defined aspect of events because it is one which he can interpret according to his own genius, using scrupulous scholarship to ends beyond documentation. It is unique, and uniquely illuminating.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
ANTHONY POWELL, in The Daily Telegraph: 'V. S. Naipaul, a Hindu whose family has lived for a couple of generations in Trinidad, is often spoken of as the best of the Caribbean authors. It is time for the regional epithet to be abandoned, and for him to be quite simply recognized as this country's most talented and promising young writer. . . . Mr Naipaul now comes along with a travel book about his home ground and those neighbourhoods. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE would be hard to beat for descriptive power and cool assessment of the situation there. . . . He unfolds the picture with irony and pity.' JAMES POPE-HENNESSY, in The Observer: `What gives this badly needed book its quality and importance is the fact that it is written by a distinguished Trinidadian novelist, long resident in this country, who was commissioned by the Government of Trinidad and Tobago to revisit the island of his birth and to publish his impressions of West Indian life in the post-colonial era. Where earlier travellers enthused or recoiled, Mr Naipaul explains. His tone is critical but humane, and he tempers his inevitable indignation with an admirable sense of comedy.' WALTER ALLEN, in the New Statesman: `It belongs to the same category of travel writing as Lawrence's books on Italy, Greene's on West Africa and Pritchett's on Spain.'
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
‘We pretend to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World . . . with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new.’ Brilliant, witty, and tragic, this novel by one of our most distinguished young novelists is his most profound and ambitious to date. His earlier works of fiction, including the famous A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS, grew out of his Trinidad Brahmin background; his most recent novel before this one, MR. STONE AND THE KNIGHTS COMPANION, was a remarkably pure example of the English novel, with no reference to the author's unique social and geographical antecedents. Now, in THE MIMIC MEN, Mr. Naipaul for the first time draws on all of his rich and varied backgrounds as a man and as an artist, melds them into a unity that offers full scope for the wit and the tragic sense that are his special stylistic creation, and so offers the reader a vivid, deeply disturbing comment on today's society. Simon Gray in The New Statesman calls this novel ‘a complex and masterful achievement.’ Ralph Singh, the central figure who is at once protagonist and narrator, is himself one of the ‘mimic men,’ with a multiplicity of roles: man of affairs, householder, student, millionaire, politician, refugee immigrant, London dandy, maneuverer and organizer, recluse. The story moves back and forth between the lush colonial island of Isabella and the urbanities and loneliness of London. Singh is both an activist and an observer, a chained and desperate spirit living between twin threats. The form of the novel is as complex as its meaning, but Naipaul handles space and time as surely as he handles his characters' actions and feelings. The result is a troubling, fascinating, exotic story, told in dazzling prose. The book can be enjoyed purely as storytelling for its taut narration and the interaction of its variety of sharply etched characters. However, most readers will find beneath the surface a probing view of the enigma of modern man, ‘the double dream within the dream.’
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
Here is the astringent wit of an Aubrey Mennen turned loose in the rich landscape of a Caribbean isle. V. S. Naipaul is an extraordinary storyteller - a voice from Trinidad of today, as contemporary and exciting as Calypso - and in THE MYSTIC MASSEUR he has created one of the most amusing and fascinating characters in contemporary fiction, Ganesh Rasumair. If Ganesh had not been so unappreciated as a schoolteacher, he would never have become a masseur. If he had not lacked talent as an ordinary masseur, he would never have blossomed into a mystic one; and, of course, if he had not lived in Trinidad, at first an obscure member and finally an ornament of the Hindu community there, none of the things that happened to him would have happened in quite that way, for Trinidad, seen with the eye of humor, is a most surprising place. This is a story of success: a success that resulted, or so it seems, from inspired detachment. Achievement was not something at which Ganesh aimed but something that overtook him in oblique and unexpected ways, often appearing at first sight to be a setback but always advancing his career. Mr. Naipaul, who himself comes of an Indian family settled in Trinidad, writes with delicate precision and keeps a poker face. He occasionally permits himself a raised eyebrow and a look of wonder at the charming absurdity of human beings, but it is his reader, not he, who laughs aloud. ‘A delightful book. . . bubbles and sparkles with life and gaiety. Wonderfully deft. Over every inch of Mr. Naipaul’s pages flickers the gleam of his fun - a fun as light and acute and affectionate as is his view of human nature.’ - From the Introduction by LORD DAVID CECIL. . . The best job of its kind since Joyce Cary looked through the wambly brown eyes of Mister Johnson.’ - TIME Magazine.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
This book by the distinguished novelist and historian V. S. Naipaul presents the best of his political and personal journalism of the last fifteen years. In the first section, ‘An Unlikely Colonial,’ Naipaul considers his position as a West Indian Indian - the particular problems facing a writer with his background. These pieces are funny, wry, and a little uneasy. Then comes ‘India,’ seven pieces covering 1962-1971, which add up to an unrivaled portrait of the subcontinent, all the more revealing for having been written in different moods ranging from hope to near-despair. The third section, ‘Looking Westward,’ focuses on the vagaries of a Japanese eccentric, on Norman Mailer campaigning for Mayor of New York, on the French ethnologist and politician Jacques Soustelle, etc., etc. . . . There is no introspection here, but an outgoing curiosity, irony, and fascination with human behavior; the outsider has found the self-confidence of a man who truly belongs to himself and is relishing it. In the final section, ‘Columbus and Crusoe,’ Naipaul circles back to the subject of colonialism, but in a new way—he is no longer describing what it is like to be the product of a colonial situation; he has become the most assured and perceptive observer of such situations now writing. Four of the articles in this section are about the Caribbean (Anguilla, St. Kitts, Trinidad, and British Honduras), and the final one - from which the volume takes its title - is about Mauritias. (A barracoon is an enclosure or barracks for the temporary confinement of slaves and convicts.)
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
One of the great writers of our time (‘There can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him’ - Irvine Howe on the front page of The New York Tines Book Review) protects his vision of our ‘half-made societies’—Argentina, Trinidad, and the Congo—and their crippling surrender to nihilism, in the most compelling essays he has written. Here are the once colonial and now ‘revolutionary’ and newly corrupt worlds, and the people and incidents crystallizing their tragedy: Eva Peron (whom many in Argentina remember as the same breed of tyrant. torturer. and thief as her husband) suddenly ‘canonized,’ her expensively embalmed corpse trotted out to glamorize the ‘new Peronism’ . . . a bogus leader named Michael X. an ex-pima. pusher, and gambling-hour: operator gaining, amidst the prevailing cynicism and indifference of Trinidad, a kind of status—setting up a commune devoted to (his own) Black Power, and slaughtering on a bizarre whim three believers-turned-betrayers . . . and Mobutu in the Congo. dispatching henchmen to preach the new ‘-authentic’ Africa. yet ruling like a medieval king, empowering and annihilating his subjects at will: ‘The chief threatens; the people are cowed: the chief relents; the people praise his magnanimity.’ In the last essay of the book. Naipaul reveals himself as a young man electrified by his encounter with the fiction of Joseph Conrad, and he explores Conrad’s earlier vision of Africa, South America, and the Far East in relation to his own chilling experience of these places today. These are worlds in which memories are conveniently edited: the past is scrubbed out: life goes on . . . worlds evoked in passionate. scathing, inspired essays by one of the foremost writers in the English language. V. S. Naipaul Was born in Trinidad. to which his grandfather had come from India. but he has lived most of his life in London. His fifteen books—eight of them novels—have been accorded great critical acclaim and several of today’s distinguished literary prizes, among them England’s Booker Prize. Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
Democracy has come to Elvira, Trinidad; and Surujpat (‘Pat’) Harbans finds that fighting an election is a surprisingly expensive business. Both Chittaranjan, who controls the Hindu vote, and Baksh, who controls the Muslims, must be appeased, while somehow or other the negro vote must be wooed away from his rival candidate, Preacher. Baksh’s son Foam is an energetic but over-enthusiastic campaign manager; he is responsible for the stirring slogan, VOTE HARBANS OR DIE! Matters are complicated by the presence of two attractive Jehovah’s Witnesses, who persuade the Spanish constituents to abstain, and by Tiger, the mongrel puppy considered in some quarters to be an evil spirit. When polling day finally arrives the destinies of many citizens of Elvira have been affected in unexpected ways. This election is as funny and as fantastic as the one at Eatanswill; it is a perfect subject for the wit, irony and succinct elegance of style which characterize V. S. Naipaul’s individual vision of the West Indian scene.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
For forty years V. S. Naipaul has been traveling and, through his writing, creating one of the most wide-ranging and sustained meditations on our world. Now, for the first time, his finest shorter pieces of reflection and reportage - nearly all of them heretofore out of print - are collected in one volume. With an abiding faith in the redemptive power of modernity balanced by a sense of wonder about the past, Naipaul has explored an astonishing variety of societies and peoples through the many-sided prism of his own experience. Whether writing about the Muslim invasions of India, Mobutu’s mad reign in Zaire, the New York mayoral elections or the enduring tragedy of Argentina, he has demonstrated again and again that no one has a shrewder intuition of the ways in which power works, of the universal relation of the exploiter and the exploited. And no one has put forth a more consistently eloquent defense of the dignity of the individual and the value of civilization. Infused with a deeply felt humanism, The Writer and the World attests powerfully not only to Naipaul’s status as the great English prose stylist of our time but also to his keen, often prophetic, understanding.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
In sharp and perhaps surprising contrast to his most recent fiction-the worlds of darkness, violence, and suffering portrayed in GUERRILLAS (1975) and A BEND IN THE RIVER (1979)- V. S. Naipaul’s first three novels are delightfully comic (often hilarious) works that take us into a Caribbean world of laughter and calypso, of magical events and irrepressible passions, a world filled with incongruity. Here we encounter madmen and innocents, housewives and prophets, merchants and dreamers-a cast of characters whose antics, adventures, and indiscretions prove unceasingly entertaining. THE MYSTIC MASSEUR traces the astonishing metamorphosis of Ganesh Ramsumair-from failed school- teacher to village masseur to enlightened mystic to unshamable entrepreneur to peerless politician to the most popular man in Trinidad. . . . In THE SUFFRAGE OF ELVIRA, the democratization of a small Trinidadian village becomes the occasion of an ‘election bacchanal’ as Mr. Surujpat Harbans, candidate, woos the local leaders and finds himself paying dearly-in cash!-for their support. Meanwhile, an underfed puppy terrorizes the entire community. . . . MIGUEL STREET gives us, through the perceptions of a young boy, the street life and local legend of a Port of Spain slum. We meet: Laura, perpetually pregnant (‘You get use to it after the first three four times. Is a damn nuisance, though’) . . . Popo, the carpenter, who works constantly at building ‘the thing without a name’ . . . Man-man, who arranges his own crucifixion Big Foot, the neighborhood strongman, who disgraces Miguel Street when he turns professional bully, Bogart, the bigamist. . . and many others. Together, these three novels project a comic vision as brilliant and original as the disturbing, darker vision of Naipaul’s later novels. When first published-in 1957, 1958, and 1959, respectively-these works heralded an unmistakably important new literary artist. Today, still fresh and funny-and now brought together in one volume for the first time-they confirm what Irving Howe has written in The New York Times Book Review: ‘For sheer abundance of talent, there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V. S. Naipaul.’
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, KB, TC (born August 17, 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago), better known as V. S. Naipaul, is a Trinidadian-born British writer of Indo-Trinidadian descent, currently resident in Wiltshire. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He is the son, older brother, uncle, and cousin of published authors Seepersad Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Neil Bissoondath, and Vahni Capildeo, respectively. His current wife is Nadira Naipaul, a former journalist. In 1971, Naipaul became the first person of Indian origin to win a Booker Prize for his book In a Free State. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Swedish Academy praised his work ‘for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.’ The Committee added, ‘Naipaul is a modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.’ The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic portrayal of the Third World. Edward Said, for example, has argued that he ‘allowed himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution’, promoting ‘colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies’.This perspective is most salient in The Middle Passage, which Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after ten years of self-exile in England, and An Area of Darkness, an arguably stark condemnation on his ancestral homeland of India. His works have become required reading in many schools within the Third World. Among English-speaking countries, Naipaul’s following is notably stronger in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States. Though a regular visitor to India since the 1960s, he has arguably ‘analysed’ India from an arms-length distance, in some cases initially with considerable distaste (as in An Area of Darkness), and later with ‘grudging affection’ (as in A Million Mutinies Now), and of late perhaps even with ‘ungrudging affection’ (most manifestly in his view that the rise of Hindutva embodies the welcome, broader civilisational resurgence of India). He has also made attempts over the decades to identify his ancestral village in India, believed to be near Gorakhpur in Eastern Uttar Pradesh from where his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as indentured labourer. In several of his books Naipaul has observed Islam, and he has been criticised for dwelling on negative aspects, e.g. nihilism among fundamentalists. Naipaul’s support for Hindutva has also been controversial. He has been quoted describing the destruction of the Babri Mosque as a ‘creative passion’, and the invasion of Babur in the 16th century as a ‘mortal wound.’ He views Vijayanagar, which fell in 1565, as the last bastion of native Hindu civilisation. He remains a somewhat reviled figure in Pakistan, which he bitingly condemned in Among the Believers. In 1998 a controversial memoir by Naipaul’s sometime protégé Paul Theroux was published. The book provides a personal, though occasionally caustic portrait of Naipaul. The memoir, entitled Sir Vidia’s Shadow, was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier. In early 2007, V.S Naipaul made a long-awaited return to his homeland of Trinidad. He urged citizens to shrug off the notions of ‘Indian’ and ‘African’ and to concentrate on being ‘Trinidadian’. He was warmly received by students and intellectuals alike and it seems, finally, that he has come to some form of closure with Trinidad. Naipaul is married to Nadira Naipaul. She was born Nadira Khannum Alvi in Kenya and got married in Pakistan. She worked as a journalist for Pakistani newspaper, The Nation for ten years before meeting Naipaul. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Hale. Nadira had been divorced twice before her marriage to Naipaul. She has two children from a previous marriage, Maliha and Nadir.
It seemed that her father's death would leave Joan Dart's way of life unchanged. She knew as much about sugar as any planter in Demerara, and was as passionately interested in Elisabeth, the Dart plantation, as the other young ladies of the Colony were in balls and presentations. Naturally she would stay and manage the plantation which Peter, her brother, despised. But Joan had reckoned without the rapacity of Madeleine, her beautiful Dutch sister in law. her father's death was to be the first of a change of events that neither Joan nor the Colony would ever forget. The year was 1823, the year of the East Coast Slaves' Insurrection.
Christopher Robin Nicole (born 7 December 1930) is a prolific British writer of over 200 novels and non-fiction books since 1957. He has written as Christopher Nicole and also under several pseudonyms including Peter Grange, Andrew York, Robin Cade, Mark Logan, Christina Nicholson, Alison York, Leslie Arlen, Robin Nicholson, C.R. Nicholson, Daniel Adams, Simon McKay, Caroline Gray and Alan Savage. He also wrote under the pen name Max Marlow when co-authoring with his wife, fellow author Diana Bachmann. Christopher Robin Nicole was born on 7 December 1930 in Georgetown, in British Guiana (now Guyana), where he was raised. He is the son of Jean Dorothy (Logan) and Jack Nicole, a police officer. Both his parents were Scottish. He studied at Queen's College in Guyana and at Harrison College in Barbados. He was a fellow at the Canadian Bankers Association and a clerk for the Royal Bank of Canada in Georgetown and Nassau from 1947 to 1956. In 1957, he moved to Guernsey, Channel Islands, United Kingdom, where he currently lives, but he also has a domicile in Spain. Nicole was first published in 1957, when he wrote a book about West Indian Cricket. He published his first novel in 1959, his first stories being set in his native Caribbean. Later he wrote many historical novels, set in tumultuous periods such as World War I, World War II and the Cold War, and depicting places in Europe, Asia and Africa. He also wrote classic romance novels.
C. L .R. James, the Trinidad-born novelist, critic, historian, philosopher, and revolutionary political activist, has proved to be as controversial in death as he was in life. Throughout his career, James was committed to a belief in the transformative powers of language, and he worked tirelessly as a writer and a speaker for the causes of black liberation and proletarian revolution. Even James’s opponents within the radical movements thought of him, in the words of James P. Canon, as the ‘lyrical historian of our movement.’ Though orthodox Trotskyites were wrong when they declared that James’s political organization ‘started and finished as a purely literary tendency,’ there can be no doubt that James and the colleagues he drew into the movement understood and valued the revolutionary potential of the written word. In C. L. R. James: A Critical Introduction a literary critic undertakes for the first time a sustained analysis of James’s major published works, placing them in the context of James’s less well-known writings as an activist and journalist. Nielsen, who was once a student in James’s courses in American universities, offers an encompassing critique of one of the African diaspora’s most significant thinkers and writers. Here the author of Black Jacobins, World Revolution, A History of Pan-African Revolt, Notes on Dialectics, Beyond a Boundary, and the lyric novel Minty Alley is seen not only as among the great political philosophers but also as the literary artist that he remained, from his first writings in Trinidad through his underground years in America, to his final essays and speeches in London. The writings of James have inspired revolutionaries on three continents, have altered the course of historiography, have shown the way toward independent black political struggles, and have established the basis for much of today’s cultural studies.
Born in the middle of the last century, in the geographical middle of the United States, to a recently-off-the-farm and now middle-class family, Aldon Nielsen soon exhibited a proclivity for the coastal extremes. Following a family move to the nation's capital, Nielsen spent the better part of three decades in the District of Columbia, where he completed his education He also spent a brief stint as a social worker in upstate New York , courtesy of the Selective Service. Following completion of graduate school and a short period teaching at Howard University , Nielsen moved to California , where he held positions at San Jose State University , the University of California in Los Angeles and Loyola Marymount University. Nielsen was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for poetry and has to date published five volumes of verse: Heat Strings, Evacuation Routes, Stepping Razor, VEXT and Mixage. His poetry was selected by John Ashbery for the Best American Poems anthology and has also received two Gertrude Stein Awards for innovation. He has presented poetry readings at many venues, including the Folger Shakespeare Library, U.C. Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin , the University of Iowa and the City Council Chambers of the District of Columbia . His first volume of literary criticism, Reading Race, won the SAMLA Studies Prize, a Myers Citation and the Kayden Award for best book in the humanities. Subsequent works of scholarship include Writing between the Lines, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction, Black Chant and Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation, which was the winner of the Josephine Miles Award. Every Goodbye Ain ' t Gone, an anthology of experimental poetry by black American artists was co-edited with Lauri Ramey. Nielsen's edition of DON'T DENY MY NAME: WORDS AND MUSIC AND THE BLACK INTELLECTUAL TRADITION, by Lorenzo Thomas, won an American Book Award. These days, Nielsen divides his time between Pennsylvania and California, where his wife, Anna Everett, is Professor of Film and Media Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara. He often finds himself flying over the place of his birth, the only somewhat inappropriately named Grand Island, Nebraska.
This perceptive and refreshing study discusses six front-line novels of the French Caribbean: Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew, Edouard Glissant's The Ripening, Joseph Zobel's Black Shack Alley, Michele Lacrosil's Tomorrow Jab-Herma, Jacques Stéphen Alexis' Comrade General Sun and Simone Schwarz-Bart's The Bridge of Beyond. Beverley Ormerod analyzes the main themes of French Caribbean literature showing how it differs from metropolitan French literature and how, at the same time, it offers many parallels with West Indian literature in English. Each novel is presented within its social and historical context, and is related to the overall contemporary West Indian background. Aimé Césaire's Cahier is also studied within the context of these novels. Recurring themes are explored in their different manifestations while at the same time the text is presented in its individuality. All quotations are given in English translation and most of the titles studied have been or will be published in English.
BEVERLEY ORMEROD is senior lecturer in French at the University of Western Australia. Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1937 she was awarded the Jamaica Girl's Scholarship for overseas study in 1955. She graduated in Modern Languages at Cambridge University in 1959 and continued her postgraduate studies there before spending a year doing research at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. In 1966 she was awarded her Doctorate in French by Cambridge University. From 1962 to 1970 she was a lecturer in the French department at the University of the West Indies, Mona, where in 1966 she introduced the first course in French Caribbean literature. She has published numerous articles in international journals and is co-author, with Anne Marie Nisbet, of Négritude et Antillanité: Etude d' Une tempéte, d'Aimé Césaire (1982).
George Padmore’s first major work appeared at this time, Life and Struggle of Negro Toilers, which dealt in some depth with working conditions of blacks around the world. Steeped as he was in Communist ideology, he was very critical of black leaders whom he considered of bourgeois inclination, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, and the political leadership of Liberia and Ethiopia.
George Padmore (28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959), born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse in Trinidad, was a leading Pan-Africanist, journalist, and author who left Trinidad in 1924 to study in the United States and from there moved to the Soviet Union, Germany, and France, before settling in London and, toward the end of his life, Accra, Ghana.
First hand accounts of the growth of slavery in the Danish West Indies from its inception in the 17th century to its abolition in the 19th century.
Isidor Paiewonsky (1909-2004) was a noted historian, widely recognized for his extraordinary life-long achievements as a businessman, humanitarian, and historian of his native Virgin Islands
When Mike drove home to Kendal after five years away, he was set on one thing: to find work for himself and his new truck carrying sugarcane. But he was in for a shock. Matt Southern had the haulage business wrapped up; the whole village was in his pay. Mike wasn't going to stand for that, especially since Matt's stepdaughter, Bunny, was on his side. So it was war. Mike found himself charged with arson. But when tragedy struck his family, the turning point came. Mike's blood was up. He laid his plans carefully, and in a crowded courtroom on the day of his trial, he faced Matt Southern in the final battle of their private war. In spite of the tension inherent in the plot, this story is alive with gaiety and zest. Once again, with vivid phrases and fresh dialogue, the author makes the people of this Jamaican village as real as our next-door neighbors.
C. Everard Palmer (October 15, 1930, Kendal, Jamaica - June 16, 2013, Mississauga, Canada) was born in Kendal in the Jamaican parish of Hanover. He had his early education in the rural community after which he attended Mico Teachers' College in Kingston. He worked as a journalist with the Gleaner Company before starting a career as an author. All his stories have been inspired by the memories of his childhood, and though the people and incidents are imagined they could easily have been real.
This violent book depicts a fight for survival in Kingston’s shanty town. Abandoned by an apathetic society, the slum dwellers live in a grim world that most Jamaicans never see. Dinah a warm hearted prostitute struggles to escape her past, but in a new tough middle class world she is fettered by her ignorance and is gradually drawn back into the carnal wilderness she knows and hates. A story to touch the conscience of society; written with realism and compassion. WINNER OF THE FIRST PRIZE FOR FICTION DAKAR FESTIVAL OF NEGRO ARTS 1966. ‘Jamaica with its hypocritical surface of ex-colonial gentility and its appalling underside of squalor, violence and vice, has been crying out for years for a Caribbean Zola. Now it has found him in the person of H. Orlando Patterson’ - Daily Telegraph. H. Orlando Patterson is one of Jamaica’s Leading young writers. Having taken his Ph.D. in Sociology at progressive London School of Economics, he then joined the teaching staff for two years, resigning in 1967 to return to Jamaica to teach Sociology at the University of the West Indies. His research into prostitution in Jamaica leaves the uncanny feeling in his writing that his characters must still exist in real life. In 1967 he published two books THE SOCIOLOGY OF SLAVERY and AN ABSENCE OF RUINS. .
H. Orlando Patterson is one of Jamaica’s Leading young writers. Having taken his Ph.D. in Sociology at progressive London School of Economics, he then joined the teaching staff for two years, resigning in 1967 to return to Jamaica to teach Sociology at the University of the West Indies. His research into prostitution in Jamaica leaves the uncanny feeling in his writing that his characters must still exist in real life. In 1967 he published two books THE SOCIOLOGY OF SLAVERY and AN ABSENCE OF RUINS. .
A bleak portrayal of life on the Dunglethe rubbish heap where the very poorest squat, this beautifully poetic, existentialist novel turns an unwavering eye to life in the Jamaican ghetto. By interweaving the stories of Dinah, a prostitute who can never quite escape the circumstances of her life, and Brother Solomon, a respected Rastafarian leader who allows his followers to think that a ship is on its way to take them home to Ethiopia, this brutally poetic story creates intense and tragic characters who struggle to come to grips with the absurdity of life. As these downtrodden protagonists shed their illusions and expectations, they realize that there is no escape from meaninglessness, and eventually gain a special kind of dignity and stoic awareness about life and the universe.
Orlando Patterson was born June 5, 1940 in Jamaica and educated there and at the London School of Economics. He is now Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.
An illustrated collection of proverbs from the Bahamas. One proverb every two pages is accompanied by a pen/ink illustration
Born in Guadeloupe, St.-John Perse lived most of his life in France, and served in the French diplomatic corps. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960, and has been widely translated throughout the world. His poetry stresses the universality of man and his most basic concerns.
Saint-John Perse (31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975) was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.
Bilingual edition of Anabase, 1924. [revised edition New York: Harcourt, 1938. 75 pages ; rev, and corrected edition New York: Harcourt, 1949. 109 pages ]
Saint-John Perse (31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975) was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.
plates, bibliog. Bilingual edition of L 'Ordre des oiseaux, 1962.
Saint-John Perse (31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975) was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.
bibliog. Bilingual edition of Chronique, 1959
Saint-John Perse (31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975) was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.
Includes all of the translations published separately in book form, with additional poems, essays, and prefaces to their translations by T. S. Eliot and Louise Varèse. All the translations have been revised for the collected works, and approved by the poet himself.
Saint-John Perse (31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975) was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.
The first English edition is a deluxe edition for collectors. Reprint 1962. 99 p.
Saint-John Perse (31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975) was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.
Seamarks (Amers) is a poem of ceremonial praise of the Sea as the divine source of life, love, and death. It is presented as the latest work of a great living poet.
Saint-John Perse (31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975) was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.
Bilingual edition of Vents, 1946. (reprint 1961. 193 p.).
Saint-John Perse (31 May 1887 – 20 September 1975) was a French poet-diplomat, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the United States until 1967.
The groundbreaking seminal collection by the author of Zong! Brilliant, lyrical, and passionate, this collection from acclaimed poet M. NourbeSe Philip is an extended jazz riff on themes of language, racism, colonialism, and exile. Philip defiantly challenges and resoundingly overthrows the silencing of black women through appropriation of language, offering no less than superb poetry resonant with beauty and strength. Originally published in 1989, it won the Casa de Las Americas Prize. This new Wesleyan edition includes a foreword by Evie Shockley, and an online reader’s companion will be available. Philip’s tragic transport—as a curate of the impure word, the degeneration and regeneration of grammar—bears the black history of romance. No sojourn in contemporary poetry is more necessary or more beautiful than hers. - Fred Moten, author of The Feel Trio.
M. Nourbese Philip (born February 3, 1947) is a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright who was born in Tobago and now lives in Toronto. She is the author of Zong! Evie Shockley is the author of the new black.
‘Harriet Tubman was brave and strong, and she was black like me. I think it was the first time I thought of wanting to be called Harriet – I wanted to be Harriet.’ Margaret is determined to be someone; to be cool, with style and class and to have a blacker skin. More than anything else she wants to help her best friend, Zulma, escape from Canada and fly back to Tobago to live with her grandmother. She compiles a list: ‘Things I want changed in my life’ and sets about achieving her objectives. But at fourteen, coming to terms with growing-up, relationships and responsibilities is not quite so straightforward, and the parental threat of ‘Good West Indian Discipline’ is never far removed. In this charming, humorous and perceptive tale of adolescence, Marlene Nourbese Philip explores the friendship of two young black girls and throws into sharp relief the wider issues of culture and identity so relevant to teenagers of all races and colours.
Marlene Nourbese Philip (born 3 February 1947), usually credited as M. NourbeSe Philip, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer. Born in the Caribbean Woodlands, Moriah, Trinidad and Tobago, Philip was educated at the University of the West Indies. She subsequently pursued graduate degrees in political science and law at the University of Western Ontario, and practised law in Toronto, Ontario for seven years. She left her law practice in 1983 to devote time to her writing. Philip is known for experimentation with literary form and for her commitment to social justice. Though her writing suggests an in-depth understanding of the canon, Philip's career undoubtedly helped to free her from the constraints of tradition and to nurture her social analysis and criticism. Philip has published three books of poetry, two novels, three books of collected essays and two plays. Her short stories, essays, reviews and articles have appeared in magazines and journals in North America and England and her poetry has been extensively anthologized. Her work - poetry, fiction and non-fiction is taught widely at the university level and is the subject of much academic writing and critique. Her first novel, Harriet's Daughter (1988), is widely used in high school curricula in Ontario, Great Britain and was, for a decade, studied by all children in the Caribbean receiving a high school CXC diploma. It has also been published as an audio cassette, a script for stage and a German language edition. Although categorized as young adult literature, Harriet’s Daughter is a book that can appeal to older children and adults of all ages. Set in Toronto, this novel explores the themes of friendship, self-image, ethics and migration while telling a story that is riveting, funny and technically accomplished. It makes the fact of being Black a very positive and enhancing experience. Philip’s most renowned poetry book, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, was awarded the Casa de las Américas Prize for Literature while still in manuscript form. As she explores themes of race, place, gender, colonialism and, always, language, Philip plays with words, bending and restating them in a way that is reminiscent of jazz. The tension between father tongue (the white Euro-Christian male canon), and mother tongue (Black African female) is always present. Philip is a prolific essayist. Her articles and essays demonstrate a persistent critique and an impassioned concern for issues of social justice and equity in the arts, prompting Selwyn R. Cudjoe's assertion that Philip ‘serves as a lightning rod of black cultural defiance of the Canadian mainstream.’ More to the point is the epigram in Frontiers where Philip dedicates the book to Canada, 'in the effort of becoming a space of true belonging'. It is as an essayist that M. NourbeSe Philip’s role as anti-racist activist is most evident. She was one of the first to make culture her primary focus as she argued passionately and articulately for social justice and equity. Specific controversial events that have been the focus of her essays include the Into the Heart of Africa exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Toronto production of Show Boat, and Caribana. Her essays also put the spotlight on racial representation on arts councils and committees in Canada and there have been definite advances in this area subsequently. It was at a small demonstration concerning the lack of Canadian writers of colour outside of the 1989 PEN Canada gala, that she was confronted by June Callwood. Philip has also taught at the University of Toronto, taught creative fiction at the third year level at York University and has been writer in residence at McMaster University and University of Windsor. Her most recent work, Zong! (2008), is based on a legal decision at the end of the eighteenth century, related to the notorious murder of Africans on board a slave ship. A dramatized reading of this new poem cycle, was workshopped and presented at Harbourfront in Toronto as part of rock.paper.sistahz in 2006. Poems from this collection have been published in Facture, boundary 2 and Fascicle; the later includes four poems, along with an extensive introduction. On April 16, 2012 at b current studio space in Toronto, Philip held her first authorial full-length reading of Zong!-- an innovative interaction-piece lasting seven hours in which both author and audience performed a cacophonous collective reading of the work from beginning to end. In solidarity with this collective reading, another audience-performance was held in Blomfontaine, South Africa. In talking about her own work Philip has said, ‘fiction is about telling lies, but you must be scathingly honest in telling those lies. Poetry is about truth telling, but you need the lie - the artifice of the form to tell those truths.’ Scholar Rinaldo Walcott has engaged critically with the work of M. NourbeSe Philip. His essay ‘'No Language is Neutral': The Politics of Performativity in M. Nourbese Philip's and Dionne Brand's Poetry’ in the book Black Like Who? is a strong example of this scholarly engagement.
A woman, travelling alone through time, Africa, and unnamed lands, searches for Dr. David Livingstone, celebrated by the West as a 'discoverer' of Africa. Looking for Livingstone explodes Western assumptions about the 'silence' of indigenous peoples; this is an elegant work which beautifully gives voice to the ancestors to whom it is dedicated.
Marlene Nourbese Philip (born 3 February 1947), usually credited as M. NourbeSe Philip, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer. Born in the Caribbean Woodlands, Moriah, Trinidad and Tobago, Philip was educated at the University of the West Indies. She subsequently pursued graduate degrees in political science and law at the University of Western Ontario, and practised law in Toronto, Ontario for seven years. She left her law practice in 1983 to devote time to her writing. Philip is known for experimentation with literary form and for her commitment to social justice. Though her writing suggests an in-depth understanding of the canon, Philip's career undoubtedly helped to free her from the constraints of tradition and to nurture her social analysis and criticism. Philip has published three books of poetry, two novels, three books of collected essays and two plays. Her short stories, essays, reviews and articles have appeared in magazines and journals in North America and England and her poetry has been extensively anthologized. Her work - poetry, fiction and non-fiction is taught widely at the university level and is the subject of much academic writing and critique. Her first novel, Harriet's Daughter (1988), is widely used in high school curricula in Ontario, Great Britain and was, for a decade, studied by all children in the Caribbean receiving a high school CXC diploma. It has also been published as an audio cassette, a script for stage and a German language edition. Although categorized as young adult literature, Harriet’s Daughter is a book that can appeal to older children and adults of all ages. Set in Toronto, this novel explores the themes of friendship, self-image, ethics and migration while telling a story that is riveting, funny and technically accomplished. It makes the fact of being Black a very positive and enhancing experience. Philip’s most renowned poetry book, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, was awarded the Casa de las Américas Prize for Literature while still in manuscript form. As she explores themes of race, place, gender, colonialism and, always, language, Philip plays with words, bending and restating them in a way that is reminiscent of jazz. The tension between father tongue (the white Euro-Christian male canon), and mother tongue (Black African female) is always present. Philip is a prolific essayist. Her articles and essays demonstrate a persistent critique and an impassioned concern for issues of social justice and equity in the arts, prompting Selwyn R. Cudjoe's assertion that Philip ‘serves as a lightning rod of black cultural defiance of the Canadian mainstream.’ More to the point is the epigram in Frontiers where Philip dedicates the book to Canada, 'in the effort of becoming a space of true belonging'. It is as an essayist that M. NourbeSe Philip’s role as anti-racist activist is most evident. She was one of the first to make culture her primary focus as she argued passionately and articulately for social justice and equity. Specific controversial events that have been the focus of her essays include the Into the Heart of Africa exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Toronto production of Show Boat, and Caribana. Her essays also put the spotlight on racial representation on arts councils and committees in Canada and there have been definite advances in this area subsequently. It was at a small demonstration concerning the lack of Canadian writers of colour outside of the 1989 PEN Canada gala, that she was confronted by June Callwood. Philip has also taught at the University of Toronto, taught creative fiction at the third year level at York University and has been writer in residence at McMaster University and University of Windsor. Her most recent work, Zong! (2008), is based on a legal decision at the end of the eighteenth century, related to the notorious murder of Africans on board a slave ship. A dramatized reading of this new poem cycle, was workshopped and presented at Harbourfront in Toronto as part of rock.paper.sistahz in 2006. Poems from this collection have been published in Facture, boundary 2 and Fascicle; the later includes four poems, along with an extensive introduction. On April 16, 2012 at b current studio space in Toronto, Philip held her first authorial full-length reading of Zong!-- an innovative interaction-piece lasting seven hours in which both author and audience performed a cacophonous collective reading of the work from beginning to end. In solidarity with this collective reading, another audience-performance was held in Blomfontaine, South Africa. In talking about her own work Philip has said, ‘fiction is about telling lies, but you must be scathingly honest in telling those lies. Poetry is about truth telling, but you need the lie - the artifice of the form to tell those truths.’ Scholar Rinaldo Walcott has engaged critically with the work of M. NourbeSe Philip. His essay ‘'No Language is Neutral': The Politics of Performativity in M. Nourbese Philip's and Dionne Brand's Poetry’ in the book Black Like Who? is a strong example of this scholarly engagement.
In 1988, Marlene Nourbese Philip won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize for the manuscript version of SHE TRIES HER TONGUE, HER SILENCE SOFTLY BREAKS. She is the first anglophone woman to win the prize and only the second Canadian. SHE TRIES HER TONGUE is brilliant, lyrical and passionate. Nourbese Philip writes with controlled intensity about being a woman and a black living in Canada, a country she sees as still, in many respects, colonial. In the important essay on language, racism and colonialism that prefaces the poetry, she states: ‘For too long we have been verbal or linguistic squatters, possessing adversely what is truly ours . . . For the many like me, black and female, it is imperative that our writing begin to recreate our histories and our myths.’ In SHE TRIES HER TONGUE, Nourbese Philip does just that, with bravery and intelligence. ‘A haunting, intelligent poem about black loss and exile. About the wombs of language and culture. About being whole, about resistance . . . a ‘must read.’ - Claire Harris.
Marlene Nourbese Philip (born 3 February 1947), usually credited as M. NourbeSe Philip, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer. Born in the Caribbean Woodlands, Moriah, Trinidad and Tobago, Philip was educated at the University of the West Indies. She subsequently pursued graduate degrees in political science and law at the University of Western Ontario, and practised law in Toronto, Ontario for seven years. She left her law practice in 1983 to devote time to her writing. Philip is known for experimentation with literary form and for her commitment to social justice. Though her writing suggests an in-depth understanding of the canon, Philip's career undoubtedly helped to free her from the constraints of tradition and to nurture her social analysis and criticism. Philip has published three books of poetry, two novels, three books of collected essays and two plays. Her short stories, essays, reviews and articles have appeared in magazines and journals in North America and England and her poetry has been extensively anthologized. Her work - poetry, fiction and non-fiction is taught widely at the university level and is the subject of much academic writing and critique. Her first novel, Harriet's Daughter (1988), is widely used in high school curricula in Ontario, Great Britain and was, for a decade, studied by all children in the Caribbean receiving a high school CXC diploma. It has also been published as an audio cassette, a script for stage and a German language edition. Although categorized as young adult literature, Harriet’s Daughter is a book that can appeal to older children and adults of all ages. Set in Toronto, this novel explores the themes of friendship, self-image, ethics and migration while telling a story that is riveting, funny and technically accomplished. It makes the fact of being Black a very positive and enhancing experience. Philip’s most renowned poetry book, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, was awarded the Casa de las Américas Prize for Literature while still in manuscript form. As she explores themes of race, place, gender, colonialism and, always, language, Philip plays with words, bending and restating them in a way that is reminiscent of jazz. The tension between father tongue (the white Euro-Christian male canon), and mother tongue (Black African female) is always present. Philip is a prolific essayist. Her articles and essays demonstrate a persistent critique and an impassioned concern for issues of social justice and equity in the arts, prompting Selwyn R. Cudjoe's assertion that Philip ‘serves as a lightning rod of black cultural defiance of the Canadian mainstream.’ More to the point is the epigram in Frontiers where Philip dedicates the book to Canada, 'in the effort of becoming a space of true belonging'. It is as an essayist that M. NourbeSe Philip’s role as anti-racist activist is most evident. She was one of the first to make culture her primary focus as she argued passionately and articulately for social justice and equity. Specific controversial events that have been the focus of her essays include the Into the Heart of Africa exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Toronto production of Show Boat, and Caribana. Her essays also put the spotlight on racial representation on arts councils and committees in Canada and there have been definite advances in this area subsequently. It was at a small demonstration concerning the lack of Canadian writers of colour outside of the 1989 PEN Canada gala, that she was confronted by June Callwood. Philip has also taught at the University of Toronto, taught creative fiction at the third year level at York University and has been writer in residence at McMaster University and University of Windsor. Her most recent work, Zong! (2008), is based on a legal decision at the end of the eighteenth century, related to the notorious murder of Africans on board a slave ship. A dramatized reading of this new poem cycle, was workshopped and presented at Harbourfront in Toronto as part of rock.paper.sistahz in 2006. Poems from this collection have been published in Facture, boundary 2 and Fascicle; the later includes four poems, along with an extensive introduction. On April 16, 2012 at b current studio space in Toronto, Philip held her first authorial full-length reading of Zong!-- an innovative interaction-piece lasting seven hours in which both author and audience performed a cacophonous collective reading of the work from beginning to end. In solidarity with this collective reading, another audience-performance was held in Blomfontaine, South Africa. In talking about her own work Philip has said, ‘fiction is about telling lies, but you must be scathingly honest in telling those lies. Poetry is about truth telling, but you need the lie - the artifice of the form to tell those truths.’ Scholar Rinaldo Walcott has engaged critically with the work of M. NourbeSe Philip. His essay ‘'No Language is Neutral': The Politics of Performativity in M. Nourbese Philip's and Dionne Brand's Poetry’ in the book Black Like Who? is a strong example of this scholarly engagement.
Bertram Francis is a British West Indian who has spent the last twenty years away from the Caribbean. Now Independence is looming and he is going back to see the end of colonial rule. But the visit that Francis expects to be a nostalgic homecoming, and a celebration of Third World nationhood, turns sour. His old friends ignore him; his schoolfellows, now in office, have become corrupted; and in the last days of British rule, Bertram Francis slowly has to come to terms with the fact that he is now an outsider in the island he still considers to be home.
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
Award-winning author Caryl Phillips presents a biographical novel of the life of Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, which she wrote as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Caryl Phillips’s A View of the Empire at Sunset is the sweeping story of the life of the woman who became known to the world as Jean Rhys. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica at the height of the British Empire, Rhys lived in the Caribbean for only sixteen years before going to England. A View of the Empire at Sunset is a look into her tempestuous and unsatisfactory life in Edwardian England, 1920s Paris, and then again in London. Her dream had always been to one day return home to Dominica. In 1936, a forty-five-year-old Rhys was finally able to make the journey back to the Caribbean. Six weeks later, she boarded a ship for England, filled with hostility for her home, never to return. Phillips’s gripping new novel is equally a story about the beginning of the end of a system that had sustained Britain for two centuries but that wreaked havoc on the lives of all who lived in the shadow of the empire: both men and women, colonizer and colonized. A true literary feat, A View of the Empire at Sunset uncovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, and family by offering a look into the life of one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century and retelling a profound story that is singularly its own.
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
Two nineteenth-century worlds connected by the insult of slavery are explored in this powerful and haunting novel: the Caribbean plantation hierarchy in all its shades of prejudice, and England at a time when, though slavery had been officially abolished, ‘bird and beast’ shops in London sold African children like pets. To begin: we read the journal of Emily Cartwright, a thirty-year-old spinster, dispatched by her father to visit his sugar estate in the West Indies. For Emily, a model of orderly English womanhood, her finely honed sense of propriety and fashionably ‘liberal’ ideas about slavery are little preparation for the ‘tropical backwater of the Americas’ In prim, cool prose she describes the island life around her, but the controlled surface of her words cannot mask her growing sensual and psychological turmoil - the complication of her attraction toward and revulsion from the lush, alien, often frightening, and insidiously seductive world she has entered, and the profound changes it forces in her. Chief among the agents of change are Arnold Brown, the brutal estate manager, who slowly wins Emily’s mind and heart; and Cambridge, the unbending slave who fears no one - not the ‘massa’s’ daughter, and not Brown, with whom he is locked in a vicious struggle for dignity, spirit, and, finally, life itself. And it is Cambridge who closes the book, telling the story of his life: the brief happiness of his childhood before he was sold into slavery; his education, Christianisation, and eventual emancipation at the hands of his first master in England; his second capture by slave traders, and the events on the island that have led to the death sentence he now faces. In the unfolding of the novel we see the lives of Emily and Cambridge grow inextricably intertwined, and it is the shifting perspective of their brilliantly realized voices that reveals not only the dramas of life on one particular slave plantation but, as well, the underpinnings of the moral hypocrisy that allowed such a system to exist.
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
Born in St. Kitts and brought up in the UK, bestselling author Caryl Phillips has written about and explored the experience of migration for more than thirty years through his spellbinding and award-winning novels, plays, and essays. Now, in a magnificent and beautifully written new book, Phillips reflects on the shifting notions of race, culture, and belonging before and after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Color Me English opens with an inspired story from his boyhood, a poignant account of a shared sense of isolation he felt with the first Muslim boy who joined his school. Phillips then turns to his years living and teaching in the United States, including a moving account of the day the twin towers fell. We follow him across Europe and through Africa while he grapples with making sense of colonial histories and contemporary migrations--engaging with legendary African, African American, and international writers from James Baldwin and Richard Wright to Chinua Achebe and Ha Jin who have aspired to see themselves and their own societies more clearly. A truly transnational reflection on race and culture in a post-9/11 world, Color Me English is a stunning collection of writing that is at once timeless and urgent.
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
'A desperate foolishness. The crops failed. I sold my children.' So begins Caryl Phillips's superb new novel: a voice speaking out of a distant past, describing the consequences of his desperation - his daughter and two sons condemned to the hold of an English slave ship bound for America in 1753. What follow are the stories of these children: Nash, Martha and Travis. Yet as the narrative unfolds, we come to understand that although they are his children, they are also all of slavery's children: Nash, returning to Africa in the 1830s a Christian-educated adult, a missionary to the new territory of Liberia, slowly becoming a part of the world his 'masters' intended him to convert ... Martha, her own daughter and husband sold away from her, settling in the American 'wild west' of the late nineteenth century, freeing herself from slavery but never from the weight of 'such misery in one life' ... Travis, an American GI stationed in a small Yorkshire village during the Second World War, finding an acceptance in England that he doesn't know at home and that he may not be able to promise his half-English son ... These brilliantly resonant stories - along with the slave ship captain's journal and the lamentations of the children's father - become a 'many-tongued chorus of a common memory' so vivid and powerful that it bridges the gaps between continents and centuries, inextricably linking the many generations of the African diaspora, one to the other.Crossing the River - masterfully conceived and crafted, driven by a powerful emotional force - is a bold confirmation of Caryl Phillips's singular gifts.
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
In a vastly ambitious and intensely moving novel, the author of CAMBRIDGE creates a many-tongued chorus of the African diaspora in the complex and riveting story of a desperate father who sells his three children into slavery. .
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
‘A new novel that reimagines the remarkable, tragic, little-known life of Bert Williams (1874-1922), the first black entertainer in the United States to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune. Even as an eleven-year-old child living in Southern California in the late 1800s - his family had recently emigrated from the Bahamas - Bert Williams understood that he had to ‘learn the role that America had set aside for him.’ At the age of twenty-two, after years of struggling for success on the stage, he made the radical decision to do his own ‘impersonation of a negro’: he donned blackface makeup and played the ‘coon’ as a character. Behind this mask, he became a Broadway headliner, starring in the Ziegfeld Follies for eight years and leading his own musical theater company - as influential a comedian as Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and W. C. Fields.’ Williams was a man of great intelligence, elegance, and dignity, but the barriers he broke down onstage continued to bear heavily on his personal life, and the contradictions between the man he was and the character he played were increasingly irreconcilable for him. W. C. Fields called him ‘the funniest man I ever saw, and the saddest man I ever knew,’ and it is this dichotomy at Williams’s core that Caryl Phillips illuminates in narrative. The story of a single life, DANCING IN THE DARK is also a novel about the tragedies of race and identity, and the perils of self-invention, that have long plagued American culture.’
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
A powerful and affecting new book from Caryl Phillips: a brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact that tells the stories of three black men whose lives speak resoundingly to the place and role of the foreigner in English society. Francis Barber, ‘given’ to the great eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson, more companion than servant, afforded an unusual depth of freedom that, after Johnson’s death, hastened his wretched demise . . . Randolph Turpin, who made history in 1951 by defeating Sugar Ray Robinson, becoming Britain’s first black world-champion boxer, a top-class fighter for twelve years whose life ended in debt and despair . . . David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949, the events of whose life called into question the reality of English justice, and whose death at the hands of police in 1969 served as a wake-up call for the entire nation. Each of these men’s stories is rendered in a different, perfectly realized voice. Each illuminates the complexity and drama that lie behind the simple notions of haplessness that have been used to explain the tragedy of these lives. And each explores, in entirely new ways, the themes—at once timeless and urgent—that have been at the heart of all of Caryl Phillips’s remarkable work: belonging, identity, and race.
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
Caryl Phillips, author of THE FINAL PASSAGE and A STATE OF INDEPENDENCE, has written an uncompromising new novel of searing eloquence and disturbing truth, a narrative that sweeps with inspiration over two centuries and three continents. In Africa a man recounts his days within the grinding machine of the slave trade-a black man who though spared manacles because of his assistance to the traders, is caught in an inescapable, vicious paradox: in the eyes of both his masters and his own people he is a pariah-less than a man. In America a young man faces life imprisonment in a Southern jail, brutalized by his guards and isolated from his fellow inmates. His letters home to his family tell of his humiliation and loneliness, but also of his dignity and fierce pride that eventually seal his fate. In Europe where the wounds of war are still open, a woman finds that she cannot, after all, escape the ghetto. For in England, as formerly in Poland, the world outside is hostile, while inside, her life is one of stifling fear and paralyzing seclusion. A novel in three pads, bound together with passion and sorrow, Higher Ground forms a haunting triptych of the dispossessed and the abandoned-of those whose very humanity is being stripped away. It is a formidable achievement.
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
In this richly descriptive and haunting narrative, Caryl Phillips chronicles a journey through modern-day Europe, his quest guided by a moral compass rather than a map. Seeking personal definition within the parameters of growing up black in Europe, he discovers that the natural loneliness and confusion inherent in long jorneys collides with the bigotry of the ‘European Tribe’-a global community of whites caught up in an unyielding, Eurocentric history. Phillips deftly illustrates the scenes and characters he encounters, from Casablanca and Costa del Sol to Venice, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Moscow. He ultimately discovers that ‘Europe is blinded by her past, and does not understand the high price of her churches, art galleries, and history as the prison from which Europeans speak.’
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
A haunting work about the final passage—the exodus of black West Indians from their impoverished islands to the uncertain opportunities of England. In her village of St. Patrick's, Leila Preston has no prospects, a young son, and a husband, Michael, who seems to prefer the company of his mistress. So when her ailing mother travels to England for medical care, Leila decides to follow her. The Final Passage follows the Prestons' outward voyage—and their bewildered attempt to find a home in a country whose rooming houses post signs announcing No vacancies for coloureds—a portrait of hope and dislocation.
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
A German Jewish girl whose life and death are shaped by the atrocities of World War II.her uncle, who undermines the sureties of his own life in order to fight for Israeli statehood.the Jews of the sixteenth-century Venetian ghetto, trapped both literally and figuratively by rabid prejudice . . . Othello, newly arrived in Venice . . . a young Ethiopian Jewish woman resettled in Israel: these are the people whose stories fill ‘The Nature of Blood’ and who, despite their clear differences, share the weight of memory as burden and sustenance. Their individual voices - delineated with masterful precision - speak out of profound depths of feeling about their worlds and their experiences of persecution, courage, and betrayal. But they move beyond the particulars of their own stories as well, their voices twining in an intricate narrative fabric that tells the larger, timeless story of ethnic hatred and racism; of the powers of faith and the shock of its loss; of the cruel patterns of repetition that mar humankind’s history, and the crystalline significance of each individual within its sweep.
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
A German Jewish girl whose life and death are shaped by the atrocities of World War II.her uncle, who undermines the sureties of his own life in order to fight for Israeli statehood.the Jews of the sixteenth-century Venetian ghetto, trapped both literally and figuratively by rabid prejudice . . . Othello, newly arrived in Venice . . . a young Ethiopian Jewish woman resettled in Israel: these are the people whose stories fill ‘The Nature of Blood’ and who, despite their clear differences, share the weight of memory as burden and sustenance. Their individual voices - delineated with masterful precision - speak out of profound depths of feeling about their worlds and their experiences of persecution, courage, and betrayal. But they move beyond the particulars of their own stories as well, their voices twining in an intricate narrative fabric that tells the larger, timeless story of ethnic hatred and racism; of the powers of faith and the shock of its loss; of the cruel patterns of repetition that mar humankind’s history, and the crystalline significance of each individual within its sweep.
Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and came with his family to England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written numerous scripts for film, radio, and television, and his book THE FINAL PASAAGE was the winner of the Malcolm X Award.
Tabloid TV. Its mission is to uncover greed, evil, and wrongdoing among us. But in its hypocritical world, the greatest ugliness can be behind the camera. Mike Phillips's fourth Sam Dean novel offers a tour into that world, where an onscreen murder investigation leads to further murder - within spitting distance of the camera crews. When the TV producer offers journalist Sam Dean the job of tracking down a suspect in the brutal murder of a young woman and her child, he's reluctant to get involved...and when the producer's own life appears to have become tangled up in the story, Sammy realizes only too late that he's become ensnared in more than just a tissue of televised soundbites.
Mike Phillips, OBE (born 1942), is a British writer and broadcaster of Guyanese descent. Phillips was born in Georgetown, Guyana, in 1942, and migrated to Britain as a child in 1956. He was educated at the University of London (English), the University of Essex (Politics), and received a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from Goldsmiths College, London. Phillips worked for the BBC as a journalist and broadcaster between 1972 and 1983, then became a lecturer in media studies at the University of Westminster. In 1992 he became a full-time writer. He has said, 'One of the experiences that made me a writer was the realisation that I was written out of a small piece of literary history in the film Prick Up Your Ears, the biography of controversial playwright Joe Orton, author of Entertaining Mr Sloane. Orton and his friend Kenneth Halliwell were frequent visitors to Essex Road Library where I worked as a library assistant. I regularly spoke to them and didn't know that they were defacing the books, an act that eventually put them in jail. When the scene was depicted on film I felt I should have been included, and realised that you can't rely on others to write your story, sometimes you have to do it yourself.' Phillips is best known for his crime fiction, including four novels featuring black journalist Sam Dean: Blood Rights (1989; serialised on BBC TV), The Late Candidate (1990), Point of Darkness (1994), An Image to Die For (1995). He is also the author of London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain (2001), a series of interlinked autobiographical essays and stories. With his brother, the political journalist Trevor Phillips, he wrote Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1998, HarperCollins, ISBN 0-00-255909-9) to accompany a BBC television series. He writes for The Guardian newspaper, and was formerly cross-cultural curator at the Tate and a trustee of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund.
In 1937 the power-mad racist Generalissimo Trujillo ordered the slaughter of thousands of Haitians. At the heart of MASSACRE RIVER is the loving marriage of the Dominican Pedro and the Haitian Adele in a little town on the Dominican border. Pedro worries that a massacre is in the making; an olive-drab truck packed with armed soldiers rumbles by. Then soon there is the relentless voice on the radio everywhere, urging the slaughter of all the Haitians. Operation Cabezas Haitianas (Haitian Heads) is underway, the soldiers shout, ‘Perejill [Parsley!] Perish! Punish!’ Haitians try to pronounce ‘perejil’ correctly, but fail, and weep. Adele is ordered to say ‘perejil’ but stammers. ‘The characters of this book not only inspired the love and outrage of an extraordinary writer like Philoctète,’ writes Edwige Danticat, ‘but continue to challenge the meaning of community and humanity in all of us.’
René Philoctète (1932–1995) was born in Jérémie, Haiti. Inspired by Rimbaud, he published ten poetry collections, four plays, and three novels. In the early 1960s, he founded the Literary Haiti group, and then a few years later was cofounder of spiralism—the most marked movement in Haitian poetry of the 20th century. Philoctete’s work is based in Haitian realism, and his writing still has a political urgency to it, always fighting against violence and dictatorships. Some of Philoctete’s most notable poems are Saison des hommes (1960), which was also his first published poem, Les Tambours du Soleil (1962), and Ces Iles qui Marchent (1969). His novel Massacre River was translated into English by Linda Coverdale and published by New Directions in 2005. It is noted for its lucid metaphors and experimental prose and features a preface by Edwidge Danticat and an introduction by Lyonel Trouillot.
Two women, separate but bound by hope When Sybille arrives in Paris from Guadeloupe with her infant son, she encounters the extravagant and marvelous Lila. Sybille is young and black with her life still ahead of her; an ex-actress, Lila is white and seventy years old. Despite their differences, the women become inseparable. Haunted by memories, Lila confides in Sybille and, among other things, relates the endless cycle of lovers in her life. Her most cherished memories are of Henry, a black man from the British Caribbean whom she met during the Liberation Day celebrations in Paris. Gradually, Sybille and Lila discover that the West Indies and the charm of Guadeloupe create a deep and common bond between them. The narrative leaps from one side of the Atlantic to the other, playing black against white, past against present, rural Caribbean culture against the urban life of Paris and New York. Sybille's memories of her own tragic childhood form a counterpoint to tales of Henry growing up on the island of St. John. The stories contain mysterious and magical elements revolving around one central theme: how fate works to draw lovers apart. Despite repeated defeats, love still survives. In tales and in legends, mocking all obstacles, it circumvents the game of destiny and the tragic vanity of mankind. Editorial Reviews About the Author Gisèle Pineau is a French novelist, writer, and former psychiatric nurse. Although born in Paris, her origins are Guadeloupean and she has written several books on the difficulties and torments of her childhood as a black person growing up in Parisian society. She now divides her time between France and Guadeloupe. Growing up, C. Dickson travelled extensively with family and lived in all parts of the United States. She left the United States in 1976 for travel in South America, Europe, and Africa and learned French fluently during this time. Now living in France, C. Dickson has acquired dual nationality.
Gisèle Pineau (born 1956) is a French novelist, writer and former psychiatric nurse. Although born in Paris, her origins are Guadeloupean and she has written several books on the difficulties and torments of her childhood as a black person growing up in Parisian society. In particular, she focuses on racism and the effects it can have on a young girl trying to discover her own cultural identity. Her book L'Exil Selon Julia highlights this, as she relies on the memories and experiences of her aged grandmother to help her learn about her society's traditions and her own cultural background. In the book, she also mentions that the discrimination she felt as a youngster did not only apply to French society in Paris, but also to the people of Guadeloupe, who rejected her for being too cosmopolitan upon her return to the land of her ancestors. She for many years lived in Paris and, whilst maintaining her writing career, has also returned to being a psychiatric nurse in order to balance out her life; but she recently has moved back to Guadeloupe.
Gisèle Pineau was born, and spent the first fourteen years of her life, in Paris. Her parents, originally from the island of Guadeloupe, were part of the massive transplantation of Antilleans to the métropole after World War II. Most had left their homeland hoping to improve their lives and their children¹s prospects. Born French nationals, all theoretically enjoyed equal footing with the Parisian French. The color of their skin, however, meant a far different reality for Pineau¹s family and their fellow émigrés. They lived on the outskirts of the city and on the margins of French society and culture. L’exil selon Julia, Gisèle Pineau¹s compelling portrait of alienation and exile, was born of that experience. The critically acclaimed 1996 autobiographical novel, now available in its first English translation, explores the alienation of a girl and her grandmother contending with life between two identities. As a young woman of color and Caribbean ancestry - even though Paris-born - the girl is not accepted, not French enough, for her fellow Parisians. Yet she is too cosmopolitan to fit into Guadeloupean society upon returning to the island for a visit. And since her parents have virtually silenced their Creole legacy hoping to become better assimilated, she has no base of traditional knowledge to fall back on for strength or guidance as she contends with her identity crisis. When her grandmother Julia moves in with the family, the stories, the culture, and the strong sense of cultural identity the older woman brings finally provide the girl with a sense of belonging that transforms her life.
Gisèle Pineau (born May 18, 1956) is a French novelist, writer and former psychiatric nurse. Although born in Paris, her origins are Guadeloupean and she has written several books on the difficulties and torments of her childhood as a black person growing up in Parisian society. In particular, she focuses on racism and the effects it can have on a young girl trying to discover her own cultural identity. Her book L'Exil Selon Julia highlights this, as she relies on the memories and experiences of her aged grandmother to help her learn about her society's traditions and her own cultural background. In the book, she also mentions that the discrimination she felt as a youngster did not only apply to French society in Paris, but also to the people of Guadeloupe, who rejected her for being too cosmopolitan upon her return to the land of her ancestors. She for many years lived in Paris and, whilst maintaining her writing career, has also returned to being a psychiatric nurse in order to balance out her life; but she recently has moved back to Guadeloupe.
Dale’s passionate relationship with Nevin is foundering. Hope and despair, jealousy and yearning battle within him. He must confront the antagonism of family, church and society to his homosexuality. A mysterious illness is threatening the gay community of late 1970s Jamaica. When Dale’s friends succumb to it, his own isolation increases and he is pushed towards desperate action. A SMALL GATHERING OF BONES explores the complexity of homosexual experience with frankness and sensitivity. REVIEW of ME DYING TRIAL: ‘ME DYING TRIAL, an impressive, multigenerational first novel, is by an expatriate, still in her twenties, who clearly has a brilliant career ahead of her.’ – ISLANDS. Jamaican-born Patricia Powell teaches creative writing in the United States. Her first novel, ME DYING TRIAL, was published in 1993. .
Patricia Powell (born 1966) is a Jamaican writer. Born in Jamaica, she moved to the United States in her late teens. She received her bachelor's degree at Wellesley College, and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, where she studied with Michael Ondaatje, among others. She began her teaching career in 1991 in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 2001, Powell was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University. In 2003, she was announced as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at MIT. Most of her work is not autobiographical, but explores personal themes of rejection, displacement, and healing through the lives of highly varied characters, ranging from a gay Jamaican man dying of AIDS, to a cross-dressing Chinese woman immigrant to Jamaica, to Nanny, a heroine of Jamaican independence.
Gwennie lives in a sleepy rural Jamaican backwater. Weighed down by a wayward brood of children and trapped in her unhappy marriage to Walter, she seeks solace in the company of her friends. Soon she is faced with a hard choice: does she flee from her past and the everyday cruelties of family life, or is she to remain a victim of her sense of duty? ME DYING TRIAL is a poignant tale of a woman’s response to sudden change. It combines lightness and joie de vivre with an infinite sadness. Jamaican-born Patricia Powell teaches creative writing in the United States.
Patricia Powell (born 1966) is a Jamaican writer. Born in Jamaica, she moved to the United States in her late teens. She received her bachelor's degree at Wellesley College, and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, where she studied with Michael Ondaatje, among others. She began her teaching career in 1991 in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 2001, Powell was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University. In 2003, she was announced as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at MIT. Most of her work is not autobiographical, but explores personal themes of rejection, displacement, and healing through the lives of highly varied characters, ranging from a gay Jamaican man dying of AIDS, to a cross-dressing Chinese woman immigrant to Jamaica, to Nanny, a heroine of Jamaican independence.
Lavishly illustrated with more than 300 images, this groundbreaking study presents the arts of the Maroons - descendants of rebel slaves from diverse African origins who wrested their freedom from Dutch plantation owners in South America in the eighteenth century and established independent societies in the tropical rain forest. The Prices build on their more than thirty years of involvement with the Maroons, which has produced over a dozen books on Maroon history and culture. Here, they recount the art history of these unique societies, showcase the work of individual artists, and explore the place of the arts in daily life. They also chronicle the challenges faced by today's Maroons as they struggle to maintain their cultural identity despite harsh attacks from without - civil war, a plummeting economy, the introduction of drugs, and invasion of their territory by multinational mining and lumber companies. And readers will follow the spread of Maroon arts beyond the rain forest, as tourists, dealers, collectors, museum curators, and even art forgers enter the picture.
Richard Price (born November 30, 1941, in New York City) is an American anthropologist and historian, best known for his studies of the Caribbean and his experiments with writing ethnography. Sally Price, born Sally Hamlin (16 September 1943) in Boston, is an American anthropologist, best known for her studies of so-called primitive art and its place in the imaginaire of Western viewers.
Almost 200 years ago, the Haitian people launched a revolution which ended slavery and established the world's first independent black republic. But it was a country 'born in ruins'. Once a source of plunder for the French colonial power, the national economy has since been a source of personal enrichment for a series of rapacious rulers. The most recent of these, 'Papa' and 'Baby Doc' Duvalier, have between them ruled Haiti for the last 30 years, turning the country into a virtual 'family business'. Repression, punctuated with occasional periods of liberalization, has sustained a social order in which an estimated 75 per cent of the rural population live on the edge of starvation. Haiti: Family Business traces the historical origins of the 'Duvalier system' and shows how and why it has survived until now. It examines the modern Haitian economy, the country's social structure and the role of the United States, for most of this century a key actor in Haitian political life. The book also looks at the forces for change in a country which has in recent years undergone some economic modernization and assesses the future prospects of the 'Duvalier system'.
New Day recounts the story of Jamaica's first outcry against the English Crown rule that cemented a socio-economic and political framework of oppression three decades post-emancipation. The novel is framed as the aged narrator John Campbell's account of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 and the series of uprisings and negotiations that finally culminates in the creation of the New Constitution in 1944. Reid employed the Jamaican dialect as a springboard for creating a distinctive literary variant and for achieving a greater depth in the English language. He was motivated to write New Day by his discontentment with how the leaders George William Gordon and Paul Bogle of the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) were depicted in the foreign press; by reworking as characters in his novel those who had been negatively portrayed as rebels, he aimed to refute what he viewed as unfair misrepresentations of history.
Victor Stafford Reid (1 May 1913 – 25 August 1987) was a Jamaican writer born in Kingston, Jamaica, who wrote with an intent of influencing the younger generations. He was the author of several novels, three of which were aimed towards children, one play production, and several short stories. As a writer, Reid aimed to instil an awareness of legacy and tradition among the Jamaican people.
‘First published in 1949, Victor Stafford Reid’s New Day was written during the period of political tumult that preceded the constitutional change. The 1930s and 40s were decades of intense social confrontation, as the island’s poor majority, badly affected by the worldwide Depression, fought for trade union and political rights. Riots shook Jamaica and many other Caribbean territories, while charismatic leaders like Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante emerged from the arena of class conflict. Reid, a journalist, was clearly an admirer of Manley and his brand of nationalism (he later wrote a biography of him). In the fight for political self-determination he also saw a longer process of struggle, leading back to one of the key moments in Jamaican history: the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, when an uprising of landless peasants in the southern town of Morant Bay was savagely repressed by the colonial government, with some 450 people executed or otherwise killed in reprisals. His novel accordingly spans an 80-year period between rebellion and the New Constitution, stretching between two turning points - one positive, one negative - in Jamaica’s eventful history. Campbell begins his narrative as an old man awaiting the ‘new day’. It is the night before the New Constitution is to be brought into force, and his mind goes back to the earlier events of 1865. This was a time of great hardship, only three decades after the end of slavery, when land was scarce and hunger widespread. Peaceful attempts to wring concessions from the planters led nowhere; a petition sent by the populace to Queen Victoria asking for help brought only a curt rebuff. Revolt was brewing, led by churchmen such as Paul Bogle, a Baptist preacher. The young John Campbell is not only a witness to these ominous events, but is also an active participant. His father, a respectable landowner of mostly white parentage, sympathises with the grievances expressed by Bogle, but is resolutely opposed to violent action. His brother Davie, on the other hand, is attracted to the message of radical social justice. As tensions rise, we see through John’s eyes the characters and events that led to the uprising, the murder of some local dignitaries and militiamen by Bogle’s followers, and the terrible response meted out by Governor John Eyre. At one point John is in the main square at Morant Bay when the militia opens fire on the protestors: Then over the shouts o’ the people I hear the muskets talking again. This time in the silence I do no’ hear any heartbeats. Neither the muskets as they reload . . . Then, God O, I come back to myself. I am lying on the ground in the square and a dead man is on me . . . What the massacre reveals is the barbarity of Eyre and the colonial authorities (strangely, Governor Eyre received a message of support from Charles Dickens when later hauled before a public inquiry in London), but, at the same time, it suggests that the rioters made a fatal mistake in resorting to force. The rebellion spells the end of John’s childhood, the destruction of his family (his father is wrongly shot as an alleged Bogle sympathiser) and a long period of hiding. The conclusion drawn from the bloody events of 1865 makes sense of what happens many years later, when John’s grandson, Garth, rises to prominence as a leader of the working class in the 1930s. And it is here that Reid’s none-too-subtle political message is hammered home: violence is pointless and self-destructive, negotiation and guile are the way forward. And so we see Garth (like Manley, a London-trained barrister) bamboozling the conservative colonial authorities with his superior knowledge of the law. Where the hotheaded leaders of the Morant Bay rebellion had charged into a futile confrontation with the authorities, Garth is able to play the system, to use the rights enshrined in British law to the advantage of his followers. And John Campbell, witness to both struggles, is in a position to articulate Reid’s insistent conclusion that progress cannot come out of violence. The overtly pro-Manley theme of peaceful constitutional change is just one of many weaknesses in this big and often enthralling novel. There are utterly incredible coincidences and bizarre anachronisms, and some of Reid’s barely concealed real-life figures do not work as fictional characters. The author’s brave attempt to place ‘ordinary’ Jamaicans at the centre of their own history by incorporating dialect-influenced English into the narrative is also a debatable technique. But despite such flaws, the book holds our attention because of the force of its conviction - that a ‘new day’ was possible - and because of the extraordinary story it tells. This story, of a people’s transition from powerlessness to democracy, is indeed an inspiring one, and it is one of the English-speaking Caribbean’s proudest achievements that today’s political rights were won without the bloodshed experienced in other post-colonial societies. New Day is also a fascinating book precisely because of its weaknesses, since it is in its historic context - the birth of a modern Jamaica - that it should be read. This is by no means an objective or neutral historical reconstruction. It is rather a totally committed, blood-and-guts celebration of what its author saw as a great victory. It is a novel about history in the making, a history that may seem distant today but which took place only 60 years ago.’ - James Ferguson. . .
Victor Stafford Reid (1 May 1913 – 25 August 1987) was a Jamaican writer born in Kingston, Jamaica, who wrote with an intent of influencing the younger generations. He was awarded the silver and gold Musgrave Medals (1955–1978), the Order of Jamaica (1980) and the Norman Manley Award for Excellence in Literature in 1981. He was the author of several novels, three of which were aimed towards children, one play production, and several short stories. Two of his most notable works are New Day - ‘the first West Indian novel to be written throughout in a dialect form’ - and The Leopard. As a writer, Reid aimed to instil an awareness of legacy and tradition among the Jamaican people. His writings reflected many of the social and cultural hardships that pervade the time periods illustrated in his literary works. As literary critic Edward Baugh has stated, ‘[Reid’s] writing showed a fondness for the rebel with a cause… he wanted people to learn about their heritage through his writing.’ Reid was one of a handful of writers to emerge from the new literary and nationalist movement that seized Jamaican sentiment in the period of the late 1930s. From this ‘new art’ surfaced many of Reid’s literary contemporaries, including Roger Mais, George Campbell, M. G. Smith, and H. D. Carberry. A common objective among this new generation of writers was an inclination to ‘break away from Victorianism and to associate with the Jamaican independence movement.’ Reid’s emphasis on resistance and struggle is reaffirmed in a 1978 lecture he delivered at the Institute of Jamaica on the topic of cultural revolution in Jamaica post-1938. In the address, Reid contended that the collective discontent of the working class majority was the public assertion of a ‘new brand of loyalty’ that situated itself not only beyond, but more importantly, in direct resistance to imperial rule. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Victor Reid was the son of Alexander Reid, a businessman who worked in the shipping industry in the United States and married Margaret Reid. Along with his two brothers and one sister, Victor grew up and attended school in Jamaica, graduating from Kingston Technical High school in 1929. He called himself a ‘city bred’ person because of his urban background. He was initially involved in advertising, journalism, farming and the book trade, before becoming a writer. Because of success in literature, his early life was prosperous. In 1935, he married his wife Monica and they had four children. He held several posts in the Jamaican government, including Chairman of the Jamaica National Trust Commission, and was a Trustee of the Historic Foundation Research Centre in Kingston. Reid was also well traveled, journeying to Great Britain, East Africa and West Africa, Canada and the United States during his lifetime. His first novel, New Day (1949), chronicles the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 and the series of events that led to the establishment of the new Jamaican constitution in 1944. He found it was difficult to get it published, as his manuscript was written in a different type of language, Creole; Reid had decided to introduce patois in order to familiarize young Jamaicans with black history as well as to instil pride in their heritage. Luckily, a piece of his work in the Jamaican Gleaner newspaper caught the attention of some magazine people that were visiting the island. This led to his first publication and gave him exposure to the literary world. He was soon editing and writing for Spotlight News Magazine and The Toronto Star. Just after New Day, Reid published a novel he had written for young people entitled Sixty-Five, which also portrays the Morant Bay Rebellion, but ‘in an easier gentler sort of way.’ In the wake of the later Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, Reid was inspired to write a novel about the African situation in an attempt to relate that situation to the Jamaican uprising presented in New Day. His representation of this Kenyan rebellion is evidence that he found literary inspiration in these black uprisings. During the time that he was writing The Leopard, he was simultaneously working as an editor of a weekly newspaper called Public Opinion. Once the book was finished, it was ‘snapped up by an American and English publisher and was published.’ Reid’s reviews on his new novel were well received by its first audience. After publishing his first few novels, he decided to shift from literary works on specific events to focus on educating the younger generation in Jamaica. According to Reid, it was more difficult for him to write children’s novels than adult novels, because he ‘had never written down to children.’ Along with his Sixty-Five, Reid also wrote a number of novels for school children including The Young Warriors (1967), which deals with runaway slaves (known as maroons). He also wrote Peter of Mount Ephraim (1971), which dates back to the 1831 Samuel Sharpe slave uprising. His next novel, The Jamaicans, was written in 1976. It commemorates the life of the Juan de Bolas, a pre-Maroon band leader during the English and Spanish quest for supremacy in Jamaica during the mid-17th century. Nanny Town (1983) was Reid’s last published novel and portrays Jamaica’s original Queen Mother who led the Jamaican Maroons to independence from the English. Reid’s final work was a biography of the Jamaican national hero Norman Manley, entitled The Horses of the Morning (1985). Although novels comprised the bulk of Reid’s literary body of work, he was also the author of several stories, collected in Fourteen Jamaican Short Stories (1950), and a play entitled Waterford Bar (1959). Furthermore, edited transcripts of lectures delivered by Reid, such as ‘The Cultural Revolution in Jamaica after 1938’ (1978) and ‘The Writer & His Work: V. S. Reid’ (1986), have been reprinted posthumously in texts such as The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature and the Journal of West Indian Literature, respectively. Reid’s novels focus on the freedom of black culture and describe the struggles of black people. His works tend to focus primarily on the history, hopes, and powers of the Jamaican people. Through his writing, Reid wanted to break apart the ‘distortions of history’ portrayed by the foreign press, which described Jamaican radicals as criminals. He wrote to prove the innocence of people who were rendered to be the opposite. Reid held that ‘[he] must discover, somehow, that these people were not the criminals they were thought to be.’ In a way, he was telling the untold stories of the times. Another important aspect of Reid’s writing included his desire to contribute to the education system. Previously, schools were solely taught from an English perspective and through a colonial lens. Reid, however, wanted people in school to learn about their own heritage through his writing; he wanted people to recognize that blacks, not only Europeans, participated in history. Therefore, Reid wrote novels to be used in Jamaican schools that provided a historical context of their country and heritage. Reid was also constantly reinventing language through his writing. In his first novel, New Day, he created a newly modified language that combines both the elements of Standard English and the native Creole language. Later, in works such as The Leopard, he integrates a singing prose style of writing.
Five Maroon boys pass tests of skill and endurance to become warriors in their village. When they go out hunting to celebrate, they suddenly discover that the forest is full of their enemies, the English Redcoats. In the campaign that follows, the defeat of the Maroons seems certain, but the young warriors help bring about a great victory.
Victor Stafford Reid (1 May 1913 – 25 August 1987) was a Jamaican writer born in Kingston, Jamaica, who wrote with an intent of influencing the younger generations. He was awarded the silver and gold Musgrave Medals (1955–1978), the Order of Jamaica (1980) and the Norman Manley Award for Excellence in Literature in 1981. He was the author of several novels, three of which were aimed towards children, one play production, and several short stories. Two of his most notable works are New Day - ‘the first West Indian novel to be written throughout in a dialect form’ - and The Leopard. As a writer, Reid aimed to instil an awareness of legacy and tradition among the Jamaican people. His writings reflected many of the social and cultural hardships that pervade the time periods illustrated in his literary works. As literary critic Edward Baugh has stated, ‘[Reid’s] writing showed a fondness for the rebel with a cause… he wanted people to learn about their heritage through his writing.’ Reid was one of a handful of writers to emerge from the new literary and nationalist movement that seized Jamaican sentiment in the period of the late 1930s. From this ‘new art’ surfaced many of Reid’s literary contemporaries, including Roger Mais, George Campbell, M. G. Smith, and H. D. Carberry. A common objective among this new generation of writers was an inclination to ‘break away from Victorianism and to associate with the Jamaican independence movement.’ Reid’s emphasis on resistance and struggle is reaffirmed in a 1978 lecture he delivered at the Institute of Jamaica on the topic of cultural revolution in Jamaica post-1938. In the address, Reid contended that the collective discontent of the working class majority was the public assertion of a ‘new brand of loyalty’ that situated itself not only beyond, but more importantly, in direct resistance to imperial rule. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Victor Reid was the son of Alexander Reid, a businessman who worked in the shipping industry in the United States and married Margaret Reid. Along with his two brothers and one sister, Victor grew up and attended school in Jamaica, graduating from Kingston Technical High school in 1929. He called himself a ‘city bred’ person because of his urban background. He was initially involved in advertising, journalism, farming and the book trade, before becoming a writer. Because of success in literature, his early life was prosperous. In 1935, he married his wife Monica and they had four children. He held several posts in the Jamaican government, including Chairman of the Jamaica National Trust Commission, and was a Trustee of the Historic Foundation Research Centre in Kingston. Reid was also well traveled, journeying to Great Britain, East Africa and West Africa, Canada and the United States during his lifetime. His first novel, New Day (1949), chronicles the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 and the series of events that led to the establishment of the new Jamaican constitution in 1944. He found it was difficult to get it published, as his manuscript was written in a different type of language, Creole; Reid had decided to introduce patois in order to familiarize young Jamaicans with black history as well as to instil pride in their heritage. Luckily, a piece of his work in the Jamaican Gleaner newspaper caught the attention of some magazine people that were visiting the island. This led to his first publication and gave him exposure to the literary world. He was soon editing and writing for Spotlight News Magazine and The Toronto Star. Just after New Day, Reid published a novel he had written for young people entitled Sixty-Five, which also portrays the Morant Bay Rebellion, but ‘in an easier gentler sort of way.’ In the wake of the later Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, Reid was inspired to write a novel about the African situation in an attempt to relate that situation to the Jamaican uprising presented in New Day. His representation of this Kenyan rebellion is evidence that he found literary inspiration in these black uprisings. During the time that he was writing The Leopard, he was simultaneously working as an editor of a weekly newspaper called Public Opinion. Once the book was finished, it was ‘snapped up by an American and English publisher and was published.’ Reid’s reviews on his new novel were well received by its first audience. After publishing his first few novels, he decided to shift from literary works on specific events to focus on educating the younger generation in Jamaica. According to Reid, it was more difficult for him to write children’s novels than adult novels, because he ‘had never written down to children.’ Along with his Sixty-Five, Reid also wrote a number of novels for school children including The Young Warriors (1967), which deals with runaway slaves (known as maroons). He also wrote Peter of Mount Ephraim (1971), which dates back to the 1831 Samuel Sharpe slave uprising. His next novel, The Jamaicans, was written in 1976. It commemorates the life of the Juan de Bolas, a pre-Maroon band leader during the English and Spanish quest for supremacy in Jamaica during the mid-17th century. Nanny Town (1983) was Reid’s last published novel and portrays Jamaica’s original Queen Mother who led the Jamaican Maroons to independence from the English. Reid’s final work was a biography of the Jamaican national hero Norman Manley, entitled The Horses of the Morning (1985). Although novels comprised the bulk of Reid’s literary body of work, he was also the author of several stories, collected in Fourteen Jamaican Short Stories (1950), and a play entitled Waterford Bar (1959). Furthermore, edited transcripts of lectures delivered by Reid, such as ‘The Cultural Revolution in Jamaica after 1938’ (1978) and ‘The Writer & His Work: V. S. Reid’ (1986), have been reprinted posthumously in texts such as The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature and the Journal of West Indian Literature, respectively. Reid’s novels focus on the freedom of black culture and describe the struggles of black people. His works tend to focus primarily on the history, hopes, and powers of the Jamaican people. Through his writing, Reid wanted to break apart the ‘distortions of history’ portrayed by the foreign press, which described Jamaican radicals as criminals. He wrote to prove the innocence of people who were rendered to be the opposite. Reid held that ‘[he] must discover, somehow, that these people were not the criminals they were thought to be.’ In a way, he was telling the untold stories of the times. Another important aspect of Reid’s writing included his desire to contribute to the education system. Previously, schools were solely taught from an English perspective and through a colonial lens. Reid, however, wanted people in school to learn about their own heritage through his writing; he wanted people to recognize that blacks, not only Europeans, participated in history. Therefore, Reid wrote novels to be used in Jamaican schools that provided a historical context of their country and heritage. Reid was also constantly reinventing language through his writing. In his first novel, New Day, he created a newly modified language that combines both the elements of Standard English and the native Creole language. Later, in works such as The Leopard, he integrates a singing prose style of writing.
Juan de Bolas, from his inaccessible mountain stronghold, at first led his guerillas in daring assaults against the English military positions and towns, as he fought and argued and traded and loved for a future that would ensure the freedom and sovereignty of his people. The conflicts inside his own camp with his friend, and, at the last, deadly antagonist, Pablo de Leon, who preferred the Spaniards, the beautiful and tender love story with the guerrilla girl, Kedela, is told in a taut poetic prose that fits like a glove over the tensions and brutal encounters of a being born, Little is known, outside of Caribbean annals, of the part played by the Jamaican guerrilla Juan de Bolas in the adventure which established the English in these storied seas. THE JAMAICANS is the great novel which provides a magnificent tale of these times.
Victor Stafford Reid (1 May 1913 – 25 August 1987) was a Jamaican writer born in Kingston, Jamaica, who wrote with an intent of influencing the younger generations. He was awarded the silver and gold Musgrave Medals (1955–1978), the Order of Jamaica (1980) and the Norman Manley Award for Excellence in Literature in 1981. He was the author of several novels, three of which were aimed towards children, one play production, and several short stories. Two of his most notable works are New Day - ‘the first West Indian novel to be written throughout in a dialect form’ - and The Leopard. As a writer, Reid aimed to instil an awareness of legacy and tradition among the Jamaican people. His writings reflected many of the social and cultural hardships that pervade the time periods illustrated in his literary works. As literary critic Edward Baugh has stated, ‘[Reid’s] writing showed a fondness for the rebel with a cause… he wanted people to learn about their heritage through his writing.’ Reid was one of a handful of writers to emerge from the new literary and nationalist movement that seized Jamaican sentiment in the period of the late 1930s. From this ‘new art’ surfaced many of Reid’s literary contemporaries, including Roger Mais, George Campbell, M. G. Smith, and H. D. Carberry. A common objective among this new generation of writers was an inclination to ‘break away from Victorianism and to associate with the Jamaican independence movement.’ Reid’s emphasis on resistance and struggle is reaffirmed in a 1978 lecture he delivered at the Institute of Jamaica on the topic of cultural revolution in Jamaica post-1938. In the address, Reid contended that the collective discontent of the working class majority was the public assertion of a ‘new brand of loyalty’ that situated itself not only beyond, but more importantly, in direct resistance to imperial rule. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Victor Reid was the son of Alexander Reid, a businessman who worked in the shipping industry in the United States and married Margaret Reid. Along with his two brothers and one sister, Victor grew up and attended school in Jamaica, graduating from Kingston Technical High school in 1929. He called himself a ‘city bred’ person because of his urban background. He was initially involved in advertising, journalism, farming and the book trade, before becoming a writer. Because of success in literature, his early life was prosperous. In 1935, he married his wife Monica and they had four children. He held several posts in the Jamaican government, including Chairman of the Jamaica National Trust Commission, and was a Trustee of the Historic Foundation Research Centre in Kingston. Reid was also well traveled, journeying to Great Britain, East Africa and West Africa, Canada and the United States during his lifetime. His first novel, New Day (1949), chronicles the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 and the series of events that led to the establishment of the new Jamaican constitution in 1944. He found it was difficult to get it published, as his manuscript was written in a different type of language, Creole; Reid had decided to introduce patois in order to familiarize young Jamaicans with black history as well as to instil pride in their heritage. Luckily, a piece of his work in the Jamaican Gleaner newspaper caught the attention of some magazine people that were visiting the island. This led to his first publication and gave him exposure to the literary world. He was soon editing and writing for Spotlight News Magazine and The Toronto Star. Just after New Day, Reid published a novel he had written for young people entitled Sixty-Five, which also portrays the Morant Bay Rebellion, but ‘in an easier gentler sort of way.’ In the wake of the later Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, Reid was inspired to write a novel about the African situation in an attempt to relate that situation to the Jamaican uprising presented in New Day. His representation of this Kenyan rebellion is evidence that he found literary inspiration in these black uprisings. During the time that he was writing The Leopard, he was simultaneously working as an editor of a weekly newspaper called Public Opinion. Once the book was finished, it was ‘snapped up by an American and English publisher and was published.’ Reid’s reviews on his new novel were well received by its first audience. After publishing his first few novels, he decided to shift from literary works on specific events to focus on educating the younger generation in Jamaica. According to Reid, it was more difficult for him to write children’s novels than adult novels, because he ‘had never written down to children.’ Along with his Sixty-Five, Reid also wrote a number of novels for school children including The Young Warriors (1967), which deals with runaway slaves (known as maroons). He also wrote Peter of Mount Ephraim (1971), which dates back to the 1831 Samuel Sharpe slave uprising. His next novel, The Jamaicans, was written in 1976. It commemorates the life of the Juan de Bolas, a pre-Maroon band leader during the English and Spanish quest for supremacy in Jamaica during the mid-17th century. Nanny Town (1983) was Reid’s last published novel and portrays Jamaica’s original Queen Mother who led the Jamaican Maroons to independence from the English. Reid’s final work was a biography of the Jamaican national hero Norman Manley, entitled The Horses of the Morning (1985). Although novels comprised the bulk of Reid’s literary body of work, he was also the author of several stories, collected in Fourteen Jamaican Short Stories (1950), and a play entitled Waterford Bar (1959). Furthermore, edited transcripts of lectures delivered by Reid, such as ‘The Cultural Revolution in Jamaica after 1938’ (1978) and ‘The Writer & His Work: V. S. Reid’ (1986), have been reprinted posthumously in texts such as The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature and the Journal of West Indian Literature, respectively. Reid’s novels focus on the freedom of black culture and describe the struggles of black people. His works tend to focus primarily on the history, hopes, and powers of the Jamaican people. Through his writing, Reid wanted to break apart the ‘distortions of history’ portrayed by the foreign press, which described Jamaican radicals as criminals. He wrote to prove the innocence of people who were rendered to be the opposite. Reid held that ‘[he] must discover, somehow, that these people were not the criminals they were thought to be.’ In a way, he was telling the untold stories of the times. Another important aspect of Reid’s writing included his desire to contribute to the education system. Previously, schools were solely taught from an English perspective and through a colonial lens. Reid, however, wanted people in school to learn about their own heritage through his writing; he wanted people to recognize that blacks, not only Europeans, participated in history. Therefore, Reid wrote novels to be used in Jamaican schools that provided a historical context of their country and heritage. Reid was also constantly reinventing language through his writing. In his first novel, New Day, he created a newly modified language that combines both the elements of Standard English and the native Creole language. Later, in works such as The Leopard, he integrates a singing prose style of writing.
This is a strange, magical tale of the haunted and the hunted — the story of a double chase: a black man’s pursuit of a white man with whom he has been deeply involved and who is now quite mad, and a leopard’s pursuit of the black man. Written by a West Indian, The Leopard evokes the mystery, the beauty, and the terror of the African jungle and its human and animal inhabitants. The story is told from the point of view of a Kikuyu of Kenya, so that it is totally unlike any other book dealing with the tangled relationships between the natives and the white settlers of that troubled land. What gives this exciting story its haunting quality is the spirit of primitive animism that informs it. Part of the magic of the book comes from the combination of almost lyric prose with the earthy and realistic presentation of its scenes and characters. Part of the magic remains undefinable. It is a book that totally captures the imagination, and no one can put it down without a feeling of sympathy and admiration for its tragic hero, an outlaw who could have been nothing save what he is.
Victor Stafford Reid (1 May 1913 – 25 August 1987) was a Jamaican writer born in Kingston, Jamaica, who wrote with an intent of influencing the younger generations. He was the author of several novels, three of which were aimed towards children, one play production, and several short stories. As a writer, Reid aimed to instil an awareness of legacy and tradition among the Jamaican people.
‘Beneath its animism and naked emotion, this book speaks eloquently of the ways of men to one another.’ - New York Herald Tribune Book Review . . . In Kenya at the time of the Mau Mau rebellion a black warrior, Nebu, sets out to track down and kill a white man, Bwana Gibson. Gibson’s wife had been Nebu’s mistress. When she admitted bearing a crippled half-breed son, her husband killed her and fled, half-mad, into the African jungle. In pursuing his master and oppressor, Nebu, with a mortal wound in his side, finds himself pursued—by the leopard, waiting to pounce at the first opportunity. From these element~ of brutality and terror the author, with a blend of singing lyricism and earthy realism, has evoked a haunting vision of a man confronting evil at its dangerous level—in the depths of his own soul. VICTOR STAFFORD REID, a native of Jamaica, was a correspondent for the London Daily Express. For his first novel, New Day, he received the Musgrave Silver Medal as an outstanding Jamaican in the arts.
Victor Stafford Reid (1 May 1913 – 25 August 1987) was a Jamaican writer born in Kingston, Jamaica, who wrote with an intent of influencing the younger generations. He was the author of several novels, three of which were aimed towards children, one play production, and several short stories. As a writer, Reid aimed to instil an awareness of legacy and tradition among the Jamaican people.
C L R James was born in the British Crown Colony of Trinidad and Tobago in 1901. This colonial birthplace formed his worldview, propelling him onto his place as one of the leading intellectuals of the African revolution. He was a friend and inspiration to Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, the two leaders of the first generation of independence struggles. His account of Toussaint L'Ouverture s slave rebellion in Haiti is one of the great historical works of the twentieth century. His studies of Hegel and Marx became part of the common knowledge of several generations of radicals in America, Europe, the Caribbean and Africa. His thought was also shaped by the experience of his migration to Britain. James was a product of the colonial education system, a world he was a part of, even as he exposed and fought it. His influence was truly global with years spent teaching in the U.S. at the University of the District of Columbia, and serving as inspiration in African and West Indian independence movements. In Britain today, and worldwide, he is known as both a radical and also for his extraordinary autobiography, Beyond a Boundary, which is universally agreed to be the greatest book about cricket ever written.
David Renton is a Senior Research Fellow in History at Sunderland University. He specializes in the history of fascism and communism. His other works include Fascism and Classical Marxism: Socialist Theory within the Second International.
'Anyone willing to believe that a grown shark will take a small boy to be his friend instead of his lunch can have some mildly shocking fun with a sly yarn called Son of Ti-Coyo. A sequel to Ti-Coyo and His Shark (published in 1951), it is so neatly laced with urbane craft and malice that many parents will think twice before sharing it with the kiddies. Guinéo, son of Ti-Coyo, is a Martinique moppet with the congenital amorality of a growing barracuda. He comes by his wicked ways naturally, since Daddy Ti-Coyo and Grandfather Cocoyo are born thieves who have come up in their island world by means that normally lead to the guillotine. Now respectable, they live on a prosperous seaside plantation. Their chief idiosyncracy is that they keep Manidou, a huge pet shark, in a specially built tank that has an outlet to the sea. Guinéo the boy and Manidou the shark are pals. They take off daily for long ocean spins, the boy riding easily by keeping tight hold of the shark's lateral fin. Guinéo likes to feed his voracious playmate, especially with human tidbits. By pretending to be helpless far offshore, he sometimes attracts a rescuing fisherman, whose extended arms are nipped off by the waiting shark. When the fisherman pitches into the water, Manidou gets the rest of him. Guinéo, who hates to study, gets rid of his tutor by taking him out for a row, pulling the boat's plug and letting Manidou handle the rest. Only Mama is really shocked by her son's tricks; daddy and grandparents can hardly conceal their admiration for the little fellow. What saves Son of Ti-Coyo from being just plain grisly is Clément Richer's tongue-in-cheek style, smooth, graceful and literate. A native of Martinique, he now lives in Paris, where he has twice been honored by the French Academy. – TIME MAGAZINE, Monday July 26, 1954.
Clement Richler was a prolific Martinican writer of entertaining tales. Although Ti-Coyo and His Shark is the first book by Clement Richer to be published in the United States, he is the author of seven novels. Most of his works are focused in one way or another on the sea, with settings from The West Indies to France, Mexico and Spain. Clement Richler was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, in 1914, went to college in the little French town of Moulins, and later studied in Paris in the Faculté des Lettres (Sorbonne) and the Ecole des Sciences Politiques. In 1937 his first novel was published. He won numerous literary prizes in France, among them the Prix Paul Flat, awarded to him in 1941, and again in 1948, by the Académie Française.
MORE daring that Mr. Belloc - who included a tiger among his suggestions for domestic pets - though scarcely more cynical, Clement Richer lauds eloquently the charms of the shark. Whether he tells a sophisticated story simply or a simple story with sophistication, is hard to determine. All that one can say is that he sets violence, horror and tragedy dancing to an odd, enchanting, little jig of his own. Mont Pele thunders and flames, overwhelming the island of Martinique: a boy Trains a shark to bite in two the competitors in diving for American dollars and English guineas: a rich planter is overwhelmed in a lava-flow, his daughter marries the shark-tamer, and looks like living happily ever after. These are the bare bones of this queer, idyllic, heartless, lyrical story, where terror becomes a tamed denizen of fairyland, and the basest of human motives live in a curious shimmer of innocence. In this over-moral world of the New Puritanism, it sounds a clear note of laughter and uninhibited delight. It is scarcely necessary to mention the excellence of Gerard Hopkins's translation, were it not that its very quality may induce the reader to forget that what he is reading is a translation at all.
Clement Richler was a prolific Martinican writer of entertaining tales. Although Ti-Coyo and His Shark is the first book by Clement Richer to be published in the United States, he is the author of seven novels. Most of his works are focused in one way or another on the sea, with settings from The West Indies to France, Mexico and Spain. Clement Richler was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, in 1914, went to college in the little French town of Moulins, and later studied in Paris in the Faculté des Lettres (Sorbonne) and the Ecole des Sciences Politiques. In 1937 his first novel was published. He won numerous literary prizes in France, among them the Prix Paul Flat, awarded to him in 1941, and again in 1948, by the Académie Française.
In Ti-Coyo and His Shark, an immoral fable for sophisticated people, wickedness triumphs because it is charming. The scene is the exotic Caribbean before, during, and after the famous eruption of Mount Pelée. Ti-Coyo, a shrewd and winning half-caste boy, rescues a wounded baby shark, which becomes his faithful servant as it grows into a monster fearful to everyone but him. With the help of this behemoth Ti-Coyo becomes rich and wins the flaxen-haired princess of his dreams. It is the shark, too, who saves Ti-Coyo, his ill-assorted parents, and his sweetheart when Mount Pelée pours destruction over St. Pierre. Altogether this book by a martiniquais educated in France (where Ti-Coyo was showered with prizes) is an unholy delight. REVIEW - Ti-Coyo, a shrewd and winning half-caste boy rescues a wounded baby shark, which becomes his faithful sevant as it grows into a monster fearful to everyone but him. . . ‘Ti-Coyo owes this world few debts: his mulatto father is a lame hunchback, his Hindu-Chinese mother ‘a female monster with a squint.’ The family, which lives in the Martinique port of St. Pierre, is forever poor, and to buy the canoe he desperately wants, Ti-Coyo dives for coins whenever the liners pull in. But the competition is terrific; dozens of strapping Negro divers leave only small change for little fellows like Ti-Coyo. How, wonders the boy, can he liquidate his competition? Ti-Coyo's shockingly unethical solution is the core of Clement Richer's novel, which the book jacket accurately calls ‘an immoral fable for sophisticated people.’ Ti-Coyo catches a baby shark and raises it in a pond. Thanks to the fish Ti-Coyo provides, the shark grows up grateful. Then Ti-Coyo goes after the competition. When a liner full of rich Yankees reaches port, Ti-Coyo and his domesticated shark, Manidou, are waiting. The coins fall, the Negroes dive, Manidou darts out and snaps a diver in two. Ti-Coyo slips into the water, scoops up the coins. The shark looks on benevolently. Everyone thinks it is a miracle that the boy has survived; but the miracle is repeated several times. Soon no Negro dares dive any more, and Ti-Coyo has a monopoly. Ti-Coyo remains singularly untroubled by moral scruples. With the money he makes, his family builds a new house with a tiled roof and Venetian blinds. Finally, when the great volcano of Mount Pelee erupts and leaves St. Pierre a cemetery of cinders, Manidou saves Ti-Coyo and his family by guiding them to a safe shore. Love has repaid love. While not so exotic as the Marcelin brothers' The Pencil of God, Ti-Coyo and His Shark shines with a rich blend of Caribbean mockery and Western sophistication. Author Richer, 37, a native of Martinique who has lived in France since 1927, writes with charm and is tactful enough to keep his fable short. What does it all mean? A satire on imperialism, perhaps, with Ti-Coyo symbolizing the native opportunist? Clement Richer, a nonpolitical fellow who describes himself as a misanthrope, is wise enough not to say; all that can be seen is his literary eye closing in a wink.’ – TIME MAGAZINE, Monday, Sep. 03, 1951.
Clement Richler was a prolific Martinican writer of entertaining tales. Although Ti-Coyo and His Shark is the first book by Clement Richer to be published in the United States, he is the author of seven novels. Most of his works are focused in one way or another on the sea, with settings from The West Indies to France, Mexico and Spain. Clement Richler was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, in 1914, went to college in the little French town of Moulins, and later studied in Paris in the Faculté des Lettres (Sorbonne) and the Ecole des Sciences Politiques. In 1937 his first novel was published. He won numerous literary prizes in France, among them the Prix Paul Flat, awarded to him in 1941, and again in 1948, by the Académie Française.
For professionals and amateurs alike, the Jamaican Cultural Development Commission's annual literary competition offers a rare opportunity for testing skills and reinforcing the literary aspects of Jamaica's cultural heritage. This anthology features prize-winning stories from 1967 to 1983 and reflects themes which have caught the attention of all Jamaicans in the first 25 years since the country's independence.
Travel information and a basic Creole-French vocabulary supplement a portrait of the Caribbean republic's history and culture.
Selden Rodman (February 19, 1909 – November 2, 2002) was an American writer and poet. Selden Rodman was born to a wealthy family in Manhattan and attended Yale University. He traveled widely, and published over 40 books in his lifetime. His most frequent subjects were Haitian art, other writers, as well as several poetry anthologies and travelogues. Rodman also co-founded the magazine Common Sense with Alfred Bingham.
A series of profiles of the Haitian artists, beginning with vaudou priest Hector Hyppolite Philome Obin Regault Benoit, Wilson Bigaud, and George Liataud.
Selden Rodman (February 19, 1909 – November 2, 2002) was an American writer and poet. Selden Rodman was born to a wealthy family in Manhattan and attended Yale University. He traveled widely, and published over 40 books in his lifetime. His most frequent subjects were Haitian art, other writers, as well as several poetry anthologies and travelogues. Rodman also co-founded the magazine Common Sense with Alfred Bingham. His sister Nancy was married to the writer Dwight Macdonald. He was married to Maia Wojciechowska but they got divorced.
The Revolutionists is in the great tradition of verse plays. Its subject is the revolt of the slaves of Haiti. Here, compact of place and time, is the drama of every violent revolution: the decay of the 'old order, the brutality of the masters, the triumph of clever leaders, tyranny and terrorism, the struggles of the revolutionists among themselves. The leading characters in the heroic drama are passionate human beings, fallible even in greatness : Toussaint Louverture, the warm-hearted moderate, caught in a web of forces beyond his control; Dessalines, the simple extremist who becomes the victim of his own cruelty; Henry Christophe, a dictator for whom the audience feels sympathy and understanding even as he carries the State he has created to destruction. The Revolutionists covers an immense, picturesque, and unfamiliar canvas, and the author has provided the reading version with a novel feature, a sort of running commentary on the personalities, history, settings of Haiti at the time of the revolution. Already this play has been acclaimed in Haiti, where it is being translated into French, and where it will be published and produced with an all-Haitian cast in the Fall.
Selden Rodman (February 19, 1909 – November 2, 2002) was an American writer and poet. Selden Rodman was born to a wealthy family in Manhattan and attended Yale University. He traveled widely, and published over 40 books in his lifetime. His most frequent subjects were Haitian art, other writers, as well as several poetry anthologies and travelogues. Rodman also co-founded the magazine Common Sense with Alfred Bingham. His sister Nancy was married to the writer Dwight Macdonald. He was married to Maia Wojciechowska but they got divorced.
The paucity of historical writing on the Upper Guinea Coast is striking, because the region has been in long and unbroken contact with Europe since the middle of the fifteenth century, and the records of those centuries survive in considerable quantities. Though every opportunity was taken to utilize the insights from archaeology, ethnography and the like, where these were forthcoming, it remains true that this study is based on European documents. This reliance on the European written word is not itself inconsistent with aspiring to the ‘new orthodoxy’ of African history: namely, the writing of the history of Africa as such, and not as an appendage to anything else. There certainly are limitations imposed by the nature of the European sources. Christopher Fyfe, illustrating the Sierra Leone Inheritance by selected documents, rightly contends that ‘a barrier is set between us and pre-European Sierra Leone. We can only glimpse it through European eyes, and must infer-not learn directly from unmediated African sources-how its people lived.’ Yet, stumbling over such harriers is an occupational hazard for those who seek to reconstruct the history not only of Africa’s peoples but also of all the voiceless millions who worked and died.’ - from the Introduction by the author.
Walter Rodney (March 23, 1942 – June 13, 1980) was a prominent Guyanese historian and political figure. Born to a working class family, Rodney was a bright student, attending Queen's College in Guyana and then attending university on a scholarship at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, graduating in 1963. Walter Rodney earned his PhD in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England. His dissertation focused on the slave trade on the upper Guinea coast. The paper was published in 1970 under the name, A HISTORY OF THE UPPER GUINEA COAST, 1545-1800 and it was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the area. He traveled widely and became very well known around the world as an activist and scholar. He taught for a time in Tanzania after graduating, and later in Jamaica at his alma mater - UWI Mona. Rodney was sharply critical of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. When the Jamaican government, led by prime minister Hugh Shearer, banned him, in October 1968, from ever returning to the country, because of his advocacy for the working poor in that country, riots broke out, eventually claiming the lives of several people and causing millions of dollars in damages. These riots, which started on October 16, 1968, are now known as the Rodney Riots, and they triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, documented in his book, THE GROUNDINGS WITH MY BROTHERS. Rodney became a prominent Pan-Africanist, and was important in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and North America. While living in Dar es Salaam he was influential in developing a new centre of African learning and discussion. Rodney's most influential book was HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, published in 1972. In it he described an Africa which had been consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial. In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was supposed to take a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, forming the Working People's Alliance, against the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned. In 1980, Rodney was killed by a bomb in his car while running for office in Guyanese elections. Rodney was survived by his wife, Pat, and three children. Walter's brother, Donald, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith had given Rodney the bomb that killed him. Smith fled to French Guiana after the killing, where he died in 2002. Rodney's death was commemorated in a poem by Martin Carter entitled ‘For Walter Rodney’. In 2004, his widow, Patricia, and children donated his papers to the Robert L. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. Since 2004, an annual Walter Rodney Symposium has been held each 23 March (Rodney's birthday) at the Center under the sponsorship of the Library and the Political Science Department of Clark Atlanta University, and under the patronage of the Rodney family.
The paucity of historical writing on the Upper Guinea Coast is striking, because the region has been in long and unbroken contact with Europe since the middle of the fifteenth century, and the records of those centuries survive in considerable quantities. Though every opportunity was taken to utilize the insights from archaeology, ethnography and the like, where these were forthcoming, it remains true that this study is based on European documents. This reliance on the European written word is not itself inconsistent with aspiring to the ‘new orthodoxy’ of African history: namely, the writing of the history of Africa as such, and not as an appendage to anything else. There certainly are limitations imposed by the nature of the European sources. Christopher Fyfe, illustrating the Sierra Leone Inheritance by selected documents, rightly contends that ‘a barrier is set between us and pre-European Sierra Leone. We can only glimpse it through European eyes, and must infer-not learn directly from unmediated African sources-how its people lived.’ Yet, stumbling over such harriers is an occupational hazard for those who seek to reconstruct the history not only of Africa’s peoples but also of all the voiceless millions who worked and died.’ - from the Introduction by the author.
Walter Rodney (March 23, 1942 – June 13, 1980) was a prominent Guyanese historian and political figure. Born to a working class family, Rodney was a bright student, attending Queen's College in Guyana and then attending university on a scholarship at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, graduating in 1963. Walter Rodney earned his PhD in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England. His dissertation focused on the slave trade on the upper Guinea coast. The paper was published in 1970 under the name, A HISTORY OF THE UPPER GUINEA COAST, 1545-1800 and it was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the area. He traveled widely and became very well known around the world as an activist and scholar. He taught for a time in Tanzania after graduating, and later in Jamaica at his alma mater - UWI Mona. Rodney was sharply critical of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. When the Jamaican government, led by prime minister Hugh Shearer, banned him, in October 1968, from ever returning to the country, because of his advocacy for the working poor in that country, riots broke out, eventually claiming the lives of several people and causing millions of dollars in damages. These riots, which started on October 16, 1968, are now known as the Rodney Riots, and they triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, documented in his book, THE GROUNDINGS WITH MY BROTHERS. Rodney became a prominent Pan-Africanist, and was important in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and North America. While living in Dar es Salaam he was influential in developing a new centre of African learning and discussion. Rodney's most influential book was HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, published in 1972. In it he described an Africa which had been consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial. In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was supposed to take a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, forming the Working People's Alliance, against the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned. In 1980, Rodney was killed by a bomb in his car while running for office in Guyanese elections. Rodney was survived by his wife, Pat, and three children. Walter's brother, Donald, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith had given Rodney the bomb that killed him. Smith fled to French Guiana after the killing, where he died in 2002. Rodney's death was commemorated in a poem by Martin Carter entitled ‘For Walter Rodney’. In 2004, his widow, Patricia, and children donated his papers to the Robert L. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. Since 2004, an annual Walter Rodney Symposium has been held each 23 March (Rodney's birthday) at the Center under the sponsorship of the Library and the Political Science Department of Clark Atlanta University, and under the patronage of the Rodney family.
The paucity of historical writing on the Upper Guinea Coast is striking, because the region has been in long and unbroken contact with Europe since the middle of the fifteenth century, and the records of those centuries survive in considerable quantities. Though every opportunity was taken to utilize the insights from archaeology, ethnography and the like, where these were forthcoming, it remains true that this study is based on European documents. This reliance on the European written word is not itself inconsistent with aspiring to the ‘new orthodoxy’ of African history: namely, the writing of the history of Africa as such, and not as an appendage to anything else. There certainly are limitations imposed by the nature of the European sources. Christopher Fyfe, illustrating the Sierra Leone Inheritance by selected documents, rightly contends that ‘a barrier is set between us and pre-European Sierra Leone. We can only glimpse it through European eyes, and must infer-not learn directly from unmediated African sources-how its people lived.’ Yet, stumbling over such harriers is an occupational hazard for those who seek to reconstruct the history not only of Africa’s peoples but also of all the voiceless millions who worked and died.’ - from the Introduction by the author.
Walter Rodney (March 23, 1942 – June 13, 1980) was a prominent Guyanese historian and political figure. Born to a working class family, Rodney was a bright student, attending Queen's College in Guyana and then attending university on a scholarship at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, graduating in 1963. Walter Rodney earned his PhD in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England. His dissertation focused on the slave trade on the upper Guinea coast. The paper was published in 1970 under the name, A HISTORY OF THE UPPER GUINEA COAST, 1545-1800 and it was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the area. He traveled widely and became very well known around the world as an activist and scholar. He taught for a time in Tanzania after graduating, and later in Jamaica at his alma mater - UWI Mona. Rodney was sharply critical of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. When the Jamaican government, led by prime minister Hugh Shearer, banned him, in October 1968, from ever returning to the country, because of his advocacy for the working poor in that country, riots broke out, eventually claiming the lives of several people and causing millions of dollars in damages. These riots, which started on October 16, 1968, are now known as the Rodney Riots, and they triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, documented in his book, THE GROUNDINGS WITH MY BROTHERS. Rodney became a prominent Pan-Africanist, and was important in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and North America. While living in Dar es Salaam he was influential in developing a new centre of African learning and discussion. Rodney's most influential book was HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, published in 1972. In it he described an Africa which had been consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial. In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was supposed to take a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, forming the Working People's Alliance, against the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned. In 1980, Rodney was killed by a bomb in his car while running for office in Guyanese elections. Rodney was survived by his wife, Pat, and three children. Walter's brother, Donald, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith had given Rodney the bomb that killed him. Smith fled to French Guiana after the killing, where he died in 2002. Rodney's death was commemorated in a poem by Martin Carter entitled ‘For Walter Rodney’. In 2004, his widow, Patricia, and children donated his papers to the Robert L. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. Since 2004, an annual Walter Rodney Symposium has been held each 23 March (Rodney's birthday) at the Center under the sponsorship of the Library and the Political Science Department of Clark Atlanta University, and under the patronage of the Rodney family.
This book deals with the section of the West African Coast between the Gambia and Cape Mount. Although arbitrarily partitioned between the British, French, and Portuguese in the nineteenth century the area has a historical, geographical, and ethnical unity. Dr. Rodney's work is based on the hitherto unexploited archives of Lisbon and Rome, as well as on a thorough survey of the secondary sources. He reconstructs a picture of African society in the mid-sixteenth century when it was largely free from European influences, and in later chapters provides valuable material concerning European activities both in the slave trade and other forms of commerce.
Walter Rodney (March 23, 1942 – June 13, 1980) was a prominent Guyanese historian and political figure. Born to a working class family, Rodney was a bright student, attending Queen's College in Guyana and then attending university on a scholarship at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, graduating in 1963. Walter Rodney earned his PhD in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England. His dissertation focused on the slave trade on the upper Guinea coast. The paper was published in 1970 under the name, A HISTORY OF THE UPPER GUINEA COAST, 1545-1800 and it was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the area. He traveled widely and became very well known around the world as an activist and scholar. He taught for a time in Tanzania after graduating, and later in Jamaica at his alma mater - UWI Mona. Rodney was sharply critical of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. When the Jamaican government, led by prime minister Hugh Shearer, banned him, in October 1968, from ever returning to the country, because of his advocacy for the working poor in that country, riots broke out, eventually claiming the lives of several people and causing millions of dollars in damages. These riots, which started on October 16, 1968, are now known as the Rodney Riots, and they triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, documented in his book, THE GROUNDINGS WITH MY BROTHERS. Rodney became a prominent Pan-Africanist, and was important in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and North America. While living in Dar es Salaam he was influential in developing a new centre of African learning and discussion. Rodney's most influential book was HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, published in 1972. In it he described an Africa which had been consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial. In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was supposed to take a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, forming the Working People's Alliance, against the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned. In 1980, Rodney was killed by a bomb in his car while running for office in Guyanese elections. Rodney was survived by his wife, Pat, and three children. Walter's brother, Donald, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith had given Rodney the bomb that killed him. Smith fled to French Guiana after the killing, where he died in 2002. Rodney's death was commemorated in a poem by Martin Carter entitled ‘For Walter Rodney’. In 2004, his widow, Patricia, and children donated his papers to the Robert L. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. Since 2004, an annual Walter Rodney Symposium has been held each 23 March (Rodney's birthday) at the Center under the sponsorship of the Library and the Political Science Department of Clark Atlanta University, and under the patronage of the Rodney family.
HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA is a major challenge to all of us. It shows a direct correlation between the development of Europe and the underdevelopment of Africa. This book, which is written with the simplicity and clarity characteristic of Rodney's writings, is compulsory reading. This wide-reaching volume shows how Africa developed before the coming of the Europeans up to the 15th century, and shows Africa's contribution to European capitalist development in the pre-colonial period. Colonialism is then shown as a system for under developing Africa. is among the most insightful analysis of the reasons behind the underdevelopment of the African continent. The book is written in a Marxist context. The author demonstrates exceptional analytical depth and critical research into how European colonialism and capitalism were a double edged sword in creating deep rooted underdevelopment of the continent which has been very difficult to uproot. Other publications of the author include A HISTORY OF THE UPPER GUINEA COAST 1545 TO 1800 (The Clarendon Press, London), THE GROUNDINGS WITH MY BROTHERS (Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, London) and a number of papers in international journals and reviews of African history.
Walter Rodney (March 23, 1942 – June 13, 1980) was a prominent Guyanese historian and political figure. Born to a working class family, Rodney was a bright student, attending Queen's College in Guyana and then attending university on a scholarship at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, graduating in 1963. Walter Rodney earned his PhD in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England. His dissertation focused on the slave trade on the upper Guinea coast. The paper was published in 1970 under the name, A HISTORY OF THE UPPER GUINEA COAST, 1545-1800 and it was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the area. He traveled widely and became very well known around the world as an activist and scholar. He taught for a time in Tanzania after graduating, and later in Jamaica at his alma mater - UWI Mona. Rodney was sharply critical of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. When the Jamaican government, led by prime minister Hugh Shearer, banned him, in October 1968, from ever returning to the country, because of his advocacy for the working poor in that country, riots broke out, eventually claiming the lives of several people and causing millions of dollars in damages. These riots, which started on October 16, 1968, are now known as the Rodney Riots, and they triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, documented in his book, THE GROUNDINGS WITH MY BROTHERS. Rodney became a prominent Pan-Africanist, and was important in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and North America. While living in Dar es Salaam he was influential in developing a new centre of African learning and discussion. Rodney's most influential book was HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, published in 1972. In it he described an Africa which had been consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial. In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was supposed to take a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, forming the Working People's Alliance, against the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned. In 1980, Rodney was killed by a bomb in his car while running for office in Guyanese elections. Rodney was survived by his wife, Pat, and three children. Walter's brother, Donald, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith had given Rodney the bomb that killed him. Smith fled to French Guiana after the killing, where he died in 2002. Rodney's death was commemorated in a poem by Martin Carter entitled ‘For Walter Rodney’. In 2004, his widow, Patricia, and children donated his papers to the Robert L. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. Since 2004, an annual Walter Rodney Symposium has been held each 23 March (Rodney's birthday) at the Center under the sponsorship of the Library and the Political Science Department of Clark Atlanta University, and under the patronage of the Rodney family.
HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA is a major challenge to all of us. It shows a direct correlation between the development of Europe and the underdevelopment of Africa. This book, which is written with the simplicity and clarity characteristic of Rodney's writings, is compulsory reading. This wide-reaching volume shows how Africa developed before the coming of the Europeans up to the 15th century, and shows Africa's contribution to European capitalist development in the pre-colonial period. Colonialism is then shown as a system for under developing Africa. is among the most insightful analysis of the reasons behind the underdevelopment of the African continent. The book is written in a Marxist context. The author demonstrates exceptional analytical depth and critical research into how European colonialism and capitalism were a double edged sword in creating deep rooted underdevelopment of the continent which has been very difficult to uproot. Other publications of the author include A HISTORY OF THE UPPER GUINEA COAST 1545 TO 1800 (The Clarendon Press, London), THE GROUNDINGS WITH MY BROTHERS (Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, London) and a number of papers in international journals and reviews of African history.
Walter Rodney (March 23, 1942 – June 13, 1980) was a prominent Guyanese historian and political figure. Born to a working class family, Rodney was a bright student, attending Queen's College in Guyana and then attending university on a scholarship at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, graduating in 1963. Walter Rodney earned his PhD in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England. His dissertation focused on the slave trade on the upper Guinea coast. The paper was published in 1970 under the name, A HISTORY OF THE UPPER GUINEA COAST, 1545-1800 and it was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the area. He traveled widely and became very well known around the world as an activist and scholar. He taught for a time in Tanzania after graduating, and later in Jamaica at his alma mater - UWI Mona. Rodney was sharply critical of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. When the Jamaican government, led by prime minister Hugh Shearer, banned him, in October 1968, from ever returning to the country, because of his advocacy for the working poor in that country, riots broke out, eventually claiming the lives of several people and causing millions of dollars in damages. These riots, which started on October 16, 1968, are now known as the Rodney Riots, and they triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, documented in his book, THE GROUNDINGS WITH MY BROTHERS. Rodney became a prominent Pan-Africanist, and was important in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and North America. While living in Dar es Salaam he was influential in developing a new centre of African learning and discussion. Rodney's most influential book was HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, published in 1972. In it he described an Africa which had been consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial. In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was supposed to take a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, forming the Working People's Alliance, against the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned. In 1980, Rodney was killed by a bomb in his car while running for office in Guyanese elections. Rodney was survived by his wife, Pat, and three children. Walter's brother, Donald, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith had given Rodney the bomb that killed him. Smith fled to French Guiana after the killing, where he died in 2002. Rodney's death was commemorated in a poem by Martin Carter entitled ‘For Walter Rodney’. In 2004, his widow, Patricia, and children donated his papers to the Robert L. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. Since 2004, an annual Walter Rodney Symposium has been held each 23 March (Rodney's birthday) at the Center under the sponsorship of the Library and the Political Science Department of Clark Atlanta University, and under the patronage of the Rodney family.
A remarkable book on the international operations of racism and the global meaning of Black Power. In this classic work published in the heady days of anti-colonial revolution, Groundings with My Brothers follows the global circulation of emancipatory ideas, from the black students of North America to the Rasta counterculture of Jamaica and beyond. The book is striking in its simultaneous ability to survey the wide and heterogeneous international context while remaining anchored in grassroots politics, as Rodney offers us first-hand accounts of mass movement organizing. Having inspired a generation of revolutionaries.
Walter Rodney (March 23, 1942 – June 13, 1980) was a prominent Guyanese historian and political figure. Born to a working class family, Rodney was a bright student, attending Queen's College in Guyana and then attending university on a scholarship at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, graduating in 1963. Walter Rodney earned his PhD in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England. His dissertation focused on the slave trade on the upper Guinea coast. The paper was published in 1970 under the name, A HISTORY OF THE UPPER GUINEA COAST, 1545-1800 and it was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the area. He traveled widely and became very well known around the world as an activist and scholar. He taught for a time in Tanzania after graduating, and later in Jamaica at his alma mater - UWI Mona. Rodney was sharply critical of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. When the Jamaican government, led by prime minister Hugh Shearer, banned him, in October 1968, from ever returning to the country, because of his advocacy for the working poor in that country, riots broke out, eventually claiming the lives of several people and causing millions of dollars in damages. These riots, which started on October 16, 1968, are now known as the Rodney Riots, and they triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, documented in his book, THE GROUNDINGS WITH MY BROTHERS. Rodney became a prominent Pan-Africanist, and was important in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and North America. While living in Dar es Salaam he was influential in developing a new centre of African learning and discussion. Rodney's most influential book was HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, published in 1972. In it he described an Africa which had been consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial. In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was supposed to take a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, forming the Working People's Alliance, against the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned. In 1980, Rodney was killed by a bomb in his car while running for office in Guyanese elections. Rodney was survived by his wife, Pat, and three children. Walter's brother, Donald, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith had given Rodney the bomb that killed him. Smith fled to French Guiana after the killing, where he died in 2002. Rodney's death was commemorated in a poem by Martin Carter entitled ‘For Walter Rodney’. In 2004, his widow, Patricia, and children donated his papers to the Robert L. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. Since 2004, an annual Walter Rodney Symposium has been held each 23 March (Rodney's birthday) at the Center under the sponsorship of the Library and the Political Science Department of Clark Atlanta University, and under the patronage of the Rodney family.
Renowned Pan-African and socialist theorist on the Bolshevik Revolution and its post-colonial legacy. In his short life, Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the foremost thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Wherever he was, Rodney was a lightning rod for working-class Black Power organizing. His deportation sparked Jamaica’s Rodney Riots in 1968, and his scholarship trained a generation how to approach politics on an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, the thirty-eight-year-old Rodney was assassinated. Walter Rodney’s Russian Revolution collects surviving texts from a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Dar es Salaam, an intellectual hub of the independent Third World. It had been his intention to work these into a book, a goal completed posthumously with the editorial aid of Robin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin. Moving across the historiography of the long Russian Revolution with clarity and insight, Rodney transcends the ideological fault lines of the Cold War. Surveying a broad range of subjects—the Narodniks, social democracy, the October Revolution, civil war, and the challenges of Stalinism—Rodney articulates a distinct viewpoint from the Third World, one that grounds revolutionary theory and history with the people in motion.
Walter Rodney (March 23, 1942 – June 13, 1980) was a prominent Guyanese historian and political figure. Born to a working class family, Rodney was a bright student, attending Queen's College in Guyana and then attending university on a scholarship at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, graduating in 1963. Walter Rodney earned his PhD in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England. His dissertation focused on the slave trade on the upper Guinea coast. The paper was published in 1970 under the name, A HISTORY OF THE UPPER GUINEA COAST, 1545-1800 and it was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the area. He traveled widely and became very well known around the world as an activist and scholar. He taught for a time in Tanzania after graduating, and later in Jamaica at his alma mater - UWI Mona. Rodney was sharply critical of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. When the Jamaican government, led by prime minister Hugh Shearer, banned him, in October 1968, from ever returning to the country, because of his advocacy for the working poor in that country, riots broke out, eventually claiming the lives of several people and causing millions of dollars in damages. These riots, which started on October 16, 1968, are now known as the Rodney Riots, and they triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, documented in his book, THE GROUNDINGS WITH MY BROTHERS. Rodney became a prominent Pan-Africanist, and was important in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and North America. While living in Dar es Salaam he was influential in developing a new centre of African learning and discussion. Rodney's most influential book was HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, published in 1972. In it he described an Africa which had been consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial. In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was supposed to take a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, forming the Working People's Alliance, against the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned. In 1980, Rodney was killed by a bomb in his car while running for office in Guyanese elections. Rodney was survived by his wife, Pat, and three children. Walter's brother, Donald, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith had given Rodney the bomb that killed him. Smith fled to French Guiana after the killing, where he died in 2002. Rodney's death was commemorated in a poem by Martin Carter entitled ‘For Walter Rodney’. In 2004, his widow, Patricia, and children donated his papers to the Robert L. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. Since 2004, an annual Walter Rodney Symposium has been held each 23 March (Rodney's birthday) at the Center under the sponsorship of the Library and the Political Science Department of Clark Atlanta University, and under the patronage of the Rodney family.
A dialogue held in Amherst, MA where Rodney discussed his own political and intellectual development, and exchanged views on the role of the black intellectual.
Walter Rodney (March 23, 1942 – June 13, 1980) was a prominent Guyanese historian and political figure. Born to a working class family, Rodney was a bright student, attending Queen's College in Guyana and then attending university on a scholarship at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, graduating in 1963. Walter Rodney earned his PhD in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England. His dissertation focused on the slave trade on the upper Guinea coast. The paper was published in 1970 under the name, A HISTORY OF THE UPPER GUINEA COAST, 1545-1800 and it was widely acclaimed for its originality in challenging the conventional wisdom on the area. He traveled widely and became very well known around the world as an activist and scholar. He taught for a time in Tanzania after graduating, and later in Jamaica at his alma mater - UWI Mona. Rodney was sharply critical of the middle class for its role in the post-independence Caribbean. When the Jamaican government, led by prime minister Hugh Shearer, banned him, in October 1968, from ever returning to the country, because of his advocacy for the working poor in that country, riots broke out, eventually claiming the lives of several people and causing millions of dollars in damages. These riots, which started on October 16, 1968, are now known as the Rodney Riots, and they triggered an increase in political awareness across the Caribbean, especially among the Afrocentric Rastafarian sector of Jamaica, documented in his book, THE GROUNDINGS WITH MY BROTHERS. Rodney became a prominent Pan-Africanist, and was important in the Black Power movement in the Caribbean and North America. While living in Dar es Salaam he was influential in developing a new centre of African learning and discussion. Rodney's most influential book was HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, published in 1972. In it he described an Africa which had been consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial. In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was supposed to take a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, forming the Working People's Alliance, against the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned. In 1980, Rodney was killed by a bomb in his car while running for office in Guyanese elections. Rodney was survived by his wife, Pat, and three children. Walter's brother, Donald, who was injured in the explosion, said that a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force named Gregory Smith had given Rodney the bomb that killed him. Smith fled to French Guiana after the killing, where he died in 2002. Rodney's death was commemorated in a poem by Martin Carter entitled ‘For Walter Rodney’. In 2004, his widow, Patricia, and children donated his papers to the Robert L. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. Since 2004, an annual Walter Rodney Symposium has been held each 23 March (Rodney's birthday) at the Center under the sponsorship of the Library and the Political Science Department of Clark Atlanta University, and under the patronage of the Rodney family.
Soon after its publication in 1972, Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA) gained global popularity among progressive students, scholars and activists, and people concerned with African affairs. His innovative application of the method of political economy was a prime contributor to shifting the paradigm for rendition of the continent's past as well as for visualizing its possible trajectory. Because it stridently took the traditional historians of Africa and the prevailing neo-colonial order to task, it was also vociferously criticized by the defenders of the status quo. In these neoliberal times, its visibility has waned. Mainstream scholars and pundits from and outside of Africa proclaim that it is no longer a relevant work for Africa. In The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Karim F Hirji makes a systematic case that, on the contrary, Rodney's seminal work retains its singular value for understanding where Africa has come from, where it is going, and charting a path towards genuine development for the people of Africa. Hirji considers Rodney in his unitary persona as a historian, theoretician and activist. He begins by outlining the publication history and contents of HEUA, and noting the comments it has drawn from varied quarters. This is followed by a depiction of the global context within which it saw the light of the day and the flowering of progressive thought and vision in those vibrant times. The retrogressive reversal, in thought and social reality, that has transpired since then is summed up next. An assessment of how HEUA has weathered this storm is also provided. The next chapter presents a brief portrait of Rodney as a revolutionary, with the focus on his seven years at the University of Dar es Salaam. This is followed by an overview of the methodological framework utilized in HEUA. These five chapters lay the foundation for the main substantive part of Hirji's book. This part begins with a detailed evaluation of the criticisms that have been levelled at HEUA. Subsequently, by a review of eight textbooks of general African history in common use today is provided. The aim here is to assess the persistence, if any, of ideas of the type promoted by Rodney in such books and identify the manner in which HEUA is directly depicted therein. Do these books give an adequate and fair depiction of Rodney to modern day students? The penultimate chapter argues for the continued relevance of Rodney and his seminal text for Africa (and the world) in this anti-people, pro-capital, pro-imperial neoliberal era. Hirji concludes with a lively account of his own interactions over six years with Walter Rodney. With the focus on the issue of building socialism in Tanzania, a key dimension in the evolution of Rodney's thinking is described in a critical spirit. The fundamental question addressed is, in our often dark, demoralizing political environment, what do Rodney and his life have to teach us on the matter of navigating between hope and struggle? The conclusion emerging from this book is that in the first place most of the criticisms of the content, style and practical value of HEUA lack merit. The representation of Rodney in mainstream books is as well replete with distortions, unfair selectivity and political bias. Hirji's succinct work is a consistent, coherent defence of an intellectual giant, an astute historian and a compassionate revolutionary who lived and died for humanity. It is an essential read for anyone with an interest in African history, and the fate of Africa and the regions that are historically related to it.
Karim F. Hirji is a retired Professor of Medical Statistics and a Fellow of the Tanzania Academy of Sciences. A recognized authority on statistical analysis of small sample discrete data, the author of the only book on the subject, he received the Snedecor Prize for Best Publication in Biometry from the American Statistical Association and International Biometrics Society for the year 1989. He has published many papers in the areas of statistical methodology, applied biomedical research, the history and practice of education in Tanzania, and written numerous essays on varied topics for the mass media and popular magazines.
Marty Sanders had left Cambridge, Massachusetts, to go back to Jamaica, to see his father, whom he hadn’t seen for thirteen years. When he arrived, by plane, in Montego Bay, the taxi driver he had hailed said to him, ‘Me not see many black tourist, mahn.’ And Marty told him he wasn’t a tourist, he was coming to see his father, whose bee farm was ‘off the road to Falmouth, past Still Valley and Bishopgate.’ ‘You call dat ah road? Dat no road up dere. If me know you’re going dere, me no take you. Ruin me car, mahn, ruin it.’ But Marty got there, walking part of the way And was welcomed by Cora, his father’s housekeeper. ‘Welcome home, Martinson,’ she said. ‘My name is Marty now and this is no longer my home,’ he told her and he asked where his father was. ‘He’s walking the land,’ Cora said. ‘You mean he can still tramp around?’ Marty asked angrily. ‘I thought he was dying. I thought that was why I left my job at the library to come back here. . . Then, out of the woods, Father appeared. ‘Here come Father,’ Marty murmured, watching him emerge from the mahogany, using his rifle as a cane. Father and son talked, caught up a little, and Marty wondered, ‘What’s wrong with me? My father is dying and what I really want to know is how quickly I can bury him.’ But he said to his father, ‘I’m writing a letter to Mother tonight. Do you want me to tell her anything?’ His mother was back in Cambridge, happy there, with a fine job and a fine future. His mother who had grabbed her son and run, thirteen years ago. His mother who answered his letter, ‘Dearest Marty, your letter finds me very well and now relieved of more than a little worry about you. When I hadn’t heard from you for those first few weeks, I had the sinking feeling that the Jamaican bush had swallowed you whole like one of those horror movie monsters, and you were gone for good. Your letter was most reassuring.’ It wasn’t easy. As Marty’s mother kept pointing out in her letters, he’d left behind him a good job, a girl, and a future. . . for a bee farm in the Jamaican bush. For what she’d hoped to rescue him from when she’d grabbed her young son and run to Massachusetts. Was the spell of Jamaica, was the father who’d been thrust out of his life, going to take over?
Seth Rolbein, award-winning journalist, editor, and documentary filmmaker, served for the past six years as chief of staff and then senior adviser to Cape and Islands Senator Dan Wolf. He recently became the Director of the Fisheries Development Trust at the Cape Cod Fishermen's Alliance, the region's premier advocacy group for our local fishermen. He has lived and worked on Cape Cod since the 1970s.
‘Mek Some Noise’, Timothy Rommen’s ethnographic study of Trinidadian gospel music, engages the multiple musical styles circulating in the nation’s Full Gospel community and illustrates the carefully negotiated and contested spaces that they occupy in relationship to questions of identity. By exploring gospelypso, jamoo (‘Jehovah’s music’), gospel dancehall, and North American gospel music, along with the discourses that surround performances in these styles, he illustrates the extent to which value, meaning, and appropriateness are continually circumscribed and reinterpreted in the process of coming to terms with what it looks and sounds like to be a Full Gospel believer in Trinidad. The local, regional, and transnational implications of these musical styles, moreover, are read in relationship to their impact on belief (and vice versa), revealing the particularly nuanced poetics of conviction that drive both apologists and detractors of these styles. Rommen sets his investigation against a concisely drawn, richly historical narrative and introduces a theoretical approach which he calls the ‘ethics of style’—a model that privileges the convictions embedded in this context and that emphasizes their role in shaping the terms upon which identity is continually being constructed in Trinidad. The result is an extended meditation on the convictions that lie behind the creation and reception of style in Full Gospel Trinidad. Copub: Center for Black Music Research.
Timothy Rommen is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Haitian poet who founded the Haitian Bureau d'Ethnologie and co- founded Revue Indigne. Both French and English translations of the poems appear on facing pages in this collection. A bilingual edition.
The genre of the peasant novel in Haiti reaches back to the nineteenth century and this is one of the outstanding examples. Manuel returns to his native village after working on a sugar plantation in Cuba only to discover that it is stricken by a drought and divided by a family feud. He attacks the resignation endemic among his people by preaching the kind of political awareness and solidarity he has learned in Cuba. He goes on to illustrate his ideas in a tangible way by finding water and bringing it to the fields through the collective labor of the villagers. In this political fable, Roumain is careful to create an authentic environment and credible characters. Readers will be emotionally moved as well as ideologically persuaded. Jacques Roumain, the son of a wealthy Haitian family, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1907. After being educated in Europe he identified with the resistance movement against the American occupation. He started Le Revue Indigène and published various books including La Montagne Ensorcelée (1931). He founded the Haitian Communist Party in 1934, was arrested and, after three years in prison, traveled in Europe and the United States until his return in 1941 when he established the Bureau d’Ethnologie in an effort to legitimise the study of Haiti’s peasantry. He was sent in 1943 to the Haitian Embassy in Mexico. It was there that he completed this book Gouverneurs de la Rosée a few months before his sudden death in 1944.
Jacques Roumain (June 4, 1907 – August 18, 1944) was a Haitian writer, politician, and advocate of Marxism. He is considered one of the most prominent figures in Haitian literature. Although poorly known in the English-speaking world, Roumain has significant following in Europe, and is renowned in the Caribbean and Latin America. The great African-American poet, Langston Hughes, translated some of Roumain's greatest works, including Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew), a masterpiece of world literature. Although his life was short, Roumain managed to touch many aspects of Haitian life and culture. Roumain was born on June 4, 1907, in Port-au-Prince to wealthy parents. His grandfather, Tancrède Auguste, served as the President of Haiti from 1912 to 1913. He was educated in Catholic schools in Port-au-Prince, and, later, in Belgium, Switzerland, France, Germany and Spain. At twenty years old, he returned to Haiti and formed La Revue Indigene: Les Arts et La Vie (The Indigenous Review: Arts and Life), along with Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, Carl Brouard, and Antonio Vieux. He was active in the struggle against the United States' occupation of Haiti. In 1934 he founded the Haitian Communist Party. Because of some of his political activities, his participation in the resistance movement against the United States' occupation, and most notably, his creation of the Haitian Communist Party, he was often arrested and finally exiled by then President Sténio Vincent. During his years in exile, Roumain worked with and befriended many prominent pan-African writers and poets of the time, including Langston Hughes. During this time he was also affiliated with Columbia University in New York City, where he conducted ethnographical research. With a change in government in Haiti, Roumain was allowed to return to his native country. Upon returning, he founded the Office of Ethnology. In 1943, President Élie Lescot appointed him chargé d'affaires in Mexico, where his newly found creative freedom permitted him to complete two of his most influential books, the poetry collection Bois D'ébène (Ebony Wood) and the novel, Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew). Much of Roumain's work expresses the frustration and rage of people who have been downtrodden for centuries. He included the mass of the people in his writing and called on the poor union to move against privation. On August 18, 1944, Jacques Roumain, one of Haiti's most respected and complex writers, died of still unknown causes at age 37. Roumain created some of the most colorful, dynamic, and moving poetry of his generation. His writings continue to influence and shape Haitian culture and the pan-African world of today. By the time of his death, Roumain had become an acclaimed writer in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. His great novel, Gouverneurs de la Rosée, has achieved a permanent place among great Caribbean and Latin American literature. It is a novel that is still studied at universities, read by new generations, and acted out by theatrical groups.
The genre of the peasant novel in Haiti reaches back to the nineteenth century and this is one of the outstanding examples. Manuel returns to his native village after working on a sugar plantation in Cuba only to discover that it is stricken by a drought and divided by a family feud. He attacks the resignation endemic among his people by preaching the kind of political awareness and solidarity he has learned in Cuba. He goes on to illustrate his ideas in a tangible way by finding water and bringing it to the fields through the collective labor of the villagers. In this political fable, Roumain is careful to create an authentic environment and credible characters. Readers will be emotionally moved as well as ideologically persuaded. Jacques Roumain, the son of a wealthy Haitian family, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1907. After being educated in Europe he identified with the resistance movement against the American occupation. He started Le Revue Indigène and published various books including La Montagne Ensorcelée (1931). He founded the Haitian Communist Party in 1934, was arrested and, after three years in prison, traveled in Europe and the United States until his return in 1941 when he established the Bureau d’Ethnologie in an effort to legitimise the study of Haiti’s peasantry. He was sent in 1943 to the Haitian Embassy in Mexico. It was there that he completed this book Gouverneurs de la Rosée a few months before his sudden death in 1944.
Jacques Roumain (June 4, 1907 – August 18, 1944) was a Haitian writer, politician, and advocate of Marxism. He is considered one of the most prominent figures in Haitian literature. Although poorly known in the English-speaking world, Roumain has significant following in Europe, and is renowned in the Caribbean and Latin America. The great African-American poet, Langston Hughes, translated some of Roumain's greatest works, including Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew), a masterpiece of world literature. Although his life was short, Roumain managed to touch many aspects of Haitian life and culture. Roumain was born on June 4, 1907, in Port-au-Prince to wealthy parents. His grandfather, Tancrède Auguste, served as the President of Haiti from 1912 to 1913. He was educated in Catholic schools in Port-au-Prince, and, later, in Belgium, Switzerland, France, Germany and Spain. At twenty years old, he returned to Haiti and formed La Revue Indigene: Les Arts et La Vie (The Indigenous Review: Arts and Life), along with Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, Carl Brouard, and Antonio Vieux. He was active in the struggle against the United States' occupation of Haiti. In 1934 he founded the Haitian Communist Party. Because of some of his political activities, his participation in the resistance movement against the United States' occupation, and most notably, his creation of the Haitian Communist Party, he was often arrested and finally exiled by then President Sténio Vincent. During his years in exile, Roumain worked with and befriended many prominent pan-African writers and poets of the time, including Langston Hughes. During this time he was also affiliated with Columbia University in New York City, where he conducted ethnographical research. With a change in government in Haiti, Roumain was allowed to return to his native country. Upon returning, he founded the Office of Ethnology. In 1943, President Élie Lescot appointed him chargé d'affaires in Mexico, where his newly found creative freedom permitted him to complete two of his most influential books, the poetry collection Bois D'ébène (Ebony Wood) and the novel, Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew). Much of Roumain's work expresses the frustration and rage of people who have been downtrodden for centuries. He included the mass of the people in his writing and called on the poor union to move against privation. On August 18, 1944, Jacques Roumain, one of Haiti's most respected and complex writers, died of still unknown causes at age 37. Roumain created some of the most colorful, dynamic, and moving poetry of his generation. His writings continue to influence and shape Haitian culture and the pan-African world of today. By the time of his death, Roumain had become an acclaimed writer in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. His great novel, Gouverneurs de la Rosée, has achieved a permanent place among great Caribbean and Latin American literature. It is a novel that is still studied at universities, read by new generations, and acted out by theatrical groups.
A comprehensive bilingual selection of prose and poetry by Haiti's great poet, revolutionary and man of letters, Jacques Roumain. "Above all, it is necessary to be done once and for all with the myth of the poet's freedom. Far from being a "very old man," as Valéry claimed, the poet is a contemporary being, the consciousness of his historical era. If his thought does not translate into action, the poet is not free. He is not free if he does not oblige himself to make imperative choices: to choose between Garcia Lorca and General Franco, between Thaelman and Hitler, between peace and war, between socialist democracy and fascism. His alleged freedom ends in a kind of Pontius Pilot complex in which every artifice of the traitor's cowardice is at work. The poet is both witness and actor in the historical drama, and he is enlisted into this drama with full responsibility. And particularly in our time, his art must be a frontline weapon in the service of the people." - Jacques Roumain (from Poetry As A Weapon). JACQUES ROUMAIN was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1907 and died just 37 years later in 1944. But during that brief time Roumain was a journalist, poet, politician, diplomat, professor, novelist, short story writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary. Jacques Roumain is to Haitian literature what Langston Hughes is to American literature. Throughout his life, Roumain searched for ways to advance the cause of justice and human solidarity.
Jacques Roumain (June 4, 1907 – August 18, 1944) was a Haitian writer, politician, and advocate of Marxism. He is considered one of the most prominent figures in Haitian literature. Although poorly known in the English-speaking world, Roumain has significant following in Europe, and is renowned in the Caribbean and Latin America. The great African-American poet, Langston Hughes, translated some of Roumain's greatest works, including Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew), a masterpiece of world literature. Although his life was short, Roumain managed to touch many aspects of Haitian life and culture. Roumain was born on June 4, 1907, in Port-au-Prince to wealthy parents. His grandfather, Tancrède Auguste, served as the President of Haiti from 1912 to 1913. He was educated in Catholic schools in Port-au-Prince, and, later, in Belgium, Switzerland, France, Germany and Spain. At twenty years old, he returned to Haiti and formed La Revue Indigene: Les Arts et La Vie (The Indigenous Review: Arts and Life), along with Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, Carl Brouard, and Antonio Vieux. He was active in the struggle against the United States' occupation of Haiti. In 1934 he founded the Haitian Communist Party. Because of some of his political activities, his participation in the resistance movement against the United States' occupation, and most notably, his creation of the Haitian Communist Party, he was often arrested and finally exiled by then President Sténio Vincent. During his years in exile, Roumain worked with and befriended many prominent pan-African writers and poets of the time, including Langston Hughes. During this time he was also affiliated with Columbia University in New York City, where he conducted ethnographical research. With a change in government in Haiti, Roumain was allowed to return to his native country. Upon returning, he founded the Office of Ethnology. In 1943, President Élie Lescot appointed him chargé d'affaires in Mexico, where his newly found creative freedom permitted him to complete two of his most influential books, the poetry collection Bois D'ébène (Ebony Wood) and the novel, Gouverneurs de la Rosée (Masters of the Dew). Much of Roumain's work expresses the frustration and rage of people who have been downtrodden for centuries. He included the mass of the people in his writing and called on the poor union to move against privation. On August 18, 1944, Jacques Roumain, one of Haiti's most respected and complex writers, died of still unknown causes at age 37. Roumain created some of the most colorful, dynamic, and moving poetry of his generation. His writings continue to influence and shape Haitian culture and the pan-African world of today. By the time of his death, Roumain had become an acclaimed writer in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. His great novel, Gouverneurs de la Rosée, has achieved a permanent place among great Caribbean and Latin American literature. It is a novel that is still studied at universities, read by new generations, and acted out by theatrical groups.
Namba Roy has brought to life the colourful and historical crucible that was Jamaica in the 1930s. NO BLACK SPARROWS challenges social injustice, the use of capital punishment and orthodox Western religion at a time when ‘we black people starting to think. And we starting to see de holes in you religion, and you democracy and you civilization.’ The novel focuses on ‘God’s Little Sparrows’ - orphans Sonna, Pazart, Mobel and Sista - who scrape a living selling bootlaces, pins and needles. The rough warmth they share with the generous Ironman who feeds them, and Captain Dimlight who teaches them ‘to speak English good’, cannot however protect them from the sadistic community constable, Bangbelly: but an ironic twist ensures that the fate of both Bangbelly and Sonna are intertwined. This compelling tale boils over with vitality and an emotion that will appeal to readers everywhere. ‘A remarkable book which contains much that is valuable, articulates, pertinent and positive.’ - Anne Walmsley.
NAMBA ROY was born in Jamaica in 1910. He spent his childhood in Kingston and in Accompong in the Cockpit Country - a refuge where escaped Jamaican slaves, known as Maroons, lived as free men. Roy’s grandfather and father were both traditional village carvers - a role passed down from father to son - and it was from them that Roy learnt about African folklore and the art of Maroon story-telling and carving. Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Roy joined the British Merchant Navy. Illness forced him to leave in 1944 and he remained in Britain where, in 1950, he met and later married English actress Yvonne Shelley, with whom he had three children. He died on l6 June 1961. Roy, a prodigious painter, carver and sculptor, wrote two books and several short stories, including NEGRO CREATION, an Afro-Maroon tale about the creation of the world, which was broadcast by the BBC in 1957. BLACK ALBINO, an historical adventure story about a Maroon community living in the mountains of Jamaica, was published by New Literature (Publishing) Ltd in 1961, shortly before the author’s death. Black Albino was then published by Longman in 1986. NO BLACK SPARROWS was written over the years 1956 and 1957. The book was important to Roy as it described his own childhood experiences in Jamaica.
This book is a collection of poetry. It brings to life the work of a woman who does not fit the literary mold...The title of this collection is inspired by the author's feeling that we still live in the remnants of the Caribbean Raj where for some, the recent past is seen as negative, even destructive. But to her, it represents the beginnings of our rites of passage and must also be viewed with loving care.
Heather Royes works as a consultant in HIV/AIDS and as a poet. She has been publishing since the 1970s and many of her poems have been included in anthologies such as the Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry, Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse and Seven Jamaican Women Writers. Heather Royes was educated in Jamaica and in the United States, and has travelled widely due to her work as a consultant. She writes: "This type of travel has been my education as a writer and poet. When I see unusual things or experience cultures which are so far from mine, it gives me a bizarre feeling of learning just a little more about life and people. Sort of intoxication of new things. A constant curiosity about other cultures.
For the better part of the century, marijuana (or ganja) has been used by Jamaican working-class men, women and children - not for the euphoric "high" the plant is inevitably associated with in Western minds, but as an energizer among working men, as a prophylactic or therapeutic tea by women and children and as a medicine by nearly everyone, smokers and non-smokers alike. It forms an integral part of the Jamaican cultural tradition and value system, and its use is therefore subject to and conditioned by societal expectations and reactions quite different from those attached to it in American or European contexts. The Jamaica study, an investigation of cultural, physiological and psychological parameters of cannabis use in Jamaica, was the first medical anthropological project center on marijuana to be undertaken, and the present report of its findings is the first intensive, multidisciplinary analysis of marijuana use and user to be published. It combines field research in the natural setting and detailed clinical examinations of long-term chronic cannabis users, providing a new perspective on the age-old relationship of man and marijuana and examining current concerns about the effects of its use. The research reported in this volume is particularly valuable in illustrating that the relationship between man and marijuana is not simply pharmacological and thus helps to dispel the stereotypes and demon theories which surround marijuana use.
Lambros Comitas (September 29, 1927 – March 5, 2020) was Gardner Cowles Professor of Anthropology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. A product of Columbia University, he received the A.B. from Columbia College in 1948 after service in the United States Army, and was awarded the Ph.D. in anthropology in 1962 from the Columbia Faculty of Political Science. Influential figures in his early professional years were Conrad Arensberg, Marvin Harris, Charles Wagley and Margaret Mead from the Columbia faculty and M. G. Smith, the eminent British-trained anthropologist whom he first met during field work in Jamaica.
BLUES DANCE is an original fictional approach to the portrayal of the Black experience in Britain in that it draws heavily from non-literary sources, namely music, to reflect the emotions and responses of members of the Black community in London. The author, who has many years of intimate involvement as a Reggae music critic, draws on the nuances of Dub music to create intimate scenes of realism. The novel is an attempt to reflect the growth to maturity of a black youth, Rough Black, who escapes parental ignorance of racist white educationists, to forge a life of his own. By going independent he falls upon a hard and resisting world, and resorts to petty theft until saved by his Rastafari brethren who give him a purpose in life. The novel is also about how Rough Black gets involved with a Rastafari sistren who spearheads his re-education. By investigating the politics of the Black community he, along with his brethren, seeks revenge for the killing of a teenaged black youth by a white fascist. The fiction escalates into reflecting the violence of the Police, the National Front, in confrontation with the Black community and radical whites. BLUES DANCE undoubtedly is a pioneering creative work which brings into focus deliberate media embargo on facets of life in Black London.
Amon Saba Saakana was born in Trinidad, attended secondary school there and migrated to the UK at aged 16, and lived for four years in the USA (1970–1974). He studied playwriting at Mountview Theatre School, 1966–1967, has a Diploma of Higher Education in Caribbean Studies from the University of East London (1982), an MA in Caribbean literature from the same university (1988) and studied towards his doctoral degree at the School of Oriental & African Studies and Goldsmiths College, University of London where he obtained his Ph.D. in Drama & Cultural Studies (1995). He received a certificate (distinction) and diploma (merit) in Egyptian Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology, Birkbeck College, University College London (1996–1998). Dr Saakana’s research interests are in African world music, African civilisations, Comparative African World literature and culture, Caribbean social history, music, art and literature, and race & media in the UK. Saakana worked as a journalist from 1969–1981 publishing features and reviews on music, drama, books, culture in Time Out, The New Statesman, New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Sounds, Black Echoes, Westindian World, Caribbean Times, Race Today, Africa, The New African, and was the founding editor of Frontline journal for five years, among many other publications (UK) and Essence, The Amsterdam News, Crawdaddy, The Metropolitan Review, Rock, The Black American, The Washington Post (Book World), Black World, Black Theatre (New Lafayette Theatre) (USA), Presénce Africaine, UNESCO Courier (France), Newsday, The Express, The Guardian (Trinidad), Bendel Times (Nigeria). He is the author of the first study on Jamaican popular music: Jah Music: The Evolution of the Jamaican Popular Song (1980), The Colonial Legacy in Caribbean Literature (1987), Colonialism & the Destruction of the Mind: Psychosocial issues of Race, Religion, & Sexuality in the novels of Roy Heath (1997), editor of and contributor to The African Origin of the Major World Religions (1992), and has contributed to several anthologies, and author of three books of poetry: Sun Song (1973), Tones & Colours (1985) and God in the Song of Birds (2016). His poetry was also anthologised in A Festac Anthology, from the second African & Black Festival held in Nigeria, 1977. He has contributed academic essays to several anthologies including: Decolonising Knowledge for Africa’s Renewal, ed., Vuyisile Msila, General History of Africa Vol. IX (UNESCO 2017 forthcoming), and Global Reggae (2012); The Heritage Series of Black Poetry, 1962–1975 (2008); The Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture, vol 3 (2008), The Oxford Companion to Black British History (2007), Music, Writing and Cultural Unity of the Caribbean (2005), and The Last Post: Music after Modernism (1993). He has been a guest lecturer at universities in the UK and USA: University of Warwick, University of Keele, Goldsmiths College (University of London), The Institute of Education, Edgehill Teacher Training College, University of Hull, Leicester University, University of Exeter, University of Essex, Richmond Further Education College, Reading University (UK); City College of New York, Manhattan Community College, Marymount College, Smiths College, Staten Island Community College, Temple University, Wellesley College, University of Pennsylvania (USA). Dr Saakana worked as a part-time lecturer for the University of North London, and College of Science, Technology & Applied Arts, Trinidad & Tobago, now devoting his time to research, writing and publishing. Dr Saakana also works in media: directed/produced, Ida’s Daughter: The World of Eintou Pearl Springer (2010, 74 mins). Director/Producer, Texturing the Word: 40 Years of Caribbean Writing in Britain (55 mins), featuring George Lamming, Edward Brathwaite, Roy Heath, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Grace Nichols, Marc Matthews (1985). Researcher, Panorama (BBC TV), We Didn’t Ask To Be Born Here (1983). Co-producer, BBC World Service, an hour long documentary on Bob Marley and Rastafari (1982). Co-writer, Jamaican popular music, ITV, London, presented by Janet Street-Porter (1976). His latest book is the poetry collection, God in the Song of Trees and the non-fiction Kmt in the Italian Renaissance: The Hermetica in the Vatican Inquisition (November 2017), a book which deals with the social histories of Kmt and Greece compared, locating the origins of egalitarian and moral philosophy, and the role of Djehuty (Thoth/Hermes), netjer of wisdom and writing, as central influence for the birth of the Italian Renaissance. This is the first of three small books on the subject. Saakana wrote the central essay in the November 2014 catalogue on Makemba Kunle’s retrospective held at the National Museum & Art Gallery, Trinidad. He is currently working on two new books: The Song Philosophy of Bob Marley: Folk Wisdom & the Human Process of Knowing, and Makemba Kunle Art & Concealment: Spirituality, Community & Memory.
The literature on the history and development of Caribbean literature is sparse, and any literature on the extent to which European colonial influence has informed and influenced Caribbean writing is almost non-existent. The author uses a variety of disciplines: history, politics, psychology to bring to bear on the interpretative analysis of how Caribbean literature has been removed from the source of its natural development. The history begins in the early 19th century, from the plantation and European literary and non-literary concerns of the plantocrats, to writing of fiction and verse which exalted European literary traditions and styles, the examination of a colonialist implantation of an educational system whose aim was the deculturation of the individual, to the full flowering of writing, not only in terms of fiction and verse, but in aesthetics and literary criticism. Through analysis and interpretation the author shows that writers such as Vic Reid, Ralph de Boissiere, H.G. de Lisser and V.S. Naipaul were falsely canonised by British literary critics. This reinforced the colonial legacy and made it doubly difficult for a truly liberating literature to emerge, although the popular arts (music, song, dance) contained the historical trends of tradition and power. Ngugi wa Thiong’o says: The essays that make up this hook, The Colonial Legacy in Caribbean Literature, are a demonstration and a defence of the continuity and centrality of the Afro-Caribbean consciousness in the anti-colonial and hence anti-imperialist struggles of the entire Caribbean peoples. The book traces this consciousness back to the slave revolts: the slaves’ affirmation of freedom through fight and flight: and the popular songs and literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By its overall insistence on the continuity and centrality of the people’s resistance as the correct standpoint from which to evaluate the colonial legacy in Caribbean literature, the book should provoke debate and thought in the relationship between literature and politics; literature and history; and that between literature and the anti-imperialist struggles of `third world’ peoples for the liberation of their economy, politics and culture.
Amon Saba Saakana was born in Trinidad and migrated to London, UK, at age sixteen. A self-taught journalist he has published widely on music, drama, carnivals, books, features and social issues. His first published book of poetry is Sun Song, 1973; his second, Tones & Colours, 1987 reached No. 5 on the City Limits Alternative Bestsellers; his third, God in the Song of Birds, 2015. He published Jah Music: The Evolution of the Jamaican Popular Song, 1980, currently being extensively revised. His novel Blues Dance was published in 1985 and was sold out in 9 months. His forthcoming book is Ntr Nfr Wa: The Perfect One, Groundings in the Nubio-Kmtan African paradigm, a book on Ancient Egypt in science, technology, art, and philosphy and its influence on both the Arab and European worlds. Saakana has a Ph.D. in Drama/Cultural Studies from University of London. He is a part-time lecturer at the College of Science, Technology & Applied Arts Trinidad & Tobago.
These essays may be read in any order - from N. W. Manley's memories of growing up in Jamaica, to the childhood experiences of the Trinidadian writers, C. L. R. James and John La Rose. One can compare notes with George Lamming, John Hearne, Elsa Goveia and N. W. Manley, as they comment on many of the significant features of our Caribbean history, politics, economics, culture and multi-racial populations, and feel what it is like to be a certain kind of immigrant in London, as Albert Maria Gomes describes his situation there. Also included are the stories from Donald Hinds of Caribbean children in the schools in Britain, and of Robert Hill in Canada and Fernando Henriques in Brazil. Roy Heath looks at his Guyanese myths; Beryl McBurnie's shares a knowledge and love of the dances of the Caribbean, Samuel Selvon's deliberates on the power of uselessness; Orlando Patterson contributes a unique interpretation of the ritual of cricket in the Caribbean; and in the extract from Eric Williams's Massa Day the reader can appreciate what it means to that writer to be the leader of a society, now independent, after many years of Colonial rule.
Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Haitian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s to pursue university education. A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching since the 1970s, holding a lifetime position as Writer-In-Residence at Hampshire College. He was born as Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey. When two years old, Salkey was sent to Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked there as a teacher, while his father continued to work in Panama. Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the University of London. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey 'quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.' After reading V. S. Naipaul's his first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the 'harassed' working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971). In 1966 he co-founded with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite the Caribbean Artists Movement, as a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In the latter part of his life he was a professor of creative writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, where he went in 1976. Salkey was good friends with Austin Clarke, and the two had a long written correspondence, a great deal of which is available in Clarke's files at the McMaster University Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. 'I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country.' (From Escape To An Autumn Pavement). Salkey was a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley, who (together with a committee comprising Louis James, John La Rose, Marc Matthews, Mervyn Morris, Jason Salkey, Anne Walmsley and Ronald Warwick) organised on 19–20 June 1992 a two-day symposium and celebration called 'Salkey's Score'. Held at the Commonwealth Institute, it paid tribute to Salkey in respect of his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s with the Caribbean Artists Movement; his journalism on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices; his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools; the importance he gave to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity; his work in Cuba; and his prolific output of novels, poetry and other writings.
‘I think it is fair to say that this selection has been by far the most difficult I have had to make in my career as an editor of West Indian writing. I have previously edited two adult anthologies of stories but this selection has proved the sternest test of my judgment, taste and all-round ability as an editor. The main reason for my editorial difficulty has been the general unsuitability of most of the existing work of West Indian authors for use in schools. For the most part the novelists have been writing for their adult readers; they have often employed difficult themes and have written in a wide variety of styles. My job has been to ‘mine’ a few suitable, representative nuggets from a sprawling El Dorado. I have done so with the appropriate trepidation and self-doubt of most editors in my position, bearing in mind throughout that the cardinal sin of any editor is to choose down to his readers, rather than to select at a lively and intelligent level. Before starting work on this collection I did what I imagine most commissioned anthologists do: I asked myself ‘What single common factor is it that shapes all short stories?’ and the short answer was: the writer’s ability to highlight characterization, human behaviour, or a small event, often an ordinary, everyday one, in such a way as to bring it alive for the reader as an immediately recognizable, meaningful entity. With that common factor in mind I have chosen as many different types of short story as I could find, some of them already written in that form, others embedded in novels. I have included examples of the ‘slice of life’ incident of suspense, adventure, mystery, humour, irony and satire; and there is even a dash of sentimentality in at least two of them. This wide range of material should also serve another purpose. It will, I hope, depict something of the remarkable INTRODUCTION diversity of the West Indian way of life, one which not only West Indian readers will easily recognize but which will also be recognized the world over; for, in a very real sense, the West Indies is a microcosm: there is its preoccupation with attaining economic well-being and the deep involvement with religion; its continuing attempts to maintain self-respect and individuality in the face of poverty and the crippling lack of opportunity, together with the threat and frightening repercussions of over-population; and again, there is the problem of growing up in a world frozen-over by a Cold War; the need simply to cope with man’s never-ending struggle with nature and with the terrible effects of personal public failure. Some of the more significant books written by West Indians on these and other themes which the reader may come are C. L. R. James’s MINTY ALLEY, THE BLACK JACOBINS and BEYOND A BOUNDARY; V. S. Reid’s NEW DAY and THE LEOPARD; George Lamming’s IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN; V.V. Naipaul’s A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS; John Hearne’s VOICES UNDER THE WINDOw, and many of his uncollected short stories in anthologies and magazines published abroad and sold in the West Indies; Roger Mais’s BLACK LIGHTNING, his short stories which he brought out privately in Jamaica and some of his journalistic essays; Samuel Selvon’s A BRIGHTER SUN and very nearly all of his short stories in at least one published collection, in two anthologies of West Indian stories and in most of the back copies of Bim. (Bim is an excellent Barbadian literary review edited by Frank Collymore: it has been for over twenty years a constant source of encouragement for unpublished West Indian writers and the springboard for quite a number of the well-known published novelists whose early work, mainly short stories, first appeared in its pages). Then there is Edgar Mittelholzer’s A MORNING AT THE OFFICE and, for the older reader, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA and the KAYWANA trilogy: and, of course, Jan Carew’s BLACK MIDAS and THE WILD COAST, and some of his adventure tales set in the jungles and rain forests of Guyana and published in anthologies and West Indian magazines. I hope, too, that the reader will, when he is about to tackle the specially recommended novels by Edgar Mittelholzer as part of his later reading, accept my recommendation and read Roger Mais’s THE HILLS WERE JOYFUL TOGETHER and BROTHER MAN, together with Neville Dawes’s THE LAST ENCHANTMENT, Sylvia Wynter’s THE HILLS OF HEBRON, and H. Orlando Patterson’s THE CHILDREN OF SISYPHUS. Apart from getting to know these ‘pioneers’ through the school- and lending-libraries, the reader will be able to experience the added excitement of growing up with these new books at a time when many of their authors are gathering momentum for the first full assault of West Indian literature over virtually undiscovered ground, in what is possibly the most fascinating literary debut in modern fiction. Let there be no mistake about this: many of the West Indian writers are establishing their worth in Britain, America, and in Europe in translation, which means that their writing should be of particular significance in the West Indies where, to borrow an expression from the world of popular music, its meaning has ‘come to stay’ - in the way that the Trinidadian calypso and the Jamaican mento have come and ‘stayed’. It is appropriate, therefore, that some of this material should now be made available for school use and that it should be regarded, along with similar writing from other literatures, as a profitable subject for study. - from the Introduction by Andrew Salkey.
Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Haitian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s to pursue university education. A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching since the 1970s, holding a lifetime position as Writer-In-Residence at Hampshire College. He was born as Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey. When two years old, Salkey was sent to Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked there as a teacher, while his father continued to work in Panama. Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the University of London. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey 'quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.' After reading V. S. Naipaul's his first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the 'harassed' working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971). In 1966 he co-founded with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite the Caribbean Artists Movement, as a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In the latter part of his life he was a professor of creative writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, where he went in 1976. Salkey was good friends with Austin Clarke, and the two had a long written correspondence, a great deal of which is available in Clarke's files at the McMaster University Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. 'I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country.' (From Escape To An Autumn Pavement). Salkey was a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley, who (together with a committee comprising Louis James, John La Rose, Marc Matthews, Mervyn Morris, Jason Salkey, Anne Walmsley and Ronald Warwick) organised on 19–20 June 1992 a two-day symposium and celebration called 'Salkey's Score'. Held at the Commonwealth Institute, it paid tribute to Salkey in respect of his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s with the Caribbean Artists Movement; his journalism on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices; his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools; the importance he gave to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity; his work in Cuba; and his prolific output of novels, poetry and other writings.
The Caribbean area--a scattering of ethnic and racial groups with a history of colonialism and bloody attempts to assert nationhood--provides an exciting background for these tales of wit, melancholy, resentment, fantasy, and superstition. If the Caribbeans are searching for a "newness," a "cool upheaval of the spirit," as Salkey suggests in the introduction, then the writers gathered together here--from the outstanding such as V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, and John Hearne to the younger, little-known, and never before published--are true to this spirit. Includes writing from John Hearne, V.S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, R.O. Robinson, Donald Hinds, C.L.R. James, Denis Williams, Michael Anthony, Claude Thompson, Edgar Mittelholzer.
Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Haitian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s to pursue university education. A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching since the 1970s, holding a lifetime position as Writer-In-Residence at Hampshire College. He was born as Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey. When two years old, Salkey was sent to Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked there as a teacher, while his father continued to work in Panama. Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the University of London. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey 'quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.' After reading V. S. Naipaul's his first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the 'harassed' working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971). In 1966 he co-founded with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite the Caribbean Artists Movement, as a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In the latter part of his life he was a professor of creative writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, where he went in 1976. Salkey was good friends with Austin Clarke, and the two had a long written correspondence, a great deal of which is available in Clarke's files at the McMaster University Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. 'I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country.' (From Escape To An Autumn Pavement). Salkey was a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley, who (together with a committee comprising Louis James, John La Rose, Marc Matthews, Mervyn Morris, Jason Salkey, Anne Walmsley and Ronald Warwick) organised on 19–20 June 1992 a two-day symposium and celebration called 'Salkey's Score'. Held at the Commonwealth Institute, it paid tribute to Salkey in respect of his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s with the Caribbean Artists Movement; his journalism on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices; his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools; the importance he gave to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity; his work in Cuba; and his prolific output of novels, poetry and other writings.
Andrew Salkey – himself a promising young West Indian novelist who has recently been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship – has collected a large, entertaining, and very representative collection of the work of the young West Indian writers who are making such an impact on the literary scene at the moment. Racy, colorful, sometimes deeply moving, often wildly funny, these stories are as diversified and enchanting – and sometimes as potentially explosive – as the Caribbean Islands themselves. Among the authors included are Edgar Mittelholzer, John Hearne, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Jan Carew, Roger Mais, Stuart Hall, and E. R. Braithwaite. In his introduction Mr. Salkey makes a brief survey and assessment of modern West Indian writing – and, in particular, of its short story writing. Why should this one area of the Commonwealth blaze with creative activity as dramatically as Ireland did more than fifty years ago? The question is probably unanswerable; but the blaze is there and is spectacular.
Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Haitian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s to pursue university education. A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching since the 1970s, holding a lifetime position as Writer-In-Residence at Hampshire College. He was born as Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey. When two years old, Salkey was sent to Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked there as a teacher, while his father continued to work in Panama. Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the University of London. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey 'quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.' After reading V. S. Naipaul's his first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the 'harassed' working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971). In 1966 he co-founded with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite the Caribbean Artists Movement, as a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In the latter part of his life he was a professor of creative writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, where he went in 1976. Salkey was good friends with Austin Clarke, and the two had a long written correspondence, a great deal of which is available in Clarke's files at the McMaster University Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. 'I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country.' (From Escape To An Autumn Pavement). Salkey was a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley, who (together with a committee comprising Louis James, John La Rose, Marc Matthews, Mervyn Morris, Jason Salkey, Anne Walmsley and Ronald Warwick) organised on 19–20 June 1992 a two-day symposium and celebration called 'Salkey's Score'. Held at the Commonwealth Institute, it paid tribute to Salkey in respect of his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s with the Caribbean Artists Movement; his journalism on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices; his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools; the importance he gave to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity; his work in Cuba; and his prolific output of novels, poetry and other writings.
Andrew Salkey – himself a promising young West Indian novelist who has recently been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship – has collected a large, entertaining, and very representative collection of the work of the young West Indian writers who are making such an impact on the literary scene at the moment. Racy, colorful, sometimes deeply moving, often wildly funny, these stories are as diversified and enchanting – and sometimes as potentially explosive – as the Caribbean Islands themselves. Among the authors included are Edgar Mittelholzer, John Hearne, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Jan Carew, Roger Mais, Stuart Hall, and E. R. Braithwaite. In his introduction Mr. Salkey makes a brief survey and assessment of modern West Indian writing – and, in particular, of its short story writing. Why should this one area of the Commonwealth blaze with creative activity as dramatically as Ireland did more than fifty years ago? The question is probably unanswerable; but the blaze is there and is spectacular.
Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Haitian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s to pursue university education. A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching since the 1970s, holding a lifetime position as Writer-In-Residence at Hampshire College. He was born as Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey. When two years old, Salkey was sent to Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked there as a teacher, while his father continued to work in Panama. Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the University of London. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey 'quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.' After reading V. S. Naipaul's his first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the 'harassed' working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971). In 1966 he co-founded with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite the Caribbean Artists Movement, as a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In the latter part of his life he was a professor of creative writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, where he went in 1976. Salkey was good friends with Austin Clarke, and the two had a long written correspondence, a great deal of which is available in Clarke's files at the McMaster University Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. 'I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country.' (From Escape To An Autumn Pavement). Salkey was a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley, who (together with a committee comprising Louis James, John La Rose, Marc Matthews, Mervyn Morris, Jason Salkey, Anne Walmsley and Ronald Warwick) organised on 19–20 June 1992 a two-day symposium and celebration called 'Salkey's Score'. Held at the Commonwealth Institute, it paid tribute to Salkey in respect of his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s with the Caribbean Artists Movement; his journalism on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices; his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools; the importance he gave to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity; his work in Cuba; and his prolific output of novels, poetry and other writings.
ANANCY’S SCORE is Andrew Salkey’s first collection of short stories. In this long-awaited volume, he describes the complex ‘score’ concerning Anancy’s history. character and development, in twenty original contemporary tales of his own very special making. In doing so, he also reminds us that the great traditional folk story hero, Anancy, is both African and Caribbean, and is capable of withstanding not only adaptation but also creative reinterpretation. What Salkey has done is to bridge the historical gap between Anancy’s two homelands, and he has made his Anancy into a physical and metaphorical spiderman, profoundly involved in the continuing struggles throughout the Third World today. . Andrew Salkey was born of Jamaican parents in Colon, Panama, in 1928. He has lived in London since 1952. He is a novelist, children’s writer, anthologist and freelance radio journalist. His non-fiction includes travel books about Cuba and Guyana. A long historical poem about the social and political development of Jamaica, on which he has been working for a little over twenty years, will be published in 1973.
Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Haitian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s to pursue university education. A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching since the 1970s, holding a lifetime position as Writer-In-Residence at Hampshire College. He was born as Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey. When two years old, Salkey was sent to Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked there as a teacher, while his father continued to work in Panama. Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the University of London. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey 'quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.' After reading V. S. Naipaul's his first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the 'harassed' working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971). In 1966 he co-founded with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite the Caribbean Artists Movement, as a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In the latter part of his life he was a professor of creative writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, where he went in 1976. Salkey was good friends with Austin Clarke, and the two had a long written correspondence, a great deal of which is available in Clarke's files at the McMaster University Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. 'I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country.' (From Escape To An Autumn Pavement). Salkey was a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley, who (together with a committee comprising Louis James, John La Rose, Marc Matthews, Mervyn Morris, Jason Salkey, Anne Walmsley and Ronald Warwick) organised on 19–20 June 1992 a two-day symposium and celebration called 'Salkey's Score'. Held at the Commonwealth Institute, it paid tribute to Salkey in respect of his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s with the Caribbean Artists Movement; his journalism on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices; his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools; the importance he gave to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity; his work in Cuba; and his prolific output of novels, poetry and other writings.
AWAY is a substantial collection of poems, evocative and sharply written, by one of the most distinguished and internationally recognized poets from the Caribbean, Personal reflections on the theme of voluntary exile form the core of the poems, which range in mood from the lyrical to the revolutionary and are all written out of Andrew Salkey’s experience of three decades of living away from his home country, Jamaica. The paradox is that by leaving home he somehow managed to draw more closely to it and to the Caribbean area as a whole - which, ironically, turns out to be one of the benefits of exile. ANDREW SALKEY was born in 1928 (in Colon, Panama, of Jamaican parents). He was educated in Jamaica until 1952 when he went to Britain to study at London University. In the twenty-four years he spent in London he worked as a freelance broadcaster, book reviewer, teacher, scriptwriter and narrator, contributed to numerous journals, and wrote and edited some twenty-six books, including non-fiction works, novels, poetry books, children’s stories and anthologies, and his work has been translated into German, Danish, French, Finnish, Dutch and Spanish. He has lectured, given readings and traveled extensively in Europe, the USA, Canada, Senegal, Cuba and the Caribbean, He has won several awards for both his poetry and prose, and since 1976 he has been Associate Professor of Writing in the School of Humanities and Arts at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts. .
Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Haitian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s to pursue university education. A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching since the 1970s, holding a lifetime position as Writer-In-Residence at Hampshire College. He was born as Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey. When two years old, Salkey was sent to Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked there as a teacher, while his father continued to work in Panama. Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the University of London. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey 'quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.' After reading V. S. Naipaul's his first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the 'harassed' working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971). In 1966 he co-founded with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite the Caribbean Artists Movement, as a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In the latter part of his life he was a professor of creative writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, where he went in 1976. Salkey was good friends with Austin Clarke, and the two had a long written correspondence, a great deal of which is available in Clarke's files at the McMaster University Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. 'I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country.' (From Escape To An Autumn Pavement). Salkey was a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley, who (together with a committee comprising Louis James, John La Rose, Marc Matthews, Mervyn Morris, Jason Salkey, Anne Walmsley and Ronald Warwick) organised on 19–20 June 1992 a two-day symposium and celebration called 'Salkey's Score'. Held at the Commonwealth Institute, it paid tribute to Salkey in respect of his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s with the Caribbean Artists Movement; his journalism on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices; his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools; the importance he gave to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity; his work in Cuba; and his prolific output of novels, poetry and other writings.
A brave and pioneering treatment of sexual identity in Caribbean literature, this novel, first published in 1960, follows the fortunes of Johnnie Sobert, a Jamaican exile who works in London at a club that caters to black American servicemen. In flight from his dominant, possessive mother, he immerses himself in the bohemian Soho scene and adopts a wisecracking persona as a cover for his deep-seated insecurities. Adding to Johnnie's confusion is the fact that when he is not at work, he navigates a completely different life in Hempstead, where he lives in a bedsitter and carries on an unsatisfying affair with his white landlady, Fiona. These two worlds provide a lively portrait of Britons reacting to the growing presence of blacks and Asians in their neighborhoods, and Johnnie takes lessons from each place. By the time he finally decides to move in with his gay friend, Dick, he is much better equipped with self-awareness--but he has yet to make a decision about where his desires truly lie.
Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Haitian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s to pursue university education. A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching since the 1970s, holding a lifetime position as Writer-In-Residence at Hampshire College. He was born as Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey. When two years old, Salkey was sent to Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked there as a teacher, while his father continued to work in Panama. Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the University of London. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey 'quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.' After reading V. S. Naipaul's his first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the 'harassed' working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971). In 1966 he co-founded with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite the Caribbean Artists Movement, as a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In the latter part of his life he was a professor of creative writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, where he went in 1976. Salkey was good friends with Austin Clarke, and the two had a long written correspondence, a great deal of which is available in Clarke's files at the McMaster University Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. 'I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country.' (From Escape To An Autumn Pavement). Salkey was a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley, who (together with a committee comprising Louis James, John La Rose, Marc Matthews, Mervyn Morris, Jason Salkey, Anne Walmsley and Ronald Warwick) organised on 19–20 June 1992 a two-day symposium and celebration called 'Salkey's Score'. Held at the Commonwealth Institute, it paid tribute to Salkey in respect of his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s with the Caribbean Artists Movement; his journalism on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices; his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools; the importance he gave to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity; his work in Cuba; and his prolific output of novels, poetry and other writings.
With his Journals, Andrew Salkey is becoming, if he has not already become, the great living diarist of Caribbean life and letters. The works loom larger than their regional setting. In his HAVANA JOURNAL, Cuba grew in our minds not only as the country of Fidel Castro, the maximum leader, but also as an important neighbour set within our Caribbean geography and the wider world of the Americas. Through Andrew Salkey’s eyes, we glimpsed Cuba’s essential Caribbeaneity and complexity. Now, in his GEORGETOWN JOURNAL, Andrew Salkey records his journey to Guyana (a heavy pendant at the end of the Caribbean chain), where he attended the February 1970 Caribbean Writers and Artists Conference, at the time of the founding of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana. The foundation stones of the Republic rest on the heroic efforts of Cuffy and Akkara, victims and martyrs of the early pre-Haiti Guyanese Revolution of 1763. And so, the Republic of Guyana was symbolically founded on February 23rd, 1970. Andrew Salkey’s journey coincided with the critical moments of the February 1970 Rebellion in Trinidad, and some of the materials he collected startle for their insight and prophecy. Through GEORGETOWN JOURNAL, we see an unstable Trinidad, which, in spite of a certain calm, remains gripped in pre-revolutionary crisis.
Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Haitian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s to pursue university education. A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching since the 1970s, holding a lifetime position as Writer-In-Residence at Hampshire College. He was born as Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey. When two years old, Salkey was sent to Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked there as a teacher, while his father continued to work in Panama. Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the University of London. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey 'quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.' After reading V. S. Naipaul's his first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the 'harassed' working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971). In 1966 he co-founded with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite the Caribbean Artists Movement, as a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In the latter part of his life he was a professor of creative writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, where he went in 1976. Salkey was good friends with Austin Clarke, and the two had a long written correspondence, a great deal of which is available in Clarke's files at the McMaster University Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. 'I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country.' (From Escape To An Autumn Pavement). Salkey was a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley, who (together with a committee comprising Louis James, John La Rose, Marc Matthews, Mervyn Morris, Jason Salkey, Anne Walmsley and Ronald Warwick) organised on 19–20 June 1992 a two-day symposium and celebration called 'Salkey's Score'. Held at the Commonwealth Institute, it paid tribute to Salkey in respect of his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s with the Caribbean Artists Movement; his journalism on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices; his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools; the importance he gave to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity; his work in Cuba; and his prolific output of novels, poetry and other writings.
In these poems of pain and hurt the author explores his reactions to the atrocities of Chile's Junta. He communicates to the reader his deep response to the death of Allende and the murder of companeros, in a manner that is remarkable for "...one so far removed from the obscene puppet show" (Captive Contributors ' ). The poems ate an outstanding contribution on the subject from an English-speaking Caribbean writer. The poet attempts with his "precise missiles of effect" to traject the pain of oppression from the still little-discovered Latin American world to the English-speaking Caribbean; in a way that emphasises Marti's Our America. The long poem 'Chile' traces the continued struggle between despotism and revolution in this country, from early independence to the most recent rape of the constitution and the murder of Allende. The lyrical constructions and repetitions of Part Three add a poignancy to this poetic unity on Chile's travails that leaves the reader feeling with conviction that ' 'the pain simply won't subside" ('Inside').
Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Haitian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s to pursue university education. A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching since the 1970s, holding a lifetime position as Writer-In-Residence at Hampshire College. He was born as Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey. When two years old, Salkey was sent to Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked there as a teacher, while his father continued to work in Panama. Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the University of London. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey 'quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.' After reading V. S. Naipaul's his first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the 'harassed' working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971). In 1966 he co-founded with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite the Caribbean Artists Movement, as a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In the latter part of his life he was a professor of creative writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, where he went in 1976. Salkey was good friends with Austin Clarke, and the two had a long written correspondence, a great deal of which is available in Clarke's files at the McMaster University Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. 'I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country.' (From Escape To An Autumn Pavement). Salkey was a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley, who (together with a committee comprising Louis James, John La Rose, Marc Matthews, Mervyn Morris, Jason Salkey, Anne Walmsley and Ronald Warwick) organised on 19–20 June 1992 a two-day symposium and celebration called 'Salkey's Score'. Held at the Commonwealth Institute, it paid tribute to Salkey in respect of his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s with the Caribbean Artists Movement; his journalism on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices; his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools; the importance he gave to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity; his work in Cuba; and his prolific output of novels, poetry and other writings.
The lives of Gerald Manston and his school friends Shifty and FU were pleasantly uneventful until the 'upheaval' came. Then they found themselves deeply involved in the struggle to establish a better way of life for the poorer people of Kingston.
Andrew Salkey (30 January 1928 – 28 April 1995) was a novelist, poet, children's books writer and journalist of Jamaican and Haitian origin. He was born in Panama but raised in Jamaica, moving to Britain in the 1950s to pursue university education. A prolific writer and editor, he was the author of more than 30 books in the course of his career, including novels for adults and for children, poetry collections, anthologies, travelogues and essays. He died in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he had been teaching since the 1970s, holding a lifetime position as Writer-In-Residence at Hampshire College. He was born as Felix Andrew Alexander Salkey in Colón, Panama, to Jamaican parents, Andrew Alexander Salkey, a businessman, and Linda Marshall Salkey. When two years old, Salkey was sent to Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother and his mother, who worked there as a teacher, while his father continued to work in Panama. Salkey was educated at St George's College, in Kingston, and at Munro College, in St. Elizabeth, before going to England in the early 1950s to attend the University of London. According to Stuart Hall, Salkey 'quickly took his place at the centre of a small but outstanding circle of Caribbean writers and intellectuals. For a critical period he was the key figure, the main presenter and writer-in-residence in the Caribbean section of the BBC World Service at Bush House, London, and his programmes became a glittering showcase for a generation of writers, including Sam Selvon and George Lamming, who had made London their second home. Established and aspiring authors were chivvied, cajoled, gently chastised, inspired and schooled to produce new work for radio on the Caribbean Voices programme over which Andrew Salkey often presided.' After reading V. S. Naipaul's his first story Salkey encouraged him to continue writing. At the BBC, he also helped write the production My People and Your People with D. G. Bridson, a radio play about a love affair between a West Indian migrant and a Scottish skiffle player. Salkey was a part of the West Indian Students Union (WISU), which provided an effective forum for Caribbean students to express their ideas and provided voluntary support to the 'harassed' working-class Caribbean immigrant community, during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The association also included Gerry Burton, Arif Ali, Chris LeMaitre, John La Rose and Horace Lashley. In the mid-1950s Salkey taught English at Walworth Secondary School (also known as Mina Road school), an early comprehensive just off the Old Kent Road in South-east London. His first novel, A Quality of Violence – set around 1900 in a remote area of Jamaica, and narrated in a Jamaican patois – was published in 1959, and his second, Escape to An Autumn Pavement, in 1960. That same year Salkey edited one of the first anthologies of Caribbean short stories, West Indian Stories, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of folklore and popular culture. His novels that followed were The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968), The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976). He was a prolific writer and subsequently published several books for children, poetry, travelogues, books that drew on folk traditions, including Anancy's Score (1973), as well as editing anthologies including Breaklight (1971). In 1966 he co-founded with John La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite the Caribbean Artists Movement, as a platform for Caribbean artists, writers, actors and musicians. In the latter part of his life he was a professor of creative writing at Hampshire College in Amherst, where he went in 1976. Salkey was good friends with Austin Clarke, and the two had a long written correspondence, a great deal of which is available in Clarke's files at the McMaster University Archives in Hamilton, Ontario. 'I was headed nowhere like a hundred million others: I had escaped a malformed Jamaican middle class; I had attained my autumn pavement; I had done more than my fair share of hurting, rejecting, and condemning; and I had created another kind of failure, and this time, in another country.' (From Escape To An Autumn Pavement). Salkey was a director and constant supporter of the London-based publishing company Bogle-L'Ouverture founded by Guyanese-born Jessica Huntley, who (together with a committee comprising Louis James, John La Rose, Marc Matthews, Mervyn Morris, Jason Salkey, Anne Walmsley and Ronald Warwick) organised on 19–20 June 1992 a two-day symposium and celebration called 'Salkey's Score'. Held at the Commonwealth Institute, it paid tribute to Salkey in respect of his work in London in the 1960s and 1970s with the Caribbean Artists Movement; his journalism on the BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices; his contributions to developing the teaching of Caribbean writing in schools; the importance he gave to the relationship of Africa to personal and communal Caribbean identity; his work in Cuba; and his prolific output of novels, poetry and other writings.
You may think you already know this story about a beautiful servant girl, a cruel stepmother, a magnificent ball, and a lost slipper. But you've never heard it for true. Now you can hear the tale from someone who was there: a poor washerwoman from the island of Martinique. She has just one thing in the world to love, her goddaughter Cendrillon. When she finds Cendrillon heartsick over a rich man's son, at first she doesn't know what to do. But she has sharp wits, a strong will, and the magic wand her mother left her - and soon she has a plan to give her dear Cendrillon the gift of a love that will change her life. A Caldecott Honor author/illustrator team brings us a unique Cinderalla story, with a remarkable fairy godmother to tell the tale. Adapted from a traditional Creole story, this fresh retelling captures all the age-old romance and magic of Cinderalla, melding it with the vivid beauty of the Caribbean and the musical language of the islands.
Robert D. San Souci (October 10, 1946 – December 19, 2014) was the critically acclaimed author of many popular books for young people. He lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. Brian Pinkney is one of the most celebrated talents in children's publishing. In his career he has won two Caldecott Honors, a Coretta Scott King medal, a "Boston Globe-Horn Book" Award, and three Coretta Scott King Honors. For Simon & Schuster he illustrated "The Faithful Friend, " which won the Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Honor, "Sukey and the Mermaid, " which won the Coretta Scott King Honor, and "The Adventures of Sparrowboy, " which won the "Boston Globe-Horn Book" Award. He lives with his wife and two children in Brooklyn, New York -- which is where this story takes place.
This anthology is a collection of short stories and poems, critical articles on literature ana culture, and essays on aspects of life in the Caribbean, all of which were published in literary magazines in the 1930s. The aim has been to go back to the beginnings of West Indian literature, and to dispel the myth that West Indian writing started with Lamming, Selvon and Naipaul in the 1950s. The twenty-seven writers who are featured include Albert M. Gomes, Alfred H. Mendes, R. A. C de Boissiere, C. L. R. James, C. A. Thomasos and Ernest A. Carr. The continuing theme is of life in the 'barrack-yard', the grotesque slum in which the majority of Trinidad's lower classes lived. The work is a patch-work quilt, each piece conjuring up another aspect of life under colonial rule. Fiercely attacking bourgeois hypocrisy, and pressing West Indians to recognize their identity, the authors raise issues which are in many ways as relevant today as they were nearly fifty years ago.
Reinhard W. Sander at present lectures in African, Caribbean and American literature in the School of African and Asian Studies at the. University of Sussex. The author was assisted by Peter K. Ayers, lecturer in English at the University of Nigeria, Nsukke.
Simone Schwarz-Bart’s new novel is set in her native Guadaloupe. Although that little island is the center of her story, her universe is a much larger one: her real subject is slavery and what comes with it. Ti Jean, the hero of this mythic tale, is a young black man who will explore his past by returning to Africa to find where he came from. In the tiny hamlet of Fond-Zombi a monstrous beast has blocked out the sunlight, throwing the island into eternal darkness, The beast symbolizes the white man, and the eternal suffering of slavery, from which no black can escape. Like a young Ulysses, Ti Jean sets out on a voyage of discovery: to find the beast which has determined his fate, to visit the dead, and to explore the past world of suffering in order to conquer the present one. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s tale intertwines the real and the magical, the history of her own people and the myths of the island, It shimmers with allusions, with stories that are in the memory of every black person in all parts of the world, There are resonances of the African past and even an occasional murmur of tomorrow. Her writing is as subtle as a poem. as exhilarating as the beat of a drum.
Simone Schwarz-Bart is the author of six novels and a play, which have been translated and published in many languages; BETWEEN TWO WORLDS and THE BRIDGE OF BEYOND have been published in English. André Schwarz-Bart is the author of three novels, including Le Dernier des justes (THE LAST OF THE JUST), which was awarded the 1959 Prix Goncourt and has been translated into twenty languages.
In this novel Simone Schwarz-Bart shows the survival power of the women of Guadeloupe who live in conditions of extreme poverty and deprivation and yet who are filled with dauntless courage and love for life.
Simone Schwarz-Bart (born Simone Brumant on 8 January 1938) is a French novelist and playwright of Guadeloupean origin. She is a recipient of the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle. Simone Brumant was born on 8 January 1938 at Saintes in the Charente-Maritime department of France. Her place of birth is not clear, however, as she has also stated that she was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. Her parents were originally from Guadeloupe. Her father was a soldier while her mother was a teacher. When the Second World War broke out, her father stayed in France to fight, while she and her mother returned to Guadeloupe. She lived in a rather dilapidated school group with her mother. She studied at Pointe-à-Pitre, followed by Paris and Dakar. At the age of 18, while studying in Paris, she met her future husband, André Schwarz-Bart, who encouraged her to take up writing as a career. They married in 1960, and lived at various times in Senegal, Switzerland, Paris, and Guadeloupe. Schwarz-Bart at one time ran a Creole furniture business as well as a restaurant. Her husband died in 2006. They have two sons, Jacques Schwarz-Bart, a noted jazz saxophonist, and Bernard Schwarz-Bart. She currently lives in Goyave, a small village in Guadeloupe. In 1967, together with her husband, André Schwarz-Bart, she wrote Un plat de porc aux bananas vertes, a historical novel exploring the parallels in the exiles of Caribbeans and Jews. In 1972, they published La Mulâtresse Solitude. In 1989, they wrote a six-volume encyclopaedia Hommage à la femme noire (In Praise of Black Women), to honour the black heroines who were missing in the official historiography. Despite being mentioned as her husband's collaborator in their works, critics have often attributed full authorship to André Schwarz-Bart, and only his name appears in the French edition of La Mulâtresse Solitude. Her authorship is acknowledged, however, in the English translation of the book. In 1972, Schwarz-Bart wrote Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, which is considered one of the masterpieces of Caribbean literature. She wrote the book after the loss of a dear friend named Stéphanie whom she considered to be "her grandmother, her sister ..." For her "it was the country that went away with this person" In 1979, she published Ti jean l'horizon. Schwarz-Bart has also written for the theatre: Ton beau capitaine was a well-received play in one act. Schwarz-Bart, along with her husband, is deeply committed to political issues, and the issues faced by people, especially women, of colour. She has explored the languages and locations of her ancestry in her works, and examines male domination over women in the Caribbean, as well as themes of alienation in exile. In his novel Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, the aim is indeed to identify the process by which women become women. The famous sentence of Simone de Beauvoir, "we are not born a woman, we become it" will not have escaped you, but much more than a conceptual formula. Schwartz-Bart highlights this statement in his production by mentioning the genealogy of its literary staff. This evocation will constitute a database, understood like historical, in which is given to have elements characteristic of the West Indies woman. Schwarz-Bart attempts to rehabilitate female figures in this West Indies discourse by giving them a decisive place. She links to the heritage of feminism which is part of the West Indies reflection discourse which it projects as a social and historical reality which would legitimize the latter. The reintegration of women into the general historicity of the West Indies will have enabled the reader of Simone Schwarz-Bart to reposition women in the social relations of power, both subject to the colonial system and to that of compulsory "herocentrism". In this positioning, the woman shows herself to be humble, modest and courageous.
‘You see, you start telling the story about a guy and then you get to telling the story of a time, a place, a people and a world.’ Tales of thwarted desires, repressed passions and betrayals evoke a troubled Caribbean paradise. The legacy of a cruel history haunts this new world society. Individuals are consumed by their own emotions and confused by the shifting ground of their own cultures. With a blend of pathos and ironic humour, Lawrence Scott describes life in this fallen Eden, where both the melancholy and the extravagant play their part.
Lawrence Scott (born in Trinidad, 1943) is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad & Tobago, currently living in London and Trinidad. His novels have been awarded (1998) and short-listed (1992, 2004) for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and twice nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (for Aelred's Sin in 2000 and Night Calypso in 2006). His stories have been much anthologized and he won the Tom-Gallon Short-Story Award in 1986. He divides his time between London and Port of Spain.
A curious narrator called Lavren, both male and female, tells carnival tales of crime and passion. These tales evoke a visionary history of the Monagas family and their island. WITCHBROOM is a brilliant first novel which reveals the history of a Caribbean island with an intensity and originality that is unrivalled. ‘This novel has more of the tone and texture and taste of the Caribbean milieu than any novel I can think of. This is a wonderful novel: rich, sensuous, quirky, energetic, vividly memorable.’ - Stewart Brown, Lecturer in African and Caribbean Literature, University of Birmingham.
Lawrence Scott (born in Trinidad, 1943) is an award-winning novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad & Tobago, currently living in London and Trinidad. His novels have been awarded (1998) and short-listed (1992, 2004) for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and twice nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (for Aelred's Sin in 2000 and Night Calypso in 2006). His stories have been much anthologized and he won the Tom-Gallon Short-Story Award in 1986. He divides his time between London and Port of Spain. Born on a sugarcane estate in Trinidad, Scott is a descendant of Trinidad's French and German creoles. He was educated at Boys’ RC School, San Fernando, Trinidad (1950-54), and by the Benedictine monks at the Abbey School, Mount Saint Benedict, Tunapuna (1955-62), before leaving for England. There he attended Prinknash Abbey, Gloucester, studying Philosophy and Theology (1963-67), St Clare’s Hall Oxford, gaining a BA Hons. degree in English Language & Literature (1968-72), and Manchester University, earning a Certificate In Education, English & Drama (Distinction) in 1972-73. Between 1973 and 2006 Scott worked as a teacher (of English and Drama) at various schools in London and in Trinidad, including Sedgehill, London; Thomas Calton Comprehensive, London; Presentation College, San Fernando, Trinidad; Aranguez Junior Secondary, Trinidad; Tulse Hill Comprehensive and Archbishop Tenison’s, London. Between 1983 and 2006 he taught Literature and Creative Writing at City & Islington Sixth Form College, London. He was a Writer-in-Residence at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in 2004. In 2006-09 he was a Senior Research Fellow of The Academy for Arts, Letters, Culture and Public Affairs at the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT). His academic research has included the Golconda Research/Writing Project, an oral history project in Trinidad. He has also researched extensively the life and times of Trinidad’s nineteenth-century artist Michel-Jean Cazabon, which work informs his 2012 novel Light Falling on Bamboo. Since 1992 Scott's publications include four novels, a collection of short stories and a book of non-fiction. His stories have been broadcast on BBC radio and have been anthologised internationally, notably in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories and Our Caribbean, A Gathering of Lesbian & Gay Writing from the Antilles (Duke University Press). He has also published poetry in several anthologies and journals, including Caribbean New Voices 1 (Longman, 1995), Trinidad & Tobago Review, Cross/Cultures 60 (Editions Rodopi B.V. Amsterdam – New York, 2002), Agenda and Wasafiri. In addition he is the author of numerous essays, reviews and interviews on the work of other Caribbean writers, including Earl Lovelace and Derek Walcott.
The derelict house in Shepherd's Bush that Moses takes on becomes the scene for an hilarious, topsy-turvy irreverent sequence of events. A Black Power group captures the basement, and a van load of illegal Pakistani immigrants move in upstairs, and soon Moses' dreams of proprietorial bliss are brought to an end. The account of his attempts to cope with these and other situations, together with a penchant for earthy, wholesome philosophising make for a vivid, witty and thoroughly enjoyable novel. `The best folk poet the British Caribbean has yet produced'. - George Lamming. 'A simple, lyrical, moving writer' - New Statesman.
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
Sam Selvon’s latest novel is a witty tale of Hogarthian progress. After years of descending to a dingy basement, living the rough, hard life of the black immigrant, Moses (the original hero of The Lonely Londoners) acquires a house in Shepherd’s Bush. Derelict and condemned as it is, he esconces himself on the top floor (for a change) and lives a landlord’s life of luxury while he writes his memoirs, employing the trusty Bob as his white Man Friday to look after the tenants and attend to household duties. His peace is rapidly shattered by a multitude of problems. A militant Black Power group takeover his basement as a centre for their activities and before he realises it he is sheltering illegal Pakistani immigrants, who slaughter sheep in his back yard and practise Yoga and other Eastern mysteries. But the hilarious account of how Moses and Bob cope with these and other situations is only a part of this vivid novel; it is full of earthy, wholesome and irreverent observations on present-day black (and white) citizens of Britain, and the changes that have taken place since the early days of coloured immigration. By a unique use of language (a combination of easily-understood dialect and Moses’s ‘correct’ English), the author has succeeded in reviving the kind of writing which is best interpreted and enjoyed as a novel. ‘A simple lyrical moving writer.’- New Statesman. ‘His style is full of flavour.’ – daily Telegraph.
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
There is a new type in the streets of London. His clothes stand out baroque and garish in the subfusc London scene, his voice is calypso-like, his smile is disarming, and his skin is black. He is, in fact, one of the vast and growing army of West Indian immigrants who have invaded the larger cities and whose calypso tunes and infectious gaiety mask the serious problems of a precarious existence. This is a book about these people by one of them, written in the very idiom in which they speak and think. Though the author writes it as a novel, we doubt if any of its characters is really fictitious. Here you may see through the eyes of the narrator, Moses, such flamboyant individuals as Five Past Twelve, Captain, the amorous young Sir Galahad and a host of others, toiling, ‘Liming’, gossiping and love-making. We follow them to their Saturday-night socials, their jive sessions and rendezvous on the park benches, see them crouching under blankets for warmth in winter and airing themselves voluptuously in the summer sunshine of mean streets. Samuel Selvon is a young Trinidadian whose first novel A BRIGHTER SUN was given such generous critical appreciation on both sides of the Atlantic. Carl Carmer wrote, ‘Not since I read Porgy have I been so impressed by a work that concerns itself with the nobilities of primitive peoples striving to overcome limitations placed upon them by poverty and discrimination. . .’ Under the laughter and the lilting rhythms of Trinidadian speech, THE LONELY LONDONERS has the same compassion which made his earlier work so memorable. . SAMUEL SELVON was born in Trinidad of Indian parents. He went to school and college on the Island, and during the war served for five years as a telegraphist in a mine-sweeper. After the war, he worked on The Trinidad Guardian, and began to write short stories in his spare time, several of which were accepted by the B.B.C. Encouraged by this success, he came to England, bringing with him the manuscript of a novel called A BRIGHTER SUN, which was published by Wingates in 1952 and by Viking in the United States. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his second novel, AN ISLAND IS A WORLD. THE LONELY LONDONERS is his third novel and the second to be published in America. . .
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
This novel of Trinidad, written by a young native of the island, brings us a scene completely new to fiction and characters who are strikingly, delightfully original. It is the story of sixteen-year-old Tiger and his dark-haired child bride, Urmilla, grappling with the mysteries of married life in a Trinidadian village. Poverty and carefree fun, swift tragedy and quiet poetry, mingle in their honest and amusing story. We learn about wartime Trinidad, with its mixed population of Negroes, Chinese, and East Indians; we watch the arrival of American troops with their money-bringing projects; we follow the colorful cycles of tropic landscape. The wild music of steel bands and the picturesque language of Calypso songs accent its pages. But the story unfolds largely through the eyes of Tiger, the Indian boy. It is his speech that gives it flavor, his point of view that gives it meaning. ‘Wat is to is, must is,’ his friends say; but Tiger is not satisfied. His reach for something beyond his narrow horizon makes him, for all his strangeness, a fellow creature whose hopes and disappointments we can share. ‘A first novel of quite remarkable quality a poetic, amusing, and frequently touch- ing portrait of a community living against a background of dramatic events . . . It is rare indeed to find a writer who, like Mr. Selvon, can catch the quality of native colonial life so dispassionately and with such skill when he has himself been a member of a similar community to that which he describes.’ - Times Literary Supplement (London). . Samuel Selvon was born of East Indian parents in Trinidad, British West Indies, in 1924. He was educated on the island, and served for five years during the war on a British minesweeper. After the war he worked on a Trinidad newspaper and began to write short stories, several of which were broadcast by the EEC in London. He followed them to England, bringing with him the manuscript of this first novel. He now works for a British publishing house. . .
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
This novel of Trinidad, written by a young native of the island, brings us a scene completely new to fiction and characters who are strikingly, delightfully original. It is the story of sixteen-year-old Tiger and his dark-haired child bride, Urmilla, grappling with the mysteries of married life in a Trinidadian village. Poverty and carefree fun, swift tragedy and quiet poetry, mingle in their honest and amusing story. We learn about wartime Trinidad, with its mixed population of Negroes, Chinese, and East Indians; we watch the arrival of American troops with their money-bringing projects; we follow the colorful cycles of tropic landscape. The wild music of steel bands and the picturesque language of Calypso songs accent its pages. But the story unfolds largely through the eyes of Tiger, the Indian boy. It is his speech that gives it flavor, his point of view that gives it meaning. ‘Wat is to is, must is,’ his friends say; but Tiger is not satisfied. His reach for something beyond his narrow horizon makes him, for all his strangeness, a fellow creature whose hopes and disappointments we can share. ‘A first novel of quite remarkable quality a poetic, amusing, and frequently touch- ing portrait of a community living against a background of dramatic events . . . It is rare indeed to find a writer who, like Mr. Selvon, can catch the quality of native colonial life so dispassionately and with such skill when he has himself been a member of a similar community to that which he describes.’ - Times Literary Supplement (London). . Samuel Selvon was born of East Indian parents in Trinidad, British West Indies, in 1924. He was educated on the island, and served for five years during the war on a British minesweeper. After the war he worked on a Trinidad newspaper and began to write short stories, several of which were broadcast by the EEC in London. He followed them to England, bringing with him the manuscript of this first novel. He now works for a British publishing house. . .
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
This novel of Trinidad, written by a young native of the island, brings us a scene completely new to fiction and characters who are strikingly, delightfully original. It is the story of sixteen-year-old Tiger and his dark-haired child bride, Urmilla, grappling with the mysteries of married life in a Trinidadian village. Poverty and carefree fun, swift tragedy and quiet poetry, mingle in their honest and amusing story. We learn about wartime Trinidad, with its mixed population of Negroes, Chinese, and East Indians; we watch the arrival of American troops with their money-bringing projects; we follow the colorful cycles of tropic landscape. The wild music of steel bands and the picturesque language of Calypso songs accent its pages. But the story unfolds largely through the eyes of Tiger, the Indian boy. It is his speech that gives it flavor, his point of view that gives it meaning. ‘Wat is to is, must is,’ his friends say; but Tiger is not satisfied. His reach for something beyond his narrow horizon makes him, for all his strangeness, a fellow creature whose hopes and disappointments we can share. ‘A first novel of quite remarkable quality a poetic, amusing, and frequently touch- ing portrait of a community living against a background of dramatic events . . . It is rare indeed to find a writer who, like Mr. Selvon, can catch the quality of native colonial life so dispassionately and with such skill when he has himself been a member of a similar community to that which he describes.’ - Times Literary Supplement (London). . Samuel Selvon was born of East Indian parents in Trinidad, British West Indies, in 1924. He was educated on the island, and served for five years during the war on a British minesweeper. After the war he worked on a Trinidad newspaper and began to write short stories, several of which were broadcast by the EEC in London. He followed them to England, bringing with him the manuscript of this first novel. He now works for a British publishing house. . .
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
‘IN CHAGUANAS, a sugar-cane district halfway down the western coast of the island, the biggest thing to happen, bigger even than the war, was Tiger’s wedding. The whole village turned up for it, negro and Indian alike, for when Indian people got married it was a big thing, plenty food and drink, plenty ceremony. The island is Trinidad, and Tiger is an Indian boy of sixteen whose child marriage to Urmilla, of the long hair and the black, sad eyes, is the opening episode of this tender and poetic little book. From this event Samuel Selvon, himself a Trinidadian Indian, develops with great delicacy the theme of the struggle towards maturity of this rather touching young couple in its sun-drenched West Indian village peopled by negroes, Chinese and fellow Indians, whose picturesque speech, habits and morals are the subject of some of the most vivid reporting we have read for a long time. Here is a book that strikes a completely new note in contemporary fiction. It is heartening to find that in any British colony a native voice can now be heard, particularly a voice of such peculiar sensitivity and charm, emanating from a young man still in his twenties. . SAMUEL SELVON was born in Trinidad of Indian parents twenty-eight years ago. He went to school and College on the Island, and during the war served for five years in the West Indian R.N.V.R. as a leading telegraphist in a mine-sweeper. After his demobilisation, he worked on The Trinidad Guardian, and began to write short stories in his spare time, several of which were accepted for broadcasting by the B.B.C. Encouraged by this success, he came to England, bringing with him the manuscript of A BRIGHTER SUN, which he submitted to Wingates, who at once decided to publish it. About one third of the inhabitants of Trinidad are, like Selvon, of Indian extraction. This book, which is largely autobiographical, deals with their life. . .
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
With this second book, the young author of A BRIGHTER SUN definitely proves himself a writer of distinction not untouched by genius. This is a word which one hesitates to use on the dust jacket of a novel, but it is also one which has sprung naturally to the lips of everyone who has read his manuscript. Once again the setting is Trinidad, and the theme the Indian as against the negroid community life of that Island. Himself a Trinidadian Indian, Selvon not only feels himself an integral part of the life he depicts, but has the almost unique gift of being able to communicate the thoughts, the language and the quirks of character of his subjects. There is the fat old jeweller, Johnnie, with his drunken, warped mentality, perpetually battling against the female opposition of his wife and two daughters, Rena and Jennifer. There are the two brothers, Rufus and Forster, whose changing outlook forces them to leave Trinidad for the United States and for London respectively, only to return home in the end. And there is Father Hope, the self-appointed priest, living a secluded philosophical life in the small mountain village of Veronica. The inter-relationships of these characters - Rufus's disastrous marriage to Rena, Jennifer's attitude to her father and so on - are worked out with mathematical skill, and the result is a novel filled with the complexity of life in Trinidad, where many races and communities mingle, and where a sense of island patriotism is only now slowly beginning to form. The book also gives a vivid picture of the life of West Indian immigrants in London - a topical theme indeed - and the less difficult absorption of West Indian elements into the city life of America.
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
Set in Trinidad, Samuel Selvon's new novel catches the anxieties which accompany the homecoming of Mark, a young Negro doctor, from . England with his white wife, Joyce. Mark returns to his mother and to his oldest and best friend, Adrian, who stayed behind when Mark joined the RAF during World War II. During the years of Mark's military service and study in Europe, Adrian has enjoyed the easy loving and drunken nights tolerated -almost expected - by the happy-go-lucky Trinidad society. The two men try to recapture the carefree friendship of their youth but find their differences are now too great. In an attempt to become the 'respectable' person he never was, Adrian vows chastity for a year. His sudden self-denial is ridiculed by Mark and Joyce, but Adrian's will remains strong, despite enticement by Polly, his fiancee. It is Joyce's ripe and forbidden sexuality which finally breaks him down, and he slides uneasily. back to his former way of life. A worthy successor to TURN AGAIN TIGER, Mr Selvon's new novel vividly portrays an exotic and permissive society. Among the other freshly-seen characters, old Ramdeen, Motilal and little Birdie contribute to the gay, melancholy world of I HEAR THUNDER.
Samuel Selvon was born in Trinidad of Indian parents. He went to school and college on the Island, and during the war served for five years as a telegraphist in a minesweeper. After the war, he worked on The Trinidad Guardian and began to write short stories in his spare time, several of which were broadcast by the BBC. His first novel, A BRIGHTER SUN, was published in England and in the United States in 1952. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his second novel, AN ISLAND IS A WORLD, and his third novel, THE LONELY LONDONERS, was an outstanding critical success. A collection of his short stories, Ways of Sunlight, was published in England and America in 1958, at the same time as his latest novel, TURN AGAIN TIGER, both of which were widely acclaimed. Samuel Selvon is now working on a musical for the stage.
The derelict house in Shepherd's Bush that Moses takes on becomes the scene for an hilarious, topsy-turvy irreverent sequence of events. A Black Power group captures the basement, and a van load of illegal Pakistani immigrants move in upstairs, and soon Moses' dreams of proprietorial bliss are brought to an end. The account of his attempts to cope with these and other situations, together with a penchant for earthy, wholesome philosophising make for a vivid, witty and thoroughly enjoyable novel. `The best folk poet the British Caribbean has yet produced'. - George Lamming. 'A simple, lyrical, moving writer' - New Statesman.
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
There is a new type in the streets of London. His clothes stand out baroque and garish in the subfusc London scene, his voice is calypso-like, his smile is disarming, and his skin is black. He is, in fact, one of the vast and growing army of West Indian immigrants who have invaded the larger cities and whose calypso tunes and infectious gaiety mask the serious problems of a precarious existence. This is a book about these people by one of them, written in the very idiom in which they speak and think. Though the author writes it as a novel, we doubt if any of its characters is really fictitious. Here you may see through the eyes of the narrator, Moses, such flamboyant individuals as Five Past Twelve, Captain, the amorous young Sir Galahad and a host of others, toiling, ‘Liming’, gossiping and love-making. We follow them to their Saturday-night socials, their jive sessions and rendezvous on the park benches, see them crouching under blankets for warmth in winter and airing themselves voluptuously in the summer sunshine of mean streets. Samuel Selvon is a young Trinidadian whose first novel A BRIGHTER SUN was given such generous critical appreciation on both sides of the Atlantic. Carl Carmer wrote, ‘Not since I read Porgy have I been so impressed by a work that concerns itself with the nobilities of primitive peoples striving to overcome limitations placed upon them by poverty and discrimination. . .’ Under the laughter and the lilting rhythms of Trinidadian speech, THE LONELY LONDONERS has the same compassion which made his earlier work so memorable. . SAMUEL SELVON was born in Trinidad of Indian parents. He went to school and college on the Island, and during the war served for five years as a telegraphist in a mine-sweeper. After the war, he worked on The Trinidad Guardian, and began to write short stories in his spare time, several of which were accepted by the B.B.C. Encouraged by this success, he came to England, bringing with him the manuscript of a novel called A BRIGHTER SUN, which was published by Wingates in 1952 and by Viking in the United States. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his second novel, AN ISLAND IS A WORLD. THE LONELY LONDONERS is his third novel and the second to be published in America. . .
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
From the Digit Books paperback edition - West Indians invade Great Britain in their thousands. A medley of ‘spades’ freezing in the fog, basking in the Cythera-summer, rackety and thrilled. Lonely and getting nowhere . . . The author depicts them and their plight expertly. ‘ Strikingly vivid . . . makes you eager for more.’ – NEW STATESMAN. ‘Lively, wonderfully colloquial and authentic.’ – SPHERE. . . There is a new type in the streets of London. His clothes stand out baroque and garish in the subfusc London scene, his voice is calypso-like, his smile is disarming, and his skin is black. He is, in fact, one of the vast and growing army of West Indian immigrants who have invaded the larger cities and whose calypso tunes and infectious gaiety mask the serious problems of a precarious existence. This is a book about these people by one of them, written in the very idiom in which they speak and think. Though the author writes it as a novel, we doubt if any of its characters is really fictitious. Here you may see through the eyes of the narrator, Moses, such flamboyant individuals as Five Past Twelve, Captain, the amorous young Sir Galahad and a host of others, toiling, ‘Liming’, gossiping and love-making. We follow them to their Saturday-night socials, their jive sessions and rendezvous on the park benches, see them crouching under blankets for warmth in winter and airing themselves voluptuously in the summer sunshine of mean streets. Samuel Selvon is a young Trinidadian whose first novel A BRIGHTER SUN was given such generous critical appreciation on both sides of the Atlantic. Carl Carmer wrote, ‘Not since I read Porgy have I been so impressed by a work that concerns itself with the nobilities of primitive peoples striving to overcome limitations placed upon them by poverty and discrimination. . .’ Under the laughter and the lilting rhythms of Trinidadian speech, THE LONELY LONDONERS has the same compassion which made his earlier work so memorable.
SAMUEL SELVON was born in Trinidad of Indian parents. He went to school and college on the Island, and during the war served for five years as a telegraphist in a mine-sweeper. After the war, he worked on The Trinidad Guardian, and began to write short stories in his spare time, several of which were accepted by the B.B.C. Encouraged by this success, he came to England, bringing with him the manuscript of a novel called A BRIGHTER SUN, which was published by Wingates in 1952 and by Viking in the United States. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his second novel, AN ISLAND IS A WORLD. THE LONELY LONDONERS is his third novel and the second to be published in America.
The first wave of Caribbean writers who made their mark were dominated by the thought of independence and their relations with the white world outside. Samuel Selvon now extends the theme by showing a young country at grips with modernisation, less and less willing to blame anyone but itself for lack of achievement. In Trinidad the sugar crop is still the chief crop and its labourers are mostly the descendants of the East Indian workers brought there to grow and harvest it. Like Western workers, the villagers of Wilderness react against the use of machinery, except for Romesh, a student fresh from university. is over-possessive mother is ambitious for him, wants him to join the emerging elite of the island and therefore involves him with Petra, a white girl, whose skin still commands a certain respect and envy. But when the new harvester arrives Romesh learns as much about himself as his original social concern. THE PLAINS OF CARONI is the author's best book so far, a real and humane story.
Samuel Selvon was born in Trinidad of Indian parents. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve during the war. After the war Selvon worked on the Trinidad Guardian and sub-edited weekly magazine of Caribbean prose and poetry. He began writing career with verse and short stories, the success of which encouraged him to come to England in 1950, and two years later he wrote his first novel, A BRIGHTER SUN, which was widely acclaimed. Selvon was twice awarded Guggenheim Fellowships from America: in 1954 for second novel AN ISLAND IS A WORLD, and in 1968 for research in creative writing. Awarded Travelling Scholarship by the Society of Authors in 1958 Samuel Selvon visited Paris and Spain. He was awarded Trinidad Government Scholarship for refamiliarisation in 1962, and honoured with the Humming Bird Medal in 1969 for work in Caribbean literature. Selvon has also twice been awarded grants from the Arts Council of Great Britain. THE PLAINS OF CARONI is his eighth book. He has also written for Radio Drama and has been resident in London for twenty years.
Only Manko, the village obeaman, foresees trouble when Roger Franklin invites his old friend, Gary Johnson, to come and stay on his cacao estate in Trinidad. Before long, however, the premonitions of the old medicine man are fulfilled. The estate workers are already uneasy in their new role with the white men after Trinidadian independence and the love of Gary for the lovely Indian, Sarajini, only aggravates their prejudices. The love affair acts as a catalyst to expose the rivalries, jealousies and intrigues amongst the villagers and what had been a happy-go-lucky atmosphere quickly evaporates as tension begins to mount. Oppressive weather culminating in a hurricane is by no means the only storm with which the community has to contend and Roger Franklin, already immersed in a controversy between the sugar and cacao planters finds he can no longer afford to ignore what is happening on his estate. Samuel Selvon writes with a light and evocative touch about his island and the result is a tale full of atmosphere and teeming with life.
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
‘Tiger boy, one thing with you, your mind not hard to change. One day you singing the blues, the next day you humming a hot calypso.’ In the spicy racial melange of Five Rivers Village on Trinidad Island, Tiger from Chaguanas is a man apart - a born leader, quick-witted, rebellious, vitally dominant. Tiger's refusal to embrace the delicious indolence of native life strikes the counterpoint of discord in the easy rhythm of the Island. After a hilarious all-night ‘freeness’ where friends come and go with the rum flow, Tiger turns his back on his home village to follow his father to the experimental sugar cane station in Five Rivers. ‘You stay in one place and you live and dead and that's all,’ Tiger decides as he begins his year of trial. High-spirited and restless, unfulfilled by a seemingly useless education (‘. . . is like one-eye man in blind-eye country’), Tiger races along a precipice, stumbling almost fatally into a dramatic encounter with the bored and beautiful wife of the white plantation supervisor. The resolution of this meeting is Tiger's coming-of-age, as his early contempt of his people's simple ways Samuel Selvon gives ground to a deep and meaningful understanding of Island life. It is through Tiger that we meet the delightful potpourri of islanders: the high dreamer, More Lazy, who can savor life only while reclining; the quixotic Hindu peddler, Soylo, the somnambulant Chinese shopkeeper Otto, dedicated to the pacific joys of opium and sleep; his young bride, Berta, who in flirtatious passing manages to disrupt not only Otto, but the males of the whole village. Samuel Selvon, a native Trinidadian, uses the idiom of his people to evoke the exuberance and gaiety, the pleasures and pastimes, with which the islanders hold their precarious existence in innocent embrace. Written with compassion and understanding, this quickly moving story runs a fluent commentary on the ways and byways of native society that will surprise and delight the enamoured observer of island life.
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
Tiger boy, one thing with you, your mind not hard to change. One day you singing the blues, the next day you humming a hot calypso.’ In the spicy racial melange of Five Rivers Village on Trinidad Island, Tiger from Chaguanas is a man apart - a born leader, quick-witted, rebellious, vitally dominant. Tiger's refusal to embrace the delicious indolence of native life strikes the counterpoint of discord in the easy rhythm of the Island. After a hilarious all-night ‘freeness’ where friends come and go with the rum flow, Tiger turns his back on his home village to follow his father to the experimental sugar cane station in Five Rivers. ‘You stay in one place and you live and dead and that's all,’ Tiger decides as he begins his year of trial. High-spirited and restless, unfulfilled by a seemingly useless education (‘. . . is like one-eye man in blind-eye country’), Tiger races along a precipice, stumbling almost fatally into a dramatic encounter with the bored and beautiful wife of the white plantation supervisor. The resolution of this meeting is Tiger's coming-of-age, as his early contempt of his people's simple ways Samuel Selvon gives ground to a deep and meaningful understanding of Island life. It is through Tiger that we meet the delightful potpourri of islanders: the high dreamer, More Lazy, who can savor life only while reclining; the quixotic Hindu peddler, Soylo, the somnambulant Chinese shopkeeper Otto, dedicated to the pacific joys of opium and sleep; his young bride, Berta, who in flirtatious passing manages to disrupt not only Otto, but the males of the whole village. Samuel Selvon, a native Trinidadian, uses the idiom of his people to evoke the exuberance and gaiety, the pleasures and pastimes, with which the islanders hold their precarious existence in innocent embrace. Written with compassion and understanding, this quickly moving story runs a fluent commentary on the ways and byways of native society that will surprise and delight the enamoured observer of island life.
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
Here, once again, as he also did in THE LONELY LONDONERS, Samuel Selvon tells us from the inside what the West Indian is really like; how he feels about London, what he thinks about us. Writing in their own lively idiom, he captures all the spontaneity and colour of their lives; the gaiety which keeps breaking out however cramping and mean their circumstances. But the people he portrays are no mere literary cliché. Sam Selvon doesn’t pander to the popular conception of the coloured man. It is true the West Indian has an exuberant love of life which often seems to be lacking in his white neighbour, but there is another side to his nature as well, and such stories as Basement Lullaby reveal quite a different force from the one we are accustomed to. Not all the episodes in WAYS OF SUNLIGHT are about London however; several have Trinidad as their setting and show clearly the kind of conditions which have driven many West Indians to this country. Indeed the book as a whole has a wider scope and reveals a greater depth of feeling than THE LONELY LONDONERS. Even the characteristic style of the earlier book has been modified, and sometimes dispensed with altogether, where the need for a different approach has been felt. The result is a considerable variation in tune, ranging from the lyricism of My Girl and the City, which might be described as a London Rhapsody, to the restrained bitterness of the harsh little piece, Gussy and the Boss. WAYS OF SUNLIGHT marks a decided advance in Samuel Selvon’s development as a writer and firmly establishes him as the West Indian’s chief interpreter.
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
Here, once again, as he also did in THE LONELY LONDONERS, Samuel Selvon tells us from the inside what the West Indian is really like; how he feels about London, what he thinks about us. Writing in their own lively idiom, he captures all the spontaneity and colour of their lives; the gaiety which keeps breaking out however cramping and mean their circumstances. But the people he portrays are no mere literary cliché. Sam Selvon doesn’t pander to the popular conception of the coloured man. It is true the West Indian has an exuberant love of life which often seems to be lacking in his white neighbour, but there is another side to his nature as well, and such stories as Basement Lullaby reveal quite a different force from the one we are accustomed to. Not all the episodes in WAYS OF SUNLIGHT are about London however; several have Trinidad as their setting and show clearly the kind of conditions which have driven many West Indians to this country. Indeed the book as a whole has a wider scope and reveals a greater depth of feeling than THE LONELY LONDONERS. Even the characteristic style of the earlier book has been modified, and sometimes dispensed with altogether, where the need for a different approach has been felt. The result is a considerable variation in tune, ranging from the lyricism of My Girl and the City, which might be described as a London Rhapsody, to the restrained bitterness of the harsh little piece, Gussy and the Boss. WAYS OF SUNLIGHT marks a decided advance in Samuel Selvon’s development as a writer and firmly establishes him as the West Indian’s chief interpreter.
Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language’, for narrative as well as dialogue. As he explained: ‘When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners, I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.’ Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando in the south of Trinidad. His parents were East Indian: his father was a first-generation Christian immigrant from Madras and his mother's father was Scottish. He was educated there at Naparima College, San Fernando, before leaving at the age of fifteen to work. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945. Thereafter he moved north to Port of Spain, and from 1945 to 1950, worked for the Trinidad Guardian as a reporter and for a time on its literary page. In this period, he began writing stories and descriptive pieces, mostly under a variety of pseudonyms such as Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Selvon moved to London, England, in the 1950s, and then in the late 1970s to Alberta, Canada, where he lived until his death from a heart attack on 16 April 1994 on a return trip to Trinidad. Selvon married twice: in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud (one daughter) and in 1963 to Althea Daroux (two sons, one daughter). Selvon is known for novels such as The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Moses Ascending (1975). His novel A Brighter Sun (1952), detailing the construction of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway in Trinidad through the eyes of young Indian worker Tiger, was a popular choice on the CXC English Literature syllabus for many years. Other notable works include Ways of Sunlight (1957), Turn Again Tiger (1958) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). During the 1970s and early 1980s, Selvon converted several of his novels and stories into radio scripts, broadcast by the BBC, which were collected in Eldorado West One (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and Highway in the Sun (Peepal Tree Press, 1991). After moving to Canada, Selvon found a job teaching creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Victoria. When that job ended, he took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary in Alberta for a few months, before becoming writer-in-residence there. He was largely ignored by the Canadian literary establishment, with his works receiving no reviews during his residency. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation’. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities’ that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi. Selvon's papers are now at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin, USA. These consist of holograph manuscripts, typescripts, book proofs, manuscript notebooks, and correspondence. Drafts for six of his eleven novels are present, along with supporting correspondence and items relating to his career.
In these ten stories, the great award-winning Olive Senior explores characters whose lives have been shaped, or twisted, by the African diaspora and centuries of colonization. The Pain Tree tells stories that speak to all aspects of Jamaican life. We hear from poor folk making the best of past hardships ("Coal"); rich folk plotting future selfishness ("The Goodness of My Heart"); and a young girl, forced to shoulder her mother's burdens in addition to her own ("Lollipop"). Bookending these are two powerful stories about the inextricability of home and history: in "The Pain Tree," the protagonist realizes the love she abandoned, and the pain she left behind; in "Flying," the lead character, searching for his missing piece, comes home for good.
Olive Senior is the prize-winning author of a dozen books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Her short story collection Summer Lightning (Longman, 1986) won the inaugural Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book, and her poetry collection Over the Roofs of the World (Insomniac, 2005) was a finalist for the 2005 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. Born in Jamaica, she divides her time between Jamaica and Toronto, Ontario.
Olive Senior is one of Jamaica's most exciting creative talents. Summer Lightning is her first collection of short stories. Her setting is rural Jamaica; her heroes are the naive and the vulnerable, who bring to life with power and realism issues such as snobbery, ambition, jealousy, faith and love. Written in vivid, colourful detail, these rich, compelling stories recreate with sensitivity and wit a whole range of emotions, from childhood hope to brooding melancholy. Each is told with an affectionate and poignant perception of you and I at our best and worst. Gently we are led, laughing, crying, but always enjoying.
Olive Marjorie Senior (born 23 December 1941) is a Jamaican poet, novelist, short story and non-fiction writer based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She was awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal awarded in 2005 by the Institute of Jamaica for her contributions to literature. Born in rural Jamaica in Trelawny, Cockpit Country, Olive Senior was the seventh of 10 children. Senior attended Montego Bay High School For Girls. At nineteen, she joined the staff of the Jamaica Gleaner in Kingston and later worked with the Jamaica Information Service. Senior later won a scholarship to study journalism at the Thomson Foundation in Cardiff, Wales and as a Commonwealth scholar attended Carleton University School of Journalism in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. While at university she began writing fiction and poetry. On her return to Jamaica, she worked as a freelancer in public relations, publishing, and speech writing before joining the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the West Indies, where she edited the journal Social and Economic Studies (1972–77). In 1982 she joined the Institute of Jamaica as editor of the Jamaica Journal. In 1987 Senior won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for her first collection of stories. After Hurricane Gilbert hit Jamaica in 1988, Senior moved to Europe, where she lived in Portugal, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, before settling in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in the early 1990s. Senior has published three collections of poems: Talking of Trees (1985), Gardening in the Tropics (1994), and Over the Roofs of the World (2005). Her short story collection Summer Lightning (1986) won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize; it was followed by Arrival of the Snake Woman (1989, 2009) and Discerner of Hearts (1995). Her most recent collection of stories, The Pain Tree (2015), was the overall winner of the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, having won the fiction category. Her first novel, Dancing Lessons (Cormorant Books, 2011), was shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize in the Canada region. Her non-fiction works include The Message Is Change (1972), about Michael Manley's first election victory; A-Z of Jamaican Heritage (1984, expanded and republished as Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage in 2004); and Working Miracles: Women's Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean (1991). Senior's most recent non-fiction book, Dying To Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal, was published in September 2014 – 100 years after the opening of the Panama Canal, 15 August 1914. On 1 April 2015 the book was shortlisted for the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, winning the non-fiction category. An extended critical evaluation of Senior's work can be found in Olive Senior by Denise deCaires Narain (2011), published by Northcote House Publishers (UK) in collaboration with the British Council as part of the Writers and Their Work series. Senior's work often addresses questions of Caribbean identity in terms of gender and ethnicity. She has said: "I've had to deal with race because of who I am and how I look. In that process, I've had to determine who I am. I do not think you can be all things to all people. As part of that process, I decided I was a Jamaican. I represent many different races and I'm not rejecting any of them to please anybody. I'm just who I am and you have to accept me or not." Her work has been adapted as drama and broadcast by the BBC and CBC, and she also wrote the radio play Window for the CBC. Her writing features in a wide range of anthologies including Her True-True Name (eds Elizabeth Wilson and Pamela Mordecai, 1989), Daughters of Africa (ed. Margaret Busby, 1992), The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (eds Ian McDonald and Stewart Brown, 1992), Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English (ed. Victor J. Ramraj, 1994), The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Tenth Annual Collection (eds Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, 1997), The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry (ed. Jay Parini, 2005), Best Poems on the Underground (eds Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik and Cicely Herbert, 2010), So Much Things to Say: 100 Calabash Poets (2010), and numerous others.
A collection of stories about British explorers and their quest for gold in the Antilles. It covers topics such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Cromwell's attempts to take Jamaica, William Paterson and his Company of Scotland's fleets, Thomas Gage, and Lionel Wafer.
Tim Severin (born 25 September 1940) is a British explorer, historian and writer. Severin is noted for his work in retracing the legendary journeys of historical figures. Severin was awarded both the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. He received the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for his 1982 book The Sindbad Voyage.
Bob Shacochis has been praised as a ‘stunning’ writer who ‘summons the spirits of America and the Third World’ (New York Newsday). Now, he brings to his first major work of reportage the worldview and political vision that have earned him comparisons with Graham Greene and V. S. Naipaul. Here is his eyewitness account of the 1994 invasion and occupation of Haiti, of American soldiers deployed into a strange war zone, ‘where there are no friends and no enemies, no front or rear, no victories and, likewise, no defeats, and no true endings.’ From the Pentagon’s war room to the bitter infighting in the dangerously divided U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince and its on again/off again relationship with terrorists, Shacochis chronicles what the military calls OTW Operations - other than war. Most enduring, from his eighteen months in the field in Haiti where he lived with a team of Special Forces commandos, Shacochis brings us the stories of soldiers, their exploits and frustrations, their inner lives as well as their heroic deeds, as they struggle to bring democracy to a country ravaged by tyranny. Not since Michael Herr’s Dispatches has an American author of this stature written such a ground-eye view of soldiering, as intimate and telling as Tim O’Brien’s THE THINGS THEY CARRIED.
Bob Shacochis (born September 9, 1951) is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary journalist. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.
From the INTRODUCTION - The New Caribbean Man, P.D. Sharma's first volume of verse, is an account of a journey of alienation, an odyssey from disillusionment with post-independence Caribbean society to the exile of the emigrant in a metropolitan society. Beneath the seemingly different concerns of the collection's three sections lies a unity of design: DELUGE documents the postdiluvian situation in which the West Indies finds itself as it suffers at the hands of a new breed of politicians; the dialect poems of ROOTS show sympathy for the common man, but find him guilty of having failed to withstand the corruption without; FLIGHT includes private as well as public poems, but again shows the individual debarred from playing any constructive role in the society in which he lives, now as an exile. If at first poems like 'Assassin's Song' seem to belong to the tradition of Guyanese political verse of which Martin Carter is the best known exponent, ultimately they represent the mood of a fresh generation, formed less by the political upheavals of the colonial period than by disillusionment with the hypocritical pieties of the New Elite. 'Post-Independence Man' shows the over-riding opportunism of this new kind of human being, while the title-poem of the collection presents him as the end-product of a form of social Darwinism in which the principle of survival of the fittest has culminated in 'homo corrupticus.' It is a damning indictment with the use of the evolutionary metaphor holding out little hope of change for the better. Yet Sharma's poetry stops short of being simply despairing, for what lends his work its particular satirical force is its blend of disenchantment and compassion. Thus, while in a poem like 'The Masses' he mounts a sardonic, vituperative attack on the people's gullibility, in 'Voice of the People' he uses dialect to express the common man's suffering in a sympathetic manner.
P. D. Sharma was born in 1944 in British Guiana (now Guyana), South America, and lived there until he immigrated to the U.S.A. in 1978. Of East Indian descent, his great grandparents came from the subcontinent as indentured labourers following the abolition of slavery. His first job, lasting for twelve years, was in the Civil Service; thereafter, he became a teacher of English (for five years) until he left the Photo: Guy Sharma country. A graduate of the University of Guyana, he studied creative writing at San Francisco State University and frequently visited the West Indian islands and the United States. Though not an active participant in political affairs, his keen and abiding interest in these matters is reflected in his earliest efforts - some witty and satirical features - which first appeared in the local press.
Global awareness of the Caribbean has come a long way from Columbus' colossal geographic error, but few readers are familiar with the diverse legacy of literature that has come out of this besieged region. In an unprecedented collection, If I Could Write This in Fire brings together fiction from the French-, Spanish-, and English-speaking Caribbean, much of it translated here for the first time, and illustrates the bridges built from one island society to another as all struggled to respond to the shared experience of conquest. The fifteen selections deal with basic, underlying themes of the region's literature: the plantation, maroon society, colonial education, rural and urban life, women's changing roles in the modern Caribbean, exile, and the diaspora. Works include Jamaican author James Carnegie's powerful novella Wages Paid about a day in the life of a slave plantation, a selection by noted Guadeloupan novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart, Puerto Rican short stories from Ana Lydia Vega, and fiction from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, St. Kitts, and Barbados. Together they offer the first picture of a Caribbean voice and aesthetic, and an extensive bibliography of further reading invites students, scholars, and others to explore beyond this initial collection. From Columbus' diaries on, the Caribbean has been the scene onto which a steady stream of myths has been imposed. If I Could Write This in Fire offers the first collection of authentic Caribbean voices - a small set of gems that will introduce readers to a rich and lyric tradition.
Author of a study on Cuban literary history and numerous articles on contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literature, Cuban American scholar Pamela Maria Smorkaloff teaches at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University.
The food of the Caribbean has been subject to a vast range of influences: American Indian, African, European and Asian. This collection of Caribbean recipes takes advantage of tropical fruit, fish, shellfish and unusual vegetables to produce unique meals with the flavour of the tropics.
Devinia Sookia was born on the tropical island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. She pursued her higher education at Aix en Provence in France and London, UK where she studied law and journalism. She is a member of Lincoln's Inn and was called to the English bar. She also worked as a lawyer for the media in London, until she moved to San Francisco, where she is an attorney, journalist and writer. Devinia has written for several newspapers and magazines over the years. In London she occupied the posts of Woman's Page Editor, Legal Editor and Cookery Editor. She is the author of Caribbean Cooking.pic
Katherine lives in the Blue Mountains above Kingston, relishing her independence and the beauty of the place. Then she meets Bob, a middle-aged, married American, and an unlikely friendship leads to love. The situation seems to be under control until Bob’s wife tries to reclaim him and Katherine is forced to acknowledge her own vulnerability. With subtlety and laconic humour, Vanessa Spence explores the hazardous battle zones between gender, culture and race.
VANESSA SPENCE was born in 1961 in Kingston, Jamaica. She was named after Vanessa Bell of Bloomsbury Group fame, who was her great aunt. She grew up in Jamaica and was later educated at the Universities of Oxford and Yale. She has lived in Sierra Leone, India and Pakistan and travelled widely in East and Southern Africa. As an economist, she has worked in the fields of public utility regulation and development banking. She now works for the state privatisation agency in Kingston and lives in the Blue Mountains. THE ROADS ARE DOWN is her first novel.
This is the final installment in a quartet of novels that explores the lives of the small St Lucian middle class in the years around independence. Peter, after years abroad, has resumed his marriage with his long abandoned wife Phyllis, and is now working as a lecturer in Jamaica. His brother Paul remains in St Lucia, disgraced and sacked from professional employment by his refusal to marry his pregnant girlfriend. He has acquired a reputation for madness, though whether this is a contrived mask or an actual breakdown is left uncertain. J—, Black Bam and the Masqueraders intercuts Paul’s confessional letters to Peter with the narrative of Peter’s marital relationship with Phyllis, his affairs and descent into despair, drunkenness and domestic violence. St Omer offers a bracingly bleak portrayal of a middle class beset with hypocrisies over race, sexism and class privilege.
Garth St. Omer was born in Castries, St Lucia, on 15 January 1931. On graduating from St Mary’s College, a Roman Catholic high school for boys in St Lucia, he taught for seven years, 1949—56, in high schools in the Eastern Caribbean. He entered the University College of the West Indies, Jamaica, in 1956 on a UCWI scholarship, and graduated in 1959 with an Honours degree in French, with Spanish as subsidiary subject. Between 1959 and 1961 he taught as an English Language Assistant in lycees in Dax and Albi, France. From 1961 to 1966 he taught French and English at Apam Secondary School, Ghana. The years 1966 to 1969 were devoted to full-time writing of fiction, in England and the West Indies. In 1969 he entered the graduate school of Fine Arts of Columbia University, taking courses in creative writing, translation, film-making, film history and film aesthetics. He graduated in 1971 with the MFA degree. In 1971 he enrolled in the Comparative Literature programme of Princeton University to read for the PhD degree. He successfully completed the requirements in 1975, his dissertation being on THE COLONIAL NOVEL, a comparative study of Albert Camus, V. S. Naipaul and Alejo Carpentier (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1975). In 1975 he joined the English Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, as Associate Professor, and was subsequently promoted to the rank of full Professor. His awards include a Writing Grant from the Arts Council, London, England (1967), a Columbia University fellowship (1969—71), a Ford Foundation fellowship (1969—73), and a Princeton University fellowship (1971—75).
After years in Europe Peter returns unexpectedly to his West Indian home to renew contact with people from his past: former lovers, schoolmates, and teachers - his mother and the wife he had more or less abandoned. The island has changed and some of them have changed with it; not always for the better. As Peter moves among them his superficially unremarkable encounters combine to give the reader a vivid and acute sense of a particular social and spiritual climate. The skill and tact of the author’s rendering lend it a significance which transcends the parochial. Mr. St. Omer - as the outstanding critical reception which greeted his last book, Shades of Grey, bears witness - is rapidly establishing himself as a major literary talent. Here the talent finds its most satisfying expression to date.
Garth St. Omer was born in Castries, St Lucia, on 15 January 1931. On graduating from St Mary’s College, a Roman Catholic high school for boys in St Lucia, he taught for seven years, 1949—56, in high schools in the Eastern Caribbean. He entered the University College of the West Indies, Jamaica, in 1956 on a UCWI scholarship, and graduated in 1959 with an Honours degree in French, with Spanish as subsidiary subject. Between 1959 and 1961 he taught as an English Language Assistant in lycees in Dax and Albi, France. From 1961 to 1966 he taught French and English at Apam Secondary School, Ghana. The years 1966 to 1969 were devoted to full-time writing of fiction, in England and the West Indies. In 1969 he entered the graduate school of Fine Arts of Columbia University, taking courses in creative writing, translation, film-making, film history and film aesthetics. He graduated in 1971 with the MFA degree. In 1971 he enrolled in the Comparative Literature programme of Princeton University to read for the PhD degree. He successfully completed the requirements in 1975, his dissertation being on THE COLONIAL NOVEL, a comparative study of Albert Camus, V. S. Naipaul and Alejo Carpentier (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1975). In 1975 he joined the English Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, as Associate Professor, and was subsequently promoted to the rank of full Professor. His awards include a Writing Grant from the Arts Council, London, England (1967), a Columbia University fellowship (1969—71), a Ford Foundation fellowship (1969—73), and a Princeton University fellowship (1971—75).
Stephenson is a young man; Derek Charles is still a boy. Both in different ways resent the frustrations of the Caribbean society in which they have grown up - and yet neither feels able to seize unhesitatingly or unequivocally the opportunities life offers. The two novels in this book are self-contained but complementary. In THE LIGHTS ON THE Hill, after years of drifting Stephenson finds himself at university: ironically the backwardness and isolation of his birthplace work in his favour to get him a place his own abilities - or even inclination - might not have achieved. When Derek in Another Place Another Time begins at school to fulfil the ambitions his widowed mother always had for him he wonders if he ought not instead to be out earning money for her. As readers of his first novel, A ROOM ON THE HILL, already know, Garth St Omer writes with an unaffected elegance and economy: the precision of his style enables him to create his most telling effects without strain. This book is a remarkable achievement.
Garth St. Omer was born in Castries, St Lucia, on 15 January 1931. On graduating from St Mary’s College, a Roman Catholic high school for boys in St Lucia, he taught for seven years, 1949—56, in high schools in the Eastern Caribbean. He entered the University College of the West Indies, Jamaica, in 1956 on a UCWI scholarship, and graduated in 1959 with an Honours degree in French, with Spanish as subsidiary subject. Between 1959 and 1961 he taught as an English Language Assistant in lycees in Dax and Albi, France. From 1961 to 1966 he taught French and English at Apam Secondary School, Ghana. The years 1966 to 1969 were devoted to full-time writing of fiction, in England and the West Indies. In 1969 he entered the graduate school of Fine Arts of Columbia University, taking courses in creative writing, translation, film-making, film history and film aesthetics. He graduated in 1971 with the MFA degree. In 1971 he enrolled in the Comparative Literature programme of Princeton University to read for the PhD degree. He successfully completed the requirements in 1975, his dissertation being on THE COLONIAL NOVEL, a comparative study of Albert Camus, V. S. Naipaul and Alejo Carpentier (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1975). In 1975 he joined the English Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, as Associate Professor, and was subsequently promoted to the rank of full Professor. His awards include a Writing Grant from the Arts Council, London, England (1967), a Columbia University fellowship (1969—71), a Ford Foundation fellowship (1969—73), and a Princeton University fellowship (1971—75).
Stephenson is in his thirties, average and unhappy. He has lost a job, stumbled through several affairs - more coincidental than passionate - and when golden opportunities fall into his lap, finds he is incapable of taking control of his own life. As the divisions of past, present, and future fuse together, Stephenson’s dilemma takes on universal significance – the perpetual struggle of man with his own passivity. Garth St. Omer’s elegant and economical prose allows him to create the most telling effects with apparent ease. THE LIGHTS ON THE HILL is one of the great achievements of West Indian literature.
Garth St. Omer was born in Castries, St Lucia, on 15 January 1931. On graduating from St Mary’s College, a Roman Catholic high school for boys in St Lucia, he taught for seven years, 1949—56, in high schools in the Eastern Caribbean. He entered the University College of the West Indies, Jamaica, in 1956 on a UCWI scholarship, and graduated in 1959 with an Honours degree in French, with Spanish as subsidiary subject. Between 1959 and 1961 he taught as an English Language Assistant in lycees in Dax and Albi, France. From 1961 to 1966 he taught French and English at Apam Secondary School, Ghana. The years 1966 to 1969 were devoted to full-time writing of fiction, in England and the West Indies. In 1969 he entered the graduate school of Fine Arts of Columbia University, taking courses in creative writing, translation, film-making, film history and film aesthetics. He graduated in 1971 with the MFA degree. In 1971 he enrolled in the Comparative Literature programme of Princeton University to read for the PhD degree. He successfully completed the requirements in 1975, his dissertation being on THE COLONIAL NOVEL, a comparative study of Albert Camus, V. S. Naipaul and Alejo Carpentier (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1975). In 1975 he joined the English Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, as Associate Professor, and was subsequently promoted to the rank of full Professor. His awards include a Writing Grant from the Arts Council, London, England (1967), a Columbia University fellowship (1969—71), a Ford Foundation fellowship (1969—73), and a Princeton University fellowship (1971—75).
The sparkling vitality of Haitian art first attracted attention and admiration when artists from the masses began to make their contribution. The work of these self-taught artists portrayed the whole kaleidoscope of Haitian life and spirit with an unprecedented openness and honesty. Although differing in style, feeling, and conception from the mainstream of European and American art, these works were immediately recognized as an important artistic current. HAITIAN ART illuminates the sources of inspiration for and the messages contained in the work of over fifty Haitian artists. Each artist's work has been subjected to a short stylistic analysis. Whenever possible, an attempt has been made to show the artist's development by including both early and more recent works. Each work is illustrated, and the illustration is accompanied by a commentary designed to guide the reader through the complexities of Haitian life and thought. Complementing the text are several valuable features. A chronology by Pierre Monosiet, Curator, Musée d'Art Haïtien du Collège St. Pierre, Port-au-Prince, dramatizes the events radiating from the establishment of the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince in 1944. Gerald Nordland, Director, Milwaukee Art Center, attempts a reassessment of several terms widely used in characterizing Haitian art. Irving Rouse, Professor of Anthropology, Yale University, carefully considers the evidence of American Indian influences in Haitian art within the context of a summary of Haitian prehistory. Robert Farris Thompson, Professor of Art History, Yale University, provides a thorough analysis of the African presence in Haitian ritual arts. One of the primary strengths of HAITIAN ART is the role played by the artists themselves. Most of the artists were interviewed by the author. Though varying in style and approach, they all draw their content from Haitian history, religion, and everyday life. 200 illustrations, including 16 plates in full color. Contents: A Chronology of Haitian Art; Haitian Art: A Western View; Roots: Pre-Columbian; The Flash of the Spirit: Haiti's Africanizing Vodum Art; History in Paining; Voodoo and Art; Everyday & Festive Life; Crosscurrents;Epilogue; Brief Biographies with Index to Works; Selected Bibliography.
Ute Stebich was an art historian and the founder of Ute Stebich Gallery in Lenox, Massachusetts.
This rich novel is roughly adapted — as was the acclaimed feature film of the same title — from the life and exploits of Rhygin, a legendary gunman and folk hero who lived in and around Kingston, Jamaica in the late 1950’s. Capturing, with poetry and precision, the rhythms, textures and idioms of Jamaica’s disparate cultures, Thelwell records Rhygin’s journey from a pastoral, morally coherent peasant culture to the crowded, predatory urban slum of Kingston. We follow Rhygin’s painful and exhilarating transformation from country boy to city-wise ganja dealer and reggae star. Ultimately, his rebellion against a corrupt power structure leads him to become a celebrated outlaw. ‘This masterly achieved novel shows Thelwell to be one of the best writers to have emerged out of the agonies of the Black liberation movements. The Harder They Come will survive as one of the very few novels worthy of the Black experience in our age’ — Harold Bloom, DeVane Professor of Humanities, Yale University. ‘Michael Thelwell’s profound love of Jamaica has nurtured the content of this beautifully achieved and memorable novel. I haven’t experienced a more truthful, passionate and harrowing report on the Third World. Thelwell’s book will last and last: ’ — Andrew Salkey, Professor of Writing, Hampshire College. ‘Michael Thelwell’s powerful and poetic new novel — a saga of the struggle-for-life in Jamaica resonating through the African diaspora — is a work of epic proportion: ’ — Sidney Kaplan, Commonwealth Professor of literature, the University of Massachusetts. ‘The Harder They Come will take its place among the few great works on the struggles of the Third World. It is a moving and rewarding piece of writing inspired by great love, anger and compassion.’ — Kwamé Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Chairman. All African Peoples Party.
Michael Thelwell is a Jamaican writer who teaches Third World literature at the University of Massachusetts. His short stories and literary and political essays have appeared in Partisan Review, Black Scholar and The Massachusetts Review, among others. His awards include First Prize in the Story Magazine Fiction Contest, and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and Society for the Humanities.
V.S. Naipaul’s achievement is already considerable. He has published twelve books and each book which follows will be a literary occasion. The American novelist, Paul Theroux, has taken the publication of IN A FREE STATE and THE OVERCROWDED BARRACOON as a good time for a general assessment of Naipaul’s work to date. Although Naipaul’s Caribbean books are his best known, many of the same themes and preoccupations appear in those novels set in England and Africa and in his book on India. Paul Theroux has this to say about the way he has planned this study: ‘Many ideas and themes repeat in Naipaul’s books. The ideas of fantasy and dependence, for example, are given expression in his fiction as well as his non-fiction. So rather than deal with each book separately, I have treated Naipaul’s concerns as subjects for chapters: creation, fantasy, marriage and householders, rootlessness and travel, a sense of the past and freedom; the last chapter raises the question of Naipaul’s style.’
Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
This book is the Haiti of the soil, the Haiti of Vodun rites, the Haiti of cockfights, of superstition, of primitive sex life, of poverty and toil, of savage dances and native rum, The reader moves in an unearthly atmosphere, he feels the haunted night, the dawn over Port-au-Prince, the rising and setting of the sun and the terrifying storms which break over the island. Vodun ceremonies, funeral rites, wild dancing under the stars to the beat of drums, are all dramatically described. Edward Larocque Tinker, leading authority on the Creole language who did the translation, says in his introduction: ‘In CANAPÉ-VERT we have, for the first time in English, a vivid and accurate picture of life on the island seen from the inside. The authors, both Haitian born, have captured the true subtlety of the Negro-peasant mentality, with all its strange, naive reasoning, its deep- rooted superstition, and the tang and savor of its humor.’ CANAPÉ-VERT is an impressive and unforgettable book. It is the fiction winner of the Second Latin American Literary Prize Competition and was selected for the award by Blair Niles, Ernesto Montenegro and John Dos Passos.
Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904 - 1975), was a Haitian poet, novelist, journalist, folklorist and politician. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin was born December 11, 1904 in Port-au-Prince. He was the older brother of Pierre Marcelin, who was born in 1908, and the two brothers worked together in the writing of several novels about rural Haiti, highlighting the themes of peasant life and Haitian folklore. Philippe went to high school in Port-au-Prince and finished in Paris where he studied law. He began his career as general secretary at ministry of Public Works. Like most Haitian intellectuals, he was opposed to the occupation of his country by the U.S. military since 1915. In 1927, he participated with Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Émile Roumer and Normil Sylvain of the creation of La Revue Indigène, in which they published many poems. They began to honor the indigenized and Haitian literary and artistic material, and returned write about the displeasure with the U.S. occupation. His first published novel Canapé-Vert, was awarded the Literary Prize of Latin America. In 1946, he participated in the founding of the People's Socialist Party (PSP) with Anthony Lespes, the same year he published La Bête de Musseau. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin died August 13, 1975 in Syracuse near New York.
In THE BEAST OF THE HAITIAN HILLS Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and Pierre Marcelin have created a tale of violence as well as charm, and the story is always strong and frequently terrifying. Morin Dutrilleul was a city man who went to the country to live. He was not superstitious, he did not believe the old legends and felt calmly superior to the peasants who did. To prove his point he cut down the tree at whose foot the sacrifices to the local gods had always been left. From that point on the story rises in a crescendo of fear; fear by the peasants of the Cigouave, the beast of the hills, fear by Morin of his growing belief in the old legends and the horrible activities of the old gods. The victim of rum and superstition, Morin does not escape the climax of violence and terror with which the book ends.
Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904 - 1975), was a Haitian poet, novelist, journalist, folklorist and politician. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin was born December 11, 1904 in Port-au-Prince. He was the older brother of Pierre Marcelin, who was born in 1908, and the two brothers worked together in the writing of several novels about rural Haiti, highlighting the themes of peasant life and Haitian folklore. Philippe went to high school in Port-au-Prince and finished in Paris where he studied law. He began his career as general secretary at ministry of Public Works. Like most Haitian intellectuals, he was opposed to the occupation of his country by the U.S. military since 1915. In 1927, he participated with Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Émile Roumer and Normil Sylvain of the creation of La Revue Indigène, in which they published many poems. They began to honor the indigenized and Haitian literary and artistic material, and returned write about the displeasure with the U.S. occupation. His first published novel Canapé-Vert, was awarded the Literary Prize of Latin America. In 1946, he participated in the founding of the People's Socialist Party (PSP) with Anthony Lespes, the same year he published La Bête de Musseau. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin died August 13, 1975 in Syracuse near New York.
The pencil of God writes hard and fast when it writes; and the Haitians say the pencil of God has no eraser. This is a novel of the strange half-lit world which exists in Haiti between the church and continued on back nap continued from front flap voodoo, and of a simple devout man, Dioghe Cyprien, a small warehouse owner, whose weakness is an everlasting and virile love of the ladies. In his last fling, the very dissimulation and craftiness which he has used to attain his heart's desire is boomeranged back to him by his love's old female relatives, who place a voodoo curse on him. His life becomes a series of freak disasters—tongues clack in the provincial, small-town atmosphere of Saint-Marc. The gossip that he is a were wolf, a fiend, a consort of evil spirits, at first a whisper, becomes a deafening roar. Like a swimmer pulled by the tide between the sharks and the reefs, Diogbne is pulled between the church and voodoo. The curse is the curse of gossip and suspicion, which can be as effective in Boston or New York or anywhere else as it is in Haiti.
Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904 - 1975), was a Haitian poet, novelist, journalist, folklorist and politician. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin was born December 11, 1904 in Port-au-Prince. He was the older brother of Pierre Marcelin, who was born in 1908, and the two brothers worked together in the writing of several novels about rural Haiti, highlighting the themes of peasant life and Haitian folklore. Philippe went to high school in Port-au-Prince and finished in Paris where he studied law. He began his career as general secretary at ministry of Public Works. Like most Haitian intellectuals, he was opposed to the occupation of his country by the U.S. military since 1915. In 1927, he participated with Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Émile Roumer and Normil Sylvain of the creation of La Revue Indigène, in which they published many poems. They began to honor the indigenized and Haitian literary and artistic material, and returned write about the displeasure with the U.S. occupation. His first published novel Canapé-Vert, was awarded the Literary Prize of Latin America. In 1946, he participated in the founding of the People's Socialist Party (PSP) with Anthony Lespes, the same year he published La Bête de Musseau. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin died August 13, 1975 in Syracuse near New York.
The pencil of God writes hard and fast when it writes; and the Haitians say the pencil of God has no eraser. This is a novel of the strange half-lit world which exists in Haiti between the church and continued on back nap continued from front flap voodoo, and of a simple devout man, Dioghe Cyprien, a small warehouse owner, whose weakness is an everlasting and virile love of the ladies. In his last fling, the very dissimulation and craftiness which he has used to attain his heart's desire is boomeranged back to him by his love's old female relatives, who place a voodoo curse on him. His life becomes a series of freak disasters—tongues clack in the provincial, small-town atmosphere of Saint-Marc. The gossip that he is a were wolf, a fiend, a consort of evil spirits, at first a whisper, becomes a deafening roar. Like a swimmer pulled by the tide between the sharks and the reefs, Diogbne is pulled between the church and voodoo. The curse is the curse of gossip and suspicion, which can be as effective in Boston or New York or anywhere else as it is in Haiti.
Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904 - 1975), was a Haitian poet, novelist, journalist, folklorist and politician. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin was born December 11, 1904 in Port-au-Prince. He was the older brother of Pierre Marcelin, who was born in 1908, and the two brothers worked together in the writing of several novels about rural Haiti, highlighting the themes of peasant life and Haitian folklore. Philippe went to high school in Port-au-Prince and finished in Paris where he studied law. He began his career as general secretary at ministry of Public Works. Like most Haitian intellectuals, he was opposed to the occupation of his country by the U.S. military since 1915. In 1927, he participated with Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Émile Roumer and Normil Sylvain of the creation of La Revue Indigène, in which they published many poems. They began to honor the indigenized and Haitian literary and artistic material, and returned write about the displeasure with the U.S. occupation. His first published novel Canapé-Vert, was awarded the Literary Prize of Latin America. In 1946, he participated in the founding of the People's Socialist Party (PSP) with Anthony Lespes, the same year he published La Bête de Musseau. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin died August 13, 1975 in Syracuse near New York.
Although ALL MEN ARE MAD is the fourth novel by the Marcelin brothers to be published in English, these Haitian writers have yet to receive the recognition they deserve. As early as 1949 Edmund Wilson wrote that ‘These books of the Marcelins are distinguished performances. They deal with difficult subjects - material that is controversial in Haiti and unfamiliar abroad; and presenting them, without sentimentality or by political melodrama and with no explicit comment, they bring out in them a human poignancy that is communicated to readers anywhere.’ ALL MEN ARE MAD, although fiction, is based on an episode in recent Haitian history. In 1942, during the regime of President Elie Lescot, the Catholic Church attempted to abolish vodou, the native religion that had merged several Catholic saints into its original pantheon of African spirits. The result, as depicted by the Marcelins, was a disaster for both sides. In his introduction Wilson writes: ‘The special plight of the Haitians is made to extend a perspective to the miseries and futilities of the whole human race, to our bitter ‘ideological’ conflicts and our apparently pointless ambitions. ALL MEN ARE MAD is a very entertaining but also troubling book, and it is a most distinguished work of literature.’. (original title: Tous les Hommes Sont Fous).
Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904–1975), was a Haitian poet, novelist, journalist, folklorist and politician. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin was born December 11, 1904 in Port-au-Prince. He and his younger brother, Pierre Marcelin (1908-?), worked together on the writing of several novels about rural Haiti, highlighting the themes of peasant life and Haitian folklore. Philippe went to high school in Port-au-Prince and finished his education in Paris where he studied law. While there, he became acquainted with Valéry Larbaud, who arranged to have some of his poems published in La revue européenne, a monthly literary journal that was published from 1923 to 1931. Back in Haiti, he began his career as general secretary at the Ministry of Public Works. Like most Haitian intellectuals, he was opposed to the American occupation of Haiti, which had been established in 1915. In 1927, together with Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Émile Roumer and Normil Sylvain (1900-1929), he helped create La Revue Indigène, a literary journal in which they published their poems. They idea was to honor the indigenous Haitian literary and artistic material, and return the culture to its pre-occupational state. His first novel Canapé-Vert, was published in 1944. In 1946, he participated in the founding of the short-lived Popular Socialist Party (PSP), together with Anthony Lespès (fr). That same year he published his second novel, La Bête de Musseau, translated as The Beast of the Haitian Hills. In 1948, when the PSP was declared illegal by President Dumarsais Estimé, he moved to the United States, where he worked as a translator for the Pan-American Union. His third novel, Le Crayon de Dieu, appeared in 1952. His last novel, Tous les Hommes sont Fous was published in 1972 and translated into English by his wife, Eva. He died at his home in Cazenovia, near Syracuse, New York, in 1975.
Do you know why the sky is so far from earth that we must use lamps, rather than stars, to read by? why Misery, rejected in both heaven and hell, has come back to earth to stay till Judgment Day? why dogs cannot talk and goats cannot climb? These are among the eighteen delightful Haitian tales retold by the Marcelin brothers in this collection. The authors heard many of them as children; now, with relish and grace, they revive the old tales of devils and magic and charms, of animals who outwit one another, of the dead who return to mingle with the living.
Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904 - 1975), was a Haitian poet, novelist, journalist, folklorist and politician. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin was born December 11, 1904 in Port-au-Prince. He was the older brother of Pierre Marcelin, who was born in 1908, and the two brothers worked together in the writing of several novels about rural Haiti, highlighting the themes of peasant life and Haitian folklore. Philippe went to high school in Port-au-Prince and finished in Paris where he studied law. He began his career as general secretary at ministry of Public Works. Like most Haitian intellectuals, he was opposed to the occupation of his country by the U.S. military since 1915. In 1927, he participated with Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Émile Roumer and Normil Sylvain of the creation of La Revue Indigène, in which they published many poems. They began to honor the indigenized and Haitian literary and artistic material, and returned write about the displeasure with the U.S. occupation. His first published novel Canapé-Vert, was awarded the Literary Prize of Latin America. In 1946, he participated in the founding of the People's Socialist Party (PSP) with Anthony Lespes, the same year he published La Bête de Musseau. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin died August 13, 1975 in Syracuse near New York.
Jerome Quashee undergoes a religious ritual, blocking all sensual links to the outside world, in order to see clearly into his past and find the sources of the pain and guilt that torment his soul. H. Nigel Thomas writes with compelling honesty about the confusing maze of pressures that paralyse Jerome. His intelligence at first promises him a gateway out of the poverty his parents have known, but he must compete with privileged White boys for scholarships in a racist, class-ridden culture. He wrestles both with the guilt of knowing so little about his African heritage and the simultaneous pressure to think, speak and act as a White person. And he will bring disgrace on his family if he does not repress his emerging homosexuality.
H[ubert] Nigel Thomas was born in St Vincent and the Grenadines in 1947 but emigrated to Canada in 1968. His poems and short stories have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. He is also the author of FROM FOLKLORE TO FICTION: A STUDY OF FOLK HEROES AND RITUALS IN THE BLACK AMERICAN NOVEL (Greenwood, 1988), the forthcoming HOW LOUD CAN THE VILLAGE COCK CROW? (a collection of short stories), and several essays on African American, Caribbean and African literature. He is presently an associate professor in the literature department at Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada. SPIRITS IN THE DARK is his first novel.
Their father’s favorite saying, between drinks and blows, was, ‘Life holds only bad surprises, and the last one will be death.’ And now, Colin observes of the man sprawled under all the broken furniture, their father was definitely and forever out of surprises. Children of Heroes is the story Colin tells of what happened—and what happened before that. Testimony, confession, a child’s outpouring: this is his painfully matter-of-fact account of how he and his older sister, Mariéla, killed the man who tyrannized them and their piously pathetic mother, who is now a ‘blank.’ As he describes their flight from the slum in Haiti to an uncertain somewhere called ‘far away,’ Colin conjures a bleak picture of the life he and his sister are trying to leave behind. And whether these two—children only in age—are guilty or merely victims of the violence festering in their city is a question only the reader can answer. In its picture of a world in which the heroes and the destroyers - whether fathers or leaders - are often indistinguishable, and where life’s poetry and poverty are inextricably linked, this book tells a story of Haiti that is at once intimate, universal, and otherworldly.
Lyonel Trouillot is a poet, novelist, and essayist of the post-Duvalierist generation of Haitian writers. Linda Coverdale is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the award-winning translator of over fifty books, including Trouillot’s Street of Lost Footsteps (PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize finalist) and Patrick Chamoiseau’s School Days and Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, all available in Bison Books editions. .
Their father’s favorite saying, between drinks and blows, was, ‘Life holds only bad surprises, and the last one will be death.’ And now, Colin observes of the man sprawled under all the broken furniture, their father was definitely and forever out of surprises. Children of Heroes is the story Colin tells of what happened—and what happened before that. Testimony, confession, a child’s outpouring: this is his painfully matter-of-fact account of how he and his older sister, Mariéla, killed the man who tyrannized them and their piously pathetic mother, who is now a ‘blank.’ As he describes their flight from the slum in Haiti to an uncertain somewhere called ‘far away,’ Colin conjures a bleak picture of the life he and his sister are trying to leave behind. And whether these two—children only in age—are guilty or merely victims of the violence festering in their city is a question only the reader can answer. In its picture of a world in which the heroes and the destroyers - whether fathers or leaders - are often indistinguishable, and where life’s poetry and poverty are inextricably linked, this book tells a story of Haiti that is at once intimate, universal, and otherworldly.
Lyonel Trouillot is a poet, novelist, and essayist of the post-Duvalierist generation of Haitian writers. Linda Coverdale is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the award-winning translator of over fifty books, including Trouillot’s Street of Lost Footsteps (PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize finalist) and Patrick Chamoiseau’s School Days and Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows, all available in Bison Books editions. .
In this energetic celebration of Haiti and its capital in the early 2000s, Trouillot embodies the nation's indomitable spirit. The anonymous, world-weary, 20-something male narrator keenly depicts a country entering a new era after years of dictatorship and the chaos wrought by the most recent foreign arrivals: the international peace-keeping forces sent to restore order after the departure of the U.S. Marines. In a series of journal entries, the young protagonist introduces readers to his world within a world—a community center in Port-au-Prince peopled by a motley group of friends, lovers, revolutionaries, compatriots, dreamers, schemers, and mentors, all living under the watchful eye of Mam Jeanne, the proprietress. In KANNJAWOU Trouillot has penned a love song and a swan song to that era of dispersion for Haiti's people, who, even when they are far from home carry with them the kannjawou spirit. About the Author
Lyonel Trouillot is an award-winning novelist and poet, a journalist, and a professor of French and Creole literature. He has contributed his work to numerous publications in Haiti and has also provided song lyrics for Tambou Libete and Mannou Charlemagne. Troullot co-edits the journal Cahiers de Vende.
In the euphoria that followed the departure of Haiti’s hated dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier, most Haitian and foreign analysts treated the regimes of the two Duvaliers, father and son, as a historical nightmare created by the malevolent minds of the leaders and their supporters. Yet the crisis, economic and political, that faces this small Caribbean nation did not begin with the dictatorship, and is far from being solved, despite its departure from the scene. In this fascinating study, Haitian-born Michel-Rolph Trouillot examines the mechanisms through which the Duvaliers ruthlessly won and then held onto power for twenty-nine years. Trouillot’s theoretical discussion focuses on the contradictory nature of the peripheral state, analyzing its relative autonomy as a manifestation of the growing disjuncture between state and nation. He discusses in detail two key characteristics of such regimes: the need for a rhetoric of ‘national unity’ coupled with unbridled violence. At the same time, he traces the current crisis from its roots in the nineteenth-century marginalization of the peasantry through the U.S. occupation from 1915 to 1934 and into the present. He ends with a discussion of the post-Duvalier period, which, far from seeing the restoration of civilian-led democracy, has been a period of increasing violence and economic decline. ‘Trouillot illuminates wonderfully the history and present condition of Haiti, a nation and a people too often slandered and vulgarized by the press. In my opinion no other writer of recent times has enabled us to grasp more intelligently and more usefully the importance of Haiti’s past and the dilemmas of its present.’ - Sidney W. Mintz, author of Sweetness and Power ‘An excellent analysis of Duvalierism, placed within a wide historical framework and preceded by a suggestive theoretical introduction. This is the best study on the subject so far.’ - Ernesto Laclau, University of Essex. ‘Through a masterly analysis of the Duvalierist state, Trouillot illuminates the fundamental ideology of the Haitian ruling class. Lucid and courageous, coherent and precise, this is a book that must be thought about by anyone who cares deeply about Haiti’s past and is concerned with its future.’ - Leon-Francois Hoffmann, Princeton University. . Michel-Rolph Trouillot is professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include a study of the beginnings of the Haitian slave revolution-the first book-length monograph written in Haitian creole-and Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy (1988), as well as a short monograph on Haiti published in the Woodrow Wilson Center series on the Caribbean. . .
Michel-Rolph Trouillot (November 26, 1949, Haiti - July 5, 2012, Chicago, IL) was a Haitian academic and anthropologist. He was Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Rolph (as he was known conversationally) was the son of Ernest Trouillot and Anne-Marie Morisset, both Black intellectuals from Port-au-Prince. His father was a lawyer and his uncle, Hénock Trouillot was a professor who worked in the National Archives of Haiti. Hénock was an influential noiriste historian. He attended the Petit Séminaire Collège Saint-Martial, moving on to the École Normale Supérieur. However, faced with repression from the Duvalier regime in 1968, Trouillot joined a mass exodus of students who found refuge in New York. In 2011, Trouillot was awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award, which is given annually by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in recognition of work of special interest to Caribbean thought. In 1977, his first book Ti dife boule sou Istwa Ayiti on the origins of the Haitian slave revolution was published. It has been described as 'the first book-length monograph written in Haitian Creole.' In July 2012, Université Caraïbe Press reprinted this masterful work. Trouillot's lifetime of work presented a vision for anthropology and the social sciences, informed by historical depth and empirical examination of Caribbean societies. The Haitian historian and novelist Henock Trouillot was his uncle. Trouillot died on July 5, 2012.
‘We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be; nut if we stop pretending, we may gain in understanding what we lose in false innocence.’ Arguably the greatest tool in the creation of a people’s identity, history has been manipulated by oligarchs and rewritten by committees. In this provocative analysis of historical narrative, Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrates how power operates, often invisibly, at all stages in the making of history to silence certain voices. From the West’s failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in history, to the continued debate over denials of the Holocaust, and the meaning of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, Trouillot shows us that history is not simply the recording of facts and events, but a process of actively enforced silences, some unconscious, others quite deliberate. As such, Trouillot argues that history must never be merely accepted. Instead, he divulges ways to expose the forces of power in historical narrative and helps us to discern how these forces shape our current understanding of our pasts and ourselves.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot (November 26, 1949, Haiti - July 5, 2012, Chicago, IL) was a Haitian academic and anthropologist. He was Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Rolph (as he was known conversationally) was the son of Ernest Trouillot and Anne-Marie Morisset, both Black intellectuals from Port-au-Prince. His father was a lawyer and his uncle, Hénock Trouillot was a professor who worked in the National Archives of Haiti. Hénock was an influential noiriste historian. He attended the Petit Séminaire Collège Saint-Martial, moving on to the École Normale Supérieur. However, faced with repression from the Duvalier regime in 1968, Trouillot joined a mass exodus of students who found refuge in New York. In 2011, Trouillot was awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award, which is given annually by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in recognition of work of special interest to Caribbean thought. In 1977, his first book Ti dife boule sou Istwa Ayiti on the origins of the Haitian slave revolution was published. It has been described as 'the first book-length monograph written in Haitian Creole.' In July 2012, Université Caraïbe Press reprinted this masterful work. Trouillot's lifetime of work presented a vision for anthropology and the social sciences, informed by historical depth and empirical examination of Caribbean societies. The Haitian historian and novelist Henock Trouillot was his uncle. Trouillot died on July 5, 2012.
Mainstream news coverage of the catastrophic earthquake of January 12, 2010, reproduced longstanding narratives of Haiti and stereotypes of Haitians. Cognizant that this Haiti, as it exists in the public sphere, is a rhetorically and graphically incarcerated one, the anthropologist and performance artist Gina Athena Ulysse embarked on a writing spree that lasted over two years. As an ethnographer and a member of the diaspora, Ulysse delivers critical cultural analysis of geopolitics and daily life in a series of dispatches, op-eds and articles on post-quake Haiti. This collection contains thirty pieces, first published in and on Haitian Times, Huffington Post, Ms Magazine, Ms Blog, NACLA, and other print and online venues. The book is trilingual (English, Kreyòl, and French) and includes a foreword by award-winning author and historian Robin D.G. Kelley. ‘Ulysse’s clear, powerful writing rips through the stereotypes to reveal a portrait of Haiti in politics and art that will change the way you think about that nation’s culture, and your own.’ - Jonathan M. Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster ‘This is a beautifully written and profoundly important work of engaged anthropology. Gina Ulysse steps bravely into the public domain bringing a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of things Haitian to a large group of general readers as well as to a broad audience of scholars. Publication of this book marks a kind of ‘coming of age’ for anthropological bloggers and public anthropology.’ - Paul Stoller, author of Yaya’s Story.
Gina Athena Ulysse is an associate professor of anthropology at Wesleyan University. Born in Haiti, she has lived in the United States for over thirty years. A performance artist, multimedia artist, and anthropologist, she is the author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica. Robin D. G. Kelley is the Distinguished Professor of History and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in United States History at UCLA..
Poetry by a number of Haitian poets including selections by the following poets: Macdonald Alexander, Fernand Ambroise, Louis Bomb, Jean Brierre, Carl Brouard, Frédéric BurrReynaud, Adrian Carrénard, Maurice Casséus, Pascal Casséus, Roland Chassagne, Arséne Chevry, Massilon Coicou, Louis-Henri Durand, Oswald Durand, Luc Grimard, Tertullien Guilbaud, Dominique Hippolyte, Edmund La Forest, Leon Laleau, Robert Lataillade, George Lescouflair, Paul Lochard, Leon Louhis, Clement Magloire-Fils, Victor Mangonés, Constantin Mayard, Pierre Mayard, Charles Moravia, Louis Morpeau, Ignace Nau, Edgard Numa, Timothée Paret, Charles F. Pressoir, Christian Regulies, Justinien Ricot, Volvick Ricourt, Milo Rigaud, Jacques Roumain,' Emile Roumer, George Sylvain, Normil Sylvain, Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, Isaac Toussaint-L'Ouverture, Duraciné Vaval, Damoclês Vieux, Etzer Vilaire, Jean-Joseph Vilaire, Christian Werleigh.
Edna Worthley Underwood (January 1873 – June 14, 1961) was an American author, poet, and translator. Born in Maine in January 1873, Edna Worthley received little education as a child, attending school occasionally, only when her family moved to Kansas in 1884. She undertook a program of extensive self-instruction, learning Latin and several of the major European languages. She began attendance at Garfield University in Wichita, Kansas, but later transferred to University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she received a B.A. in 1892. Returning to Kansas, she taught in a public school for three years before being dismissed because she refused to give up yellow-bound foreign-language books which her superiors believed to be 'wicked', of a possibly pornographic nature. After marrying Earl Underwood in August 1897, Edna moved to Kansas City and then to New York City. She immediately undertook various literary activities including the composition of poetry, plays and filmscripts. Her first published book was a collaborative translation of a work by Nikolai Gogol in 1903. The first published book that bore Underwood's name as author was the collection of short stories, A Book of Dear Dead Women (1911). With the sole exception of 'An Orchid of Asia', Underwood apparently wrote no more short stories. In 1919, she published Letters from a Prairie Garden, a collection of her letters to a famous artist who had visited the mid-West and undertaken a correspondence with her. Underwood had published a book of poetry, The Garden of Desire (1913) but then turned to the writing of, for the most part, historical novels, drawing heavily upon the languages she had learned, the extensive travel she had undertaken, and her thorough grounding in history. The Whirlwind (1918) is about Catherine II of Russia. It was followed by The Penitent (1922), about Alexander I; The Passion Flower (1924), about Nicholas I and Alexander Pushkin. The Pageant-Maker was a novel planned but never completed or published. These novels gained favourable reviews, but by the late 1920s Underwood turned principally to poetry and translation. She had already issued translations from Russian and the Slavic languages (Short Stories from the Balkans, 1919), as well as translations from Persian (Songs of Hafiz, 1917) and Japanese (Moons of Nippon, 1919). She then made several translations from the Chinese, including the eighth-century poet Tu Fu (now rendered as Du Fu); these translations were made in collaboration with Chi-Hwang Chu. By the early 1930s she had turned to translating from the Spanish, including poets of Mexico, Haiti, and South America. By 1940 Underwood appears to have given up her literary endeavours. She entered a sanatorium in 1953 suffering from dementia. She died on June 14, 1961.
Available in English for the first time, Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s stunning trilogy of novellas is a remarkable literary event. In a brilliant translation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur, Love, Anger, Madness is a scathing response to the struggles of race, class, and sex that have ruled Haiti. Suppressed upon its initial publication in 1968, this major work became an underground classic and was finally released in an authorized edition in France in 2005. In Love, Anger, Madness, Marie Vieux-Chauvet offers three slices of life under an oppressive regime. Gradually building in emotional intensity, the novellas paint a shocking portrait of families and artists struggling to survive under Haiti’s terrifying government restrictions that have turned its society upside down, transforming neighbors into victims, spies, and enemies. In ‘Love,’ Claire is the eldest of three sisters who occupy a single house. Her dark skin and unmarried status make her a virtual servant to the rest of the family. Consumed by an intense passion for her brother-in-law, she finds redemption in a criminal act of rebellion. In ‘Anger,’ a middle-class family is ripped apart when twenty-year-old Rose is forced to sleep with a repulsive soldier in order to prevent a government takeover of her father’s land. And in ‘Madness,’ René, a young poet, finds himself trapped in a house for days without food, obsessed with the souls of the dead, dreading the invasion of local military thugs, and steeling himself for one final stand against authority. Sympathetic, savage and truly compelling with an insightful introduction by Edwidge Danticat, Love, Anger, Madness is an extraordinary, brave and graphic evocation of a country in turmoil.
Marie Vieux-Chauvet, a seminal writer of postoccupation Haiti, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1916 and died in New York in 1973. She is the author of five novels, including Dance on the Volcano, Fonds des Nègres, Fille d’Haiti, and Les Rapaces. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur have translated two novels by Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnificent and Texaco, the latter of which won the American Translators Association Galantière Prize for Best Book. Their translation of Love, Anger, Madness was supported by a Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Edwidge Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She is the author of Brother, I’m Dying; Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!; The Farming of Bones; and The Dew Breaker. She lives in Miami with her husband and two daughters.
Surinam Creole is a young language created after 1651 to serve as the mother tongue of the Surinam slaves and as a contact language between masters and slaves. This book is a record of its rise from a despised ghetto language to a language of great sophistication and subtlety equal to the demands of modern literary use. Covering texts from the oral to the written tradition, the book contains poems of in- finite pathos expressing, for example, the tragedy of slaves on the plantation and children begotten by slave owners. At times there are passages redolent of nostalgia for Africa and the African heritage. There are brief, rather hallowed, poems to the earth goddess, a poem that is an excellent example of verbal calisthenics between a Creole woman and her white husband, and stories with a somewhat eerie, supernatural content. Here for the first time in English the poet J. G. A. Koenders is assigned his proper place beside those other great West Indian demythologizers - Marcus Aurelius Garvey, George Padmore, and Frantz Fanon. "The book is of very real scholarly importance for students of the African heritage in the Americas and for social historians, anthropologists, and linguists. The texts may well comprise the finest corpus ever assembled for any creole language in their variety of genres and themes and in the richness of their ethnographic and social content." - Richard Price.
Jan Voorhoeve is head of the department of African languages at the University of Leiden. Ursy M. Lichtveld is on the staff of the Bureau of Linguistic Research in Surinam at the University of Amsterdam. Vernie A. February, a South African poet in exile, is now on the staff of the African Studies Center in Leiden.
‘The clear glaze of another life, a landscape locked in amber, the rare gleam. The dream . . .’ In his longest and most ambitious poem, Derek Walcott reaches beyond an evocative portrayal of his native West Indies to create a moving elegy on himself and on man. The fascinating and complex matrix of the author’s life is illuminated with candor, verve, and strength. Over four thousand lines of verse are grouped into four parts. He evokes scenes of his divided childhood, in which children live in shacks while fine khaki-clothed Englishmen drink tea. He depicts the influence of three intimate friends, including his first love, Anna, on his emergence as a man and artist. He chronicles the mixed remorse and resolution of maturity. He recalls of his youth: ‘We were blessed with a virginal, unpainted world/ with Adam’s task of giving things their names . . .’ Yet in retrospect lie acknowledges the irony of his artistic reliance on metaphor to transform reality—his search for ‘another life.’ When the author’s most recent collection of poetry, THE GULF, was published, Selden Rodman wrote in The New York Times Book Review ‘Now, with the publication of his fourth book of verse, Walcott’s stature in the front rank of all contemporary poets English should be apparent.’ Chad Walsh in Book World said: ‘I am convinced Derek Walcott is already one of the half-dozen most important poets now writing in English. He may prove to be the best.’ ANOTHER LIFE helps to fulfill this prophecy.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Derek Walcott’s first collection, 25 POEMS, was released in St. Lucia in 1948. Several poems from that collection were reprinted in IN A GREEN NIGHT (1962), a book that led Robert Graves to write: ‘Derek Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries.’ In the decades since, Walcott has gone from strength to strength, with the publication in America of seven volumes of verse: SELECTED POEMS (1964), THE GULF (1970), ANOTHER LIFE (1973), SEA GRAPES (1976), THE STAR-APPLE KINGDOM (1979), THE FORTUNATE TRAVELLER (1981), AND MIDSUMMER (1984). COLLECTED POEMS includes most of the poems in each of Walcott’s collections, as selected by the poet, and the complete text of ANOTHER LIFE—a magnificent narrative poem of over four thousand lines. Both the autobiography of an artist and a paean to the island and people of his youth, this long poem exemplifies the technical virtuosity and thematic variety of Walcott’s considerable oeuvre. The accumulated riches in this retrospective collection present the sure development of one of our major poets, as well as a tribute to the possibilities of the language.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
For nine years, Derek Walcott has been director of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop as well as its chief playwright. The appearance of his first collection of plays is a literary event. In addition to the title play, the book includes TI-JEAN AND HIS BROTHERS, MALCOCHON and THE SEA AT DAUPHIN. Of his brilliant introductory essay, ‘What the Twilight Says,’ the author writes: ‘It should not be considered either as an apologia or a manifesto. . . . It merely tries to re-create the experience of a playwright with the company to which his plays became committed.’ The two endpaper drawings are stage sketches the author made while writing DREAM ON MONKEY MOUNTAIN.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
The poems in this sequence of fifty-four were written to encompass one year, from summer to summer. Their principal themes are the stasis, both stultifying and provocative, of midsummer in the tropics; the pull of the sea, family, and friendship on one whose circumstances lead to separation; the relationship of poetry to painting; and the place of a poet between two cultures. Walcott records, with his distinctive linguistic blend of soaring imagery and plainly stated facts, the experience of a mid-life period—in reality and in memory or the imagination. As Louis Simpson wrote on the publication of Walcott’s THE FORTUNATE TRAVELLER, ‘Walcott is a spellbinder. Of how many poets can it be said that their poems are compelling—not a mere stringing together of images and ideas but language that delights in itself, rhythms that seem spontaneous, scenes that are vividly there? . . . The poet who can write like this is a master.’
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Derek Walcott’s OMEROS is a poem in seven books, of circular narrative design. The title is the Greek name for Homer, invoked here by a Greek girl in exile in America, the invocation marking the beginning of a long journey home - through an intricate web of places and histories and associations - for the poem’s characters. Achille, the protagonist, has set out on a fishing expedition from the island of Saint Lucia when he is carried back across the centuries to his ancestral home on the West African coast. On the journey, he is forced to leave behind his friend Philoctete, who is suffering from an incurable leg wound. Achille and Philoctete are simple fishermen, but as Walcott’s poem unfolds, they and their tribulations take on the specific gravity and resonance of their mythic Greek namesakes. The figure of Omeros, too, recurs in various guises, as a native fisherman, an Indian shaman, a vagrant in London, serving as a touchstone for the characters’ journeys toward the spirit’s proper home, both in the present and in the classical past. There are two currents of history in Derek Walcott’s stunning new poem, his longest and most ambitious work to date: the visible history charted in events - the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement - and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile. These two strands of experience, the public and the private, are enacted in the place where history itself has no foundation - in the sea common to both archipelagoes, Greek and Antillean.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events -- the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement -- and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile. A poem in five books. The title is the Greek name for Homer, invoked by a Greek girl in exile beginning a long journey home.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Both of the plays in this volume vividly personify the aftereffects of British colonialism on West Indian society, while emphasizing, with humor and compassion, more universal matters of hierarchy and identity. First produced by Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in 1979, REMEMBRANCE is the story of an elderly black teacher and writer, Albert Jordan, who cannot reconcile his anachronistic love of British culture with the evolution of his family and community in independent Trinidad. Jordan’s reminiscences in the first act show us a younger man reciting Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy’ to a jeering classroom; hilariously repulsing the attempts of an art-collecting Yankee to buy the roof off his house for the mural painted thereon; courting Esther Hope, a British officer stationed in wartime Port of Spain, and then, afraid to face the consequences of his unconventional dreams, retreating when she agrees to marry him. The memory of Esther Hope is resurrected in Act Two—pitted against Jordan’s wife’s waning patience—as is the even more painful recollection of the killing of his son by the country’s police. In the final scene Walcott masterfully renders Jordan’s inevitable self-scrutiny—an evasively eloquent and mockingly tyrannical man’s capitulation to emotional turmoil. PANTOMIME is a fast-paced comedy with a cast of two: a retired English actor who has bought a hotel in Tobago, and his recalcitrant and witty black handyman. In the hope of entertaining future guests, the Englishman proposes that the two work up a satire on the Robinson Crusoe story, in which the roles of Crusoe and Friday are reversed. The play was produced by both BBC Radio and London’s Keskidee Theatre in 1979.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
DEREK WALCOTT was aptly described by Laurence Lieberman in The Yale Review as ‘one of the handful of brilliant historic mythologists of our day.’ SEA GRAPES deepens this major poet’s search for true images of the post-Adamic ‘new world’ - especially those of his native Caribbean culture. Walcott’s rich and vital naming of the forms of island life is complemented by poems set in America and England, by inward-turning meditations, and by invocations of other poets - Osip Mandelstam, `Walt Whitman, Frank O’Hara, James Wright, and Pablo Neruda. On the publication of SELECTED POEMS in 1963, Robert Graves wrote, ‘Derek Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries.’ This collection of new poems in every way confirms Walcott’s mastery. He is also the author of THE GULF, DREAM ON MONKEY MOUNTAIN AND OTHER PLAYS, and ANOTHER LIFE.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Two years ago, with the publication in England of his first book, IN A GREEN NIGHT, Derek Walcott was recognized at once as a new poet of imaginative energy and power. As Robert Graves wrote, ‘Derek Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries.’ A critic in The Listener described the poems as ‘full of summery melancholy, fresh and, stinging colors, luscious melody, and intense awareness of place’—the place being the West Indian world in which Derek Walcott was brought up. SELECTED POEMS brings together the best poems from the earlier volume, and new poems written since 1960. This rich collection introduces an important new poetic talent to American readers. ‘He writes extraordinarily good poetry,’ wrote The Sphere, ‘balanced and compassionate in spite of angry tension of race, stringing his words together in a rich but measured pattern with the wry sadness of a Caribbean Eliot.’
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Drawing from every stage of his career, Derek Walcott’s Selected Poems brings together famous pieces from his early volumes, including ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ and ‘A City’s Death by Fire,’ with passages from the celebrated Omeros and selections from his latest major works, which extend his contributions to reenergizing the contemporary long poem. Here we find all of Walcott’s essential themes, from grappling with the Caribbean’s colonial legacy to his conflicted love of home and of Western literary tradition; from the wisdom-making pain of time and mortality to the strange wonder of love, the natural world, and what it means to be human. We see his lifelong labor at poetic crafts, his broadening of the possibilities of rhyme and meter, stanza forms, language, and metaphor. Edited and with an introduction by the Jamaican poet and critic Edward Baugh, this volume is a perfect representation of Walcott’s breadth of work, spanning almost half a century.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Drawing from every stage of his career, Derek Walcott’s Selected Poems brings together famous pieces from his early volumes, including ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ and ‘A City’s Death by Fire,’ with passages from the celebrated Omeros and selections from his latest major works, which extend his contributions to reenergizing the contemporary long poem. Here we find all of Walcott’s essential themes, from grappling with the Caribbean’s colonial legacy to his conflicted love of home and of Western literary tradition; from the wisdom-making pain of time and mortality to the strange wonder of love, the natural world, and what it means to be human. We see his lifelong labor at poetic crafts, his broadening of the possibilities of rhyme and meter, stanza forms, language, and metaphor. Edited and with an introduction by the Jamaican poet and critic Edward Baugh, this volume is a perfect representation of Walcott’s breadth of work, spanning almost half a century.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on December 10, 1992. His Nobel lecture is a stirring evocation of the multivalent wholeness of the culture of the Antilles, forged out of a violent history against a land- and seascape of immemorial dimensions. ‘Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped,’ writes Walcott. ‘Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture.’ He finds the image of this culture in the city of Port of Spain, Trinidad, ‘mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a history, like heaven.’ And watching a group of East Indian Trinidadians reenact the Hindu epic the RAMAYANA in the small village of Felicity, he meditates on the sacred celebration of joy, the rehearsal of collective memory, that is the very essence of human experience, beyond history. Walcott’s lecture is a powerful reenvisioning of the themes that have energized and informed his poetry.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
This new collection of poems, Derek Walcott’s first since MIDSUMMER (1984), is divided into two parts - ’There,’ verse evoking the poet’s native Caribbean, and ‘Elsewhere.’ It opens with six poems in quatrains, which sound a note of strong clarity that characterizes much of the work in this volume. Their memorable, compact lines further Walcott’s continuous effort to crystallize images of the Caribbean landscape and people. For the past several years, Derek Walcott has lived mainly in the States. ‘The Arkansas Testament,’ one of this book’s long poems, is a powerful confrontation of changing allegiances. The poem’s crisis concerns taking on an extra history, one that challenges unquestioning devotion. On the publication of COLLECTED POEMS (1986), Seamus Heaney, writing in The Boston Globe, said: ‘The Walcott line . . . can be incantatory and self-entrancing . . . It can be athletic and demotic . . . It can compel us with the almost hydraulic drag of its words . . . This is a triumphant book.’ And James Dickey wrote in The New York Times Book Review: ‘If one thinks of self-division and alienation, of a combination of homesickness and homelessness as a personal condition, in short if one thinks of exile as this theme, one would look far to find a more stunningly sensuous and telling projection of it than Mr. Walcott’s . . . After a few poems the reader is convinced that Mr. Walcott could turn his attention on anything at all and make it live with a reality beyond its own; through his fearless language it becomes not only its acquired life, but the real one, the one that lasts.’
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
THE BOUNTY opens with the title poem, a memorable elegy to Walcott’s mother. It also contains a haunting series of poems evoking the poet’s native ground, the island of St. Lucia. The power and beauty of Walcott’s lyric gift have never been more fully in evidence. ‘Derek Walcott has moved with gradually deepening confidence to found his own poetic domain, independent of the tradition he inherited yet not altogether orphaned from it . . . The Walcott line is still sponsored by Shakespeare and the Bible, happy to surprise by fine excess. It can be incantatory and self-entrancing . . . It can be athletic and demotic . . . It can compel us with the almost hydraulic drag of its words.’ - SEAMUS HEANEY. ‘For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives as more than himself or ‘a world’; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.’ - JOSEPH BRODSKY.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
The title poem of Derek Walcott’s new collection elaborates on the spiritual crisis of a traveller from one underdeveloped country to another. He is fortunate in his ability to escape, but plagued by knowledge that the world’s new nations are repealing the old order, creating hardship and injustice. Another long and masterful poem, ‘North and South,’ more directly reflects Walcott’s own experience as he shifts from one hemisphere to the next, and from north to south of the Mason–Dixon line. Pervasive coldness and intellectual fatigue are contrasted with the particular culture of his native Caribbean, and the wariness of a black in America’s South. Some poems are concerned exclusively with the traveller in the North: ‘Old New England,’ ‘Upstate,’ and ‘Piano Practice’ among them. Others render the troubled beauty of Walcott’s Antillean world and—especially in the long poem ‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’—the place of a poet living and working there. A series of poems makes use of visions of the Aegean and Greek myths in the Caribbean, and in ‘The Spoiler’s Return’ the dialect of a Calypsonian is re-created, while it is made clear that Spoiler’s couplets echo the likes of the Earl of Rochester and Juvenal. Derek Walcott has for some time been recognized as one of the most accomplished and resourceful poets writing in English. THE FORTUNATE TRAVELLER, his first collection since THE STAR-APPLE KINGDOM (1979), confirms that he is going from strength to strength. As Sven Birkerts wrote recently in the New Boston Review, Walcott has ‘an authority and power that seem to grow Antaeus-like with each performance.’
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
As his title suggests, Derek Walcott’s new poems—while making beautiful use of Caribbean imagery—are concerned with themes of isolation and the achievement of identity through loneliness. When it was published in England in 1969, The Gulf was awarded the Cholmondeley prize for poetry. As the London Times wrote, ‘His new collection is as noble and stern and grand as Milton . . . Walcott writes with a tropical glory of images; handles his huge pyrotechnic vocabulary with iron-discipline, verve and nerve . . . His glittering intelligence and luxurious command of sensation fuse in a mastery of images which burst in the brain like balls of phosphorescent fire.’ The subject of the title poem is the alienation and isolation of an America where filling-station signs proclaim the Gulf, an air, heavy with gas, sickens the state, from Newark to New Orleans. The central figure in the Caribbean poems is w Robinson Crusoe-like castaway, who ‘Warns again the self-creating peace of islands.’
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Plays by the Nobel-laureate, brought together for the first time. In the history plays that comprise THE HAITIAN TRILOGY - HENRI CHRISTOPHE, DRUMS AND COLOURS and THE HAITIAN EARTH - -Derek Walcott, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, uses verse to tell the story of his native West Indies as a four-hundred-year cycle of war, conquest and rebellion. In HENRI CHRISTOPHE and THE HAITIAN EARTH, Walcott re-casts the legacy of Haiti's violent revolutionaries - led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe - whose rebellion established the first black state in the Americas, but whose cruelty becomes a parable of racial pride and corruption. DRUMS AND COLOURS, commissioned in 1958 to celebrate the first parliament in Trinidad, is a grand pageant linking the lives of complex, ambiguous heroes: Columbus and Raleigh; Toussaint; and George William Gordon, a martyr of the constitutional era. From HENRI CHRISTOPHE's high style to the bracing vernacular of THE HAITIAN EARTH, to the epic scale and scope of DRUMS AND COLOURS, in these plays Walcott, one of our most celebrated poets, carved a place in the modern theater for the history of the West Indies, and a sounding room for his own maturing voice.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
These two plays contribute to the body of work which has established Derek Walcott as an engaging dramatist, a unique poetic intelligence, and a resourceful friend to the English language. In "The Joker of Seville," Don Juan Tenorio, a Spanish prince, devotes himself to the pursuit of happiness through sexual conquest. "O Babylon," brings to life the Rastafarian sect in Jamaica, which grew during Marcus Garvey's exile to that country and has been popularized through the lyrics of reggae music.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
With its inspired counterpointing of Homeric and Caribbean themes, Derek Walcott’s new play, commissioned by Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company, springs from the same imaginative sources as his epic poem OMEROS. Episodes of the story of Odysseus’ protracted wanderings from fallen Troy to his island home of Ithaca are pungently interspersed with a commentary by the blind singer Billy Blue. Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, the giant Cyclops, Circe and her revellers, ghosts, and mermaids are among the cast. With its vast sweep and richly figurative language, THE ODYSSEY confirms that Derek Walcott is as compelling a playwright as he is a poet.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
With its inspired counterpointing of Homeric and Caribbean themes, Derek Walcott’s new play, commissioned by Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company, springs from the same imaginative sources as his epic poem OMEROS. Episodes of the story of Odysseus’ protracted wanderings from fallen Troy to his island home of Ithaca are pungently interspersed with a commentary by the blind singer Billy Blue. Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, the giant Cyclops, Circe and her revellers, ghosts, and mermaids are among the cast. With its vast sweep and richly figurative language, THE ODYSSEY confirms that Derek Walcott is as compelling a playwright as he is a poet.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
THE PRODIGAL is a journey through physical and mental landscapes, from Greenwich Village to the Alps, from Pescara to Milan, from Germany to Cartagena. But always in ‘the music of memory, water’ abide St. Lucia, the author’s birthplace, and the living sea. In his new work, Derek Walcott has created a sweeping yet intimate epic of an exhausted Europe studded with church spires and mountains, train stations and statuary, a place where the New World is an idea, a ‘wavering map,’ and where History subsumes the natural history of his ‘unimportantly beautiful’ island home. Here the wanderer fears that he has been tainted by his exile, that his life has become untranslatable, and that his craft itself is rooted in the betrayal of the vivid archipelago to which he must return for the sustenance of life.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Most of the poems in this new collection follow the arc of the Caribbean archipelago from Trinidad to Jamaica. The reader is taken on an odyssey, beginning with ‘The Schooner Flight,’ in which a poor mulatto sailor abandons his life in Trinidad, sailing northward to meet his fate, and ending with ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom,’ a long poem whose axis is the critical attempt to establish a new social order in Jamaica without sacrificing democracy. Other poems speak through various personae: ‘Koenig of the River’ marks the end of a saga of nineteenth-century exploration and conquest through the Conradian image of a missionary-soldier whose comrades have been lost at sea; ‘The Saddhu of Couva’ describes the lament of an Indian priest for a fading spirituality; ‘Egypt, Tobago’ places Mark Antony on a beach in the glare of afternoon. Two poems are dedicated to fellow poets - Joseph Brodsky and Robert Lowell. In THE STAR-APPLE KINGDOM, Walcott’s precise and inventive imagery is enriched by frequent exploitation of the tonal aspects of dialect. He has absorbed into poetry the normal resources of fiction - to the point where fact crystallizes into metaphor. As John Thompson recently commented in The New York Review of Books: ‘Walcott writes now as a man who knows exactly what he is doing. His style is that of the best language of our period.’
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
The three plays in this collection form a triptych - the central play, a farce, is flanked by two dramas. Together they span the last four decades of Trinidad's social and political history, beginning, in "The Last Carnival," with the colonial life-style of a French Creole family faced with the emergence of the Black Power movement, and ending, in "A Branch of the Blue Nile," with the conflict among members of a small theatre company in contemporary Port-of-Spain. "Beef, No Chicken," the middle play, deals with the corruption of a small town in a hurry to catch up with the industrialization that a new highway will bring.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
TIEPOLO’S HOUND joins the quests of two Caribbean men. Camille Pissarro, a Sephardic Jew born in 1830, leaves his native St. Thomas to follow his vocation as a painter in Paris, while the poet himself longs to rediscover a detail - ’a slash of pink on the inner thigh / of a white hound’ - of a Venetian painting encountered on an early visit from St. Lucia to New York. Both journeys take us through a Europe of the mind’s eye, in search of a connection between the lost, actual landscape of a childhood and the mythical landscape of empire. Published with twenty-six full-color c reproductions of Derek Walcott’s own paintings, the poem is at once the spiritual biography of a great artist in self-imposed exile, a history in verse of Impressionist painting, and a memoir of the poet’s desire to catch the visual world in more than words.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
The first collection of essays by the Nobel laureate. Derek Walcott has been publishing essays in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere for more than twenty years. WHAT THE TWILIGHT SAYS collects these pieces to form a volume of remarkable elegance, concision, and brilliance. It includes Walcott’s moving and insightful examinations of the paradoxes of Caribbean culture, his Nobel lecture, and his reckoning of the work and significance of such poets as Robert Lowell, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Frost, Les Murray, and Ted Hughes, and of prose writers such as V. S. Naipaul and Patrick Chamoiseau. On every subject he takes up, Walcott the essayist brings to bear the lyric power and syncretic intelligence that have made him one of the major poetic voices of our time.
Derek Alton Walcott (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
A DAZZLING NEW COLLECTION FROM ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT POETS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats the characteristic subjects of his career-the Caribbean's complex colonial legacy, his love of the Western literary tradition, the wisdom that comes through the passing of time, the always strange joys of new love, and the sometimes terrifying beauty of the natural world-with an intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the mesmerizing repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott creates an almost surflike cadence, broadening the possibilities of rhyme and meter, poetic form and language. White Egrets is a moving new collection from one of the most important poets of the twentieth century-a celebration of the life and language of the West Indies. It is also a triumphant paean to beauty, love, art, and-perhaps most surprisingly-getting older.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 – 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
‘A substantial step forward for black diaspora and black transnational literary studies.’--Gary Edward Holcomb, author of Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha. ‘Fills a significant void in our understanding of the life and literary career of Eric Walrond. By collecting, for the first time, the writings Walrond produced following his departure from the U.S. in 1928, Parascandola and Wade have done scholars a rich service.’--Heather Hathaway, author of Caribbean Waves. Eric Walrond is one of the great underexamined figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the Caribbean diaspora. Very little of his later work has been subsequently published or made readily available to American scholars. His writings, set in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe, discuss imperialism, racism, the role of the black writer, black identity, and immigration--all topics of vital concern today. Born in British Guiana (now Guyana), Walrond moved to New York City in 1918 where he worked briefly for Marcus Garvey and became a protégé of Charles S. Johnson. During that time, he wrote short fiction as well as nonfiction and gained a measure of fame for his 1926 collection, Tropic Death. In Search of Asylum compiles Walrond’s European journalism and later fiction, as well as the pieces he wrote during the 1950s at Roundway Hospital in Wiltshire, England, where he was a voluntary patient. Louis Parascandola and Carl Wade have assembled a collection that at last fills in the biographical gaps in Walrond’s life, providing insights into the contours of his later work and the cultural climates in which he functioned between 1928 and his death in 1966.
Eric Walrond (December 18, 1898 - August 8, 1966) born in Georgetown, British Guiana, in 1898, was the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father. His first eight years were spent in Guiana. But his parents’ marital difficulties led Walrond into an almost wayfaring existence. In 1906, his father abandoned Walrond and his mother. His mother moved the two of them to a small village in Barbados to live with their relatives. Walrond began his education in Barbados at St. Stephen’s Boys’ School, located in Black Rock. Around 1910, Walrond and his mother traveled in search of his father to the Panama Canal Zone, where thousands of west Indians and Guyanese were employed to dig the canal. Walrond and his mother never found his father and they made a home in Colon. It is in Colon where Walrond completed his public and secondary school education between 1913 and 1916. During his education in Colon, Walrond was exposed to the Spanish culture and became bilingual. Around this time he was trained as a secretary and stenographer, and acquired a job as a clerk in the Health Department of the Canal commission at Cristobal. Through the years 1916 and 1918 he began a journalistic career which he pursued while in the United States. Walrond worked as a general reporter, court reporter, and sportswriter for the Panama Star-Herald, ‘the most important contemporaneous newspaper in the American tropics.’ Walrond was also associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In the early 1920s he published short stories in periodicals such as the Opportunity, Smart Set, and Vanity Fair. In 1923, he wrote ‘On Being a Domestic,’ ‘Miss Kenny’s Marriage,’ ‘The Stone Rebounds,’ and ‘The Stone Rebounds.’ Walrond’s stories focused on a realistic presentation of racial situations in New York City. In 1924 he focused on a more impressionistic presentation of life in the American tropics. He did not return to the realistic form of writing until 1927, when he wrote ‘City Love,’ which is the last story he published before he left the United States. His works include - ‘On Being Black’ (1922); ‘On being a Domestic,’ ‘Miss Kenny’s Marriage,’ ‘The Stone Rebounds,’ ‘Cynthia Goes to the Prom,’ ‘The New Negro Faces America,’ ‘The Negro Exodus from the South’ (1923); ‘Vignettes of the Dusk,’ ‘The Black City’ (1924); ‘A Cholo Romance,’ ‘Imperator Africanus, Marcus Garvey: Menace or Promise?’ (1925); Tropic Death (1926); ‘City Love’ (1927). Louis J. Parascandola, professor of English at Long Island University, is author or editor of six books, including "Look for Me All Around You": Anglophone Caribbean Immigrants in the Harlem Renaissance. Carl A. Wade, senior lecturer in English at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados, has published extensively on Caribbean American writers and writing.
THE CRUEL, SENSUAL WORLD OF TROPIC DEATH - From a lonely cabin in Guinea to the sizzling deck of a Honduras freighter, from the West Indies slums in Panama to the marl-diggers’ shacks in Barbados, Eric Walrond brilliantly etches a world in which tropic death is a way of life. Ten stark, realistic stories cut across the West Indies to Panama and the Isthmus Islands to recreate the black Caribbean experience, a transplanted African heritage flowering amidst an exotic new world of buckra johnnies, British whites, upstage blacks, Spanish senoritas, wordy West Indians, American Marines and Latin seamen. Tropic Death uniquely reflects the rhythm, religion, speech and manners of a world of droughts, malnutrition, exploitation, race hatred, folk myths, black magic and leprosy that destroy even as they create the tragic-hallucinatory tropic scenario. ERIC WALROND was born in Jamaica and came to this country in the twenties. He was a contemporary and friend of Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance group writing at that time. He died in 1967.
Eric Walrond (December 18, 1898 - August 8, 1966) born in Georgetown, British Guiana, in 1898, was the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father. His first eight years were spent in Guiana. But his parents’ marital difficulties led Walrond into an almost wayfaring existence. In 1906, his father abandoned Walrond and his mother. His mother moved the two of them to a small village in Barbados to live with their relatives. Walrond began his education in Barbados at St. Stephen’s Boys’ School, located in Black Rock. Around 1910, Walrond and his mother traveled in search of his father to the Panama Canal Zone, where thousands of west Indians and Guyanese were employed to dig the canal. Walrond and his mother never found his father and they made a home in Colon. It is in Colon where Walrond completed his public and secondary school education between 1913 and 1916. During his education in Colon, Walrond was exposed to the Spanish culture and became bilingual. Around this time he was trained as a secretary and stenographer, and acquired a job as a clerk in the Health Department of the Canal commission at Cristobal. Through the years 1916 and 1918 he began a journalistic career which he pursued while in the United States. Walrond worked as a general reporter, court reporter, and sportswriter for the Panama Star-Herald, ‘the most important contemporaneous newspaper in the American tropics.’ Walrond was also associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In the early 1920s he published short stories in periodicals such as the Opportunity, Smart Set, and Vanity Fair. In 1923, he wrote ‘On Being a Domestic,’ ‘Miss Kenny’s Marriage,’ ‘The Stone Rebounds,’ and ‘The Stone Rebounds.’ Walrond’s stories focused on a realistic presentation of racial situations in New York City. In 1924 he focused on a more impressionistic presentation of life in the American tropics. He did not return to the realistic form of writing until 1927, when he wrote ‘City Love,’ which is the last story he published before he left the United States. His works include - ‘On Being Black’ (1922); ‘On being a Domestic,’ ‘Miss Kenny’s Marriage,’ ‘The Stone Rebounds,’ ‘Cynthia Goes to the Prom,’ ‘The New Negro Faces America,’ ‘The Negro Exodus from the South’ (1923); ‘Vignettes of the Dusk,’ ‘The Black City’ (1924); ‘A Cholo Romance,’ ‘Imperator Africanus, Marcus Garvey: Menace or Promise?’ (1925); Tropic Death (1926); ‘City Love’ (1927).
TROPIC DEATH, Eric Walrond’s most acclaimed work, consists of ten stories of inhumanity in the American tropics, especially white against black - or imperial power against impoverished native. In ‘Subjection,’ for example, a white marine shoots a black canal worker. Walrond also explores the effects of modern technology and exploitation on the Caribbean natural environment; ‘The Palm Porch’ describes the construction of the Panama Canal in terms of its causing ‘the gradual death and destruction of the frontier post.’ Walrond writes in an impressionistic style that quickly shifts from one image to another. He depicts cultural impressions more than characters or plot yet illustrates the disorientation and alienation his characters experience. Considered an example of avant-garde writing, TROPIC DEATH has been praised by critics such as W. E. B. DuBois and Langston Hughes.
Eric Walrond (December 18, 1898 - August 8, 1966) born in Georgetown, British Guiana, in 1898, was the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father. His first eight years were spent in Guiana. But his parents’ marital difficulties led Walrond into an almost wayfaring existence. In 1906, his father abandoned Walrond and his mother. His mother moved the two of them to a small village in Barbados to live with their relatives. Walrond began his education in Barbados at St. Stephen’s Boys’ School, located in Black Rock. Around 1910, Walrond and his mother traveled in search of his father to the Panama Canal Zone, where thousands of west Indians and Guyanese were employed to dig the canal. Walrond and his mother never found his father and they made a home in Colon. It is in Colon where Walrond completed his public and secondary school education between 1913 and 1916. During his education in Colon, Walrond was exposed to the Spanish culture and became bilingual. Around this time he was trained as a secretary and stenographer, and acquired a job as a clerk in the Health Department of the Canal commission at Cristobal. Through the years 1916 and 1918 he began a journalistic career which he pursued while in the United States. Walrond worked as a general reporter, court reporter, and sportswriter for the Panama Star-Herald, ‘the most important contemporaneous newspaper in the American tropics.’ Walrond was also associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In the early 1920s he published short stories in periodicals such as the Opportunity, Smart Set, and Vanity Fair. In 1923, he wrote ‘On Being a Domestic,’ ‘Miss Kenny’s Marriage,’ ‘The Stone Rebounds,’ and ‘The Stone Rebounds.’ Walrond’s stories focused on a realistic presentation of racial situations in New York City. In 1924 he focused on a more impressionistic presentation of life in the American tropics. He did not return to the realistic form of writing until 1927, when he wrote ‘City Love,’ which is the last story he published before he left the United States. His works include - ‘On Being Black’ (1922); ‘On being a Domestic,’ ‘Miss Kenny’s Marriage,’ ‘The Stone Rebounds,’ ‘Cynthia Goes to the Prom,’ ‘The New Negro Faces America,’ ‘The Negro Exodus from the South’ (1923); ‘Vignettes of the Dusk,’ ‘The Black City’ (1924); ‘A Cholo Romance,’ ‘Imperator Africanus, Marcus Garvey: Menace or Promise?’ (1925); Tropic Death (1926); ‘City Love’ (1927).
Eric Walrond (1898-1966), a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement, is a seminal writer of Black diasporic life, but much of his work is not readily available. This new anthology brings together a broad sampling of Walrond's writings, including not only selections from his celebrated Tropic Death (1926) but also other stories, essays, and reviews. Born in British Guiana in 1898 and raised in Barbados and Panama, Walrond arrived in the U.S. in 1918 when the wave of West Indian immigrants was reaching its peak. He worked as an editor for Marcus Garvey's Negro Worm and Charles S. Johnson's Opportunity but moved on to Europe after ten years. This anthology retraces Walrond's migratory life by focusing on key periods of his work. Examples of his apprentice writing document his early encounters with racial prejudice and his ambivalence toward the Garveyites, while a second section focuses on his involvement with the New Negro Movement and reflects both his emphasis on racial pride and interest in literary aesthetics. A third section contains impressionistic stories from Tropic Death, which vividly depicts the lives and culture of Caribbean Blacks and still holds a unique place in Black literature. A final section samples Walrond's work from England, much of it unknown today, where he continued to write on the themes of migration, discrimination, and racial pride until his death in London in 1966. Louis J. Parascandola's introduction to the collection provides the most complete description to date of Walrond's life and work. It brings together previously undocumented biographical information that situates him in the context of his times, and it offers both an overview and a renewed appreciation of his writings. This book restores Walrond to his proper place in the history of African American and Caribbean literature and is an essential reader for students of Black culture.
Eric Walrond (December 18, 1898 - August 8, 1966) born in Georgetown, British Guiana, in 1898, was the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father. His first eight years were spent in Guiana. But his parents’ marital difficulties led Walrond into an almost wayfaring existence. In 1906, his father abandoned Walrond and his mother. His mother moved the two of them to a small village in Barbados to live with their relatives. Walrond began his education in Barbados at St. Stephen’s Boys’ School, located in Black Rock. Around 1910, Walrond and his mother traveled in search of his father to the Panama Canal Zone, where thousands of west Indians and Guyanese were employed to dig the canal. Walrond and his mother never found his father and they made a home in Colon. It is in Colon where Walrond completed his public and secondary school education between 1913 and 1916. During his education in Colon, Walrond was exposed to the Spanish culture and became bilingual. Around this time he was trained as a secretary and stenographer, and acquired a job as a clerk in the Health Department of the Canal commission at Cristobal. Through the years 1916 and 1918 he began a journalistic career which he pursued while in the United States. Walrond worked as a general reporter, court reporter, and sportswriter for the Panama Star-Herald, ‘the most important contemporaneous newspaper in the American tropics.’ Walrond was also associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In the early 1920s he published short stories in periodicals such as the Opportunity, Smart Set, and Vanity Fair. In 1923, he wrote ‘On Being a Domestic,’ ‘Miss Kenny’s Marriage,’ ‘The Stone Rebounds,’ and ‘The Stone Rebounds.’ Walrond’s stories focused on a realistic presentation of racial situations in New York City. In 1924 he focused on a more impressionistic presentation of life in the American tropics. He did not return to the realistic form of writing until 1927, when he wrote ‘City Love,’ which is the last story he published before he left the United States. His works include - ‘On Being Black’ (1922); ‘On being a Domestic,’ ‘Miss Kenny’s Marriage,’ ‘The Stone Rebounds,’ ‘Cynthia Goes to the Prom,’ ‘The New Negro Faces America,’ ‘The Negro Exodus from the South’ (1923); ‘Vignettes of the Dusk,’ ‘The Black City’ (1924); ‘A Cholo Romance,’ ‘Imperator Africanus, Marcus Garvey: Menace or Promise?’ (1925); Tropic Death (1926); ‘City Love’ (1927).
When Helene is packing up her belongings in readiness for her imminent move and marriage, she unearths a faded old exercise book. As she reads she cannot anticipate the effect it will have upon her own future. It is the diary of Juletane, a young West Indian woman. Written over three weeks, it records her short life; her lonely childhood in France, her marriage to an African student, and her eager return, with him, to Africa - the land of her ancestors. In stark contrast to her naive illusions, the social realities of traditional Muslim life and their cultural demands on her as a woman threaten to drive her to unendurable extremes of loneliness and complete alienation. She is a foreigner, in spite of the colour of her skin. In this powerful and moving novel, Myriam Warner-Vieyra portrays with great sensitivity the complexities of cross-cultural relationships and, in particular, the female predicament.
Myriam Warner-Vieyra was born in Pointe-à-Pitre in 1939. She spent a large part of her childhood with her grandmother in Guadeloupe. She then went to live in France, where she finished her secondary education and afterwards attended the University of Dakar, where she obtained a librarian's diploma. She married the film-maker Paulin Vieyra and she has lived in Senegal for thirty years. She is a librarian and has three adult children (in 1992).
Set on a small Caribbean island, The Rising depicts a year in the life of a young boy, who slowly comes to realise that - contrary to popular belief - it is the women who hold the true power on the island.
Edgar Nkosi White is a playwright and novelist. His work has been performed throughout the world from New York to New Zealand. His published work includes: The Rising, The Crucificado, Underground, The Lament for Rastafari, Redemption Song, The Nine Night, Omar at Christmas and The Children of Night. He has also been a frequent contributor to Monthly Review as well as Writer in Residence at New York City College where he also taught Creative Writing. His writing career began with the poet and writer, Langston Hughes, who was the first to herald his work and was instrumental in the publication of his first book, Underground, with William and Morrow publishers. The theatre began for him with Joseph Papp at the New York Public Theater where five of his plays were performed. The first production of The Mummers Play led to tours with Shakespeare Public Theater productions in Central Park. A performance of his play, Lament for Rastafari at Ellen Stewart’s world famous Café La Mama Theatre led to productions in England both on stage and radio drama with the BBC. He also contributed to the BBC television series ‘Black Silk’. Upon returning to the United States, the author received a Rockefeller award and became a member of the New Dramatist. Productions of two of his plays, Trance and I Marcus Garvey toured Canada in 2012. He attended City College of New York, New York University and the Yale School of Drama. The author also attended New York Theological Seminary and has had a very close association with the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. He is an ordained minister and has made Prison Ministry a major factor in his life. He has performed frequent theatre workshops at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
Through a series of personal journeys, each interwoven with scenes from Haiti’s extraordinary past, Amy Wilentz, a brilliant young writer/ reporter, brings to life this turbulent and fascinating country.
Amy Wilentz is an American journalist and writer. She is a Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches in the Literary Journalism program.
'It began, way back, with those two names: the one [Lionel] on my birth certificate, on my black-Frank-Sinatra face; and the one [Lobo] I carried -like a pregnant load waiting to be freed and to take itself with every despatch back to the swamps and forests . of my South American home. All along, ever since I'd felt I ought to become this, alter ego of ancestral times that I was sure quietly slumbered behind the cultivated mask.' Estrangement from one's source is the theme of Denis Williams' remarkable first novel, set somewhere in the Sudanic Savannah. Kenneth Ramchand says, 'It is a measure of Williams' triumph that although the novel is set in Africa and works through African material, it is the universal dimension of [Lionel's] case — the abortive quest for origins — that emerges from this fiction.'
Denis Williams (1 February 1923 – 28 June 1998) was a Guyanese painter, author and archaeologist. Dr. Denis Joseph Ivan Williams, C.C.H., Hon. D. Lit., M.A., called by his friends "Sonny" Williams, was born in Georgetown, Guyana, where he received his early education; he was granted a Cambridge Junior School Certificate in 1940 and a Cambridge Senior School Certificate in 1941. His promise as a painter won him a two-year British Council Scholarship to the Camberwell School of Art in London in 1946. He lived in London for the next 10 years, during which he taught fine art and held several one-man shows of his work as well as producing the artwork for Bajan novelist George Lamming's first book In the Castle of my Skin. From 1957 to 1967 he taught art and art history at the School of Fine Art, Khartoum, Sudan; the University of Ife, Nigeria; Makerere University, Uganda; and the University of Lagos, Nigeria. He also published numerous articles on the history and iconography of West African classical art expressed especially in brass, bronze, and iron, and a book, Icon and Image: A Study of Sacred and Secular Forms of African Classical Art (1974, New York University Press). Williams had been exposed to archaeology in Sudan and renewed his interest in 1968 when he finally returned to Guyana and established a homestead in the Mazaruni District. In his first letter to the Smithsonian Institution in 1973, he said: "my interest in these antiquities is that they may explain something about the who and how, as well as the when of the arts of the Guyana Indians." His appointment in 1974 as director of the newly created Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology in Georgetown provided the opportunity to pursue this quest. Initially, he concentrated his attention on petroglyphs, not only recording the designs, but excavating to recover the tools used and observing the environmental contexts. His Master's thesis, The Aishalton Petroglyph Complex in the Prehistory of the Rupununi Savannas, submitted to the University of Guyana in 1979, presented ideas elaborated in a 1985 article published in the journal Advances in World Archaeology. In 1980 he began intensive archaeological and paleoclimatic investigations of the shell middens on the northwest coast of Guyana. From the beginning of his studies, he was aware of potential disturbance of stratigraphy, errors in radiocarbon dates, and other pitfalls, and some of his efforts to detect them were detailed in Early Pottery on the Amazon: A Correction. Evidence for a correlation between the declining productivity of mangrove resources and changes in artefacts and settlement behaviour was summarised in Some Subsistence Implications of Holocene Climatic Change in Northwestern Guyana. His observation that the methods employed by the Warao for processing palm starch are preadapted for eliminating the poison from bitter manioc offers a reasonable explanation for the origin of this remarkable technology. A monograph detailing his evidence and interpretations of the interaction between environmental change and Guyana prehistory was in press at the time of his death. He recognised the importance of publication and in 1978 founded Archaeology and Anthropology, the journal of the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology in Georgetown. Among other journals Williams edited were Odu (the University of Ife Journal of African studies) and Lagos Notes and Records, and he contributed numerous essays on art to several books and journals. His skill as a writer is documented not only in his scientific papers, but in numerous works of fiction. In 1986 Williams and his assistant, Jennifer Wishart, initiated a programme for junior archaeologists in Guyanese secondary schools. Awards His accomplishments were recognised in several national awards, including the Golden Arrow of Achievement Award from the government of Guyana in 1973, and the Cacique Crown of Honour in 1989, the same year that he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies.
‘It began, way back, with those two names : the one (Lionel) on my birth certificate, on my black —Frank Sinatra face; and the one (Lobo) I carried like a pregnant load waiting to be freed and to take itself with every despatch back to the swamps and forests of my South American home ...All along, ever since I'd grown up, I'd been Lionel looking for Lobo. I'd felt I ought to become this alter ego of ancestral times that I sure, quietly slumbered behind the cultivated mask.' Estrangement from one's source is the theme of OTHER LEOPARDS. Set in Jokhara, a country somewhere in the Savannah that stretches across Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic, it describes Lionel Froad's conflict within him- self, and especially with Hughie, head of the Archaeological survey on which Lionel works as draughtsman, Lionel is torn by a respectful love and admiration for Hughie, who is confident, wise, dependable, understanding, all the things Lionel feels himself to be, but knows he is not; and by his passion for Catherine, a Welsh girl, Hughie's assistant, and Eve, the Christian daughter of a black pastor. Catherine is estranged from her own background, Eve is, likewise, from hers by having married a Muslim who has repudiated her, so she belongs nowhere. These complicated relationships are beautifully described by Williams against the background of a country newly independent. In OTHER LEOPARDS Denis Williams shows a consummate mastery of both descriptive writing and perceptive characterisation.
DENIS WILLIAMS was born in Georgetown, British Guiana, in 1923, He studied painting at Camberwell School of Art. From 1950 to 1957 he was a Lecturer at the Central School of Art, Holborn, and Visiting Tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art, He has had exhibitions at Gimpel Fils, Galerie de France; etc, Second prize "Artists under thirty-five" organised by the DAILY EXPRESS in 1955. From 1957-1962 he was Lecturer in Fine Art, Khartoum Technical Institute, At present he is with the Institute of African Studies, University of Ife, Nigeria where he hopes to further his researches in African antiquity, write and paint. He is married and has five children.
The former, based on research done in the 1940s and initially presented at a symposium at Atlanta University, sought to debunk British historiography on the region and to condemn as racist the nineteenth and early twentieth century British perspective on the West Indies. Williams was particularly scathing in his description of the nineteenth century British intellectual Thomas Carlyle.
Eric E. Williams (born 25 September 1911, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago) was one of the most outstanding African Caribbean intellectuals of all time, author of Capitalism and Slavery (1944), classic on African enslavement in the Americas by the pan-European World – from his 1938 Oxford University doctoral thesis, and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, 31 August 1962, after centuries of the British/European World conquest, enslaving and occupation
Eric Williams’s CAPITALISM & SLAVERY became the foundation for many future studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams’s study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He goes on to show how a mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system.
Eric E. Williams (born 25 September 1911, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago) was one of the most outstanding African Caribbean intellectuals of all time, author of Capitalism and Slavery (1944), classic on African enslavement in the Americas by the pan-European World – from his 1938 Oxford University doctoral thesis, and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, 31 August 1962, after centuries of the British/European World conquest, enslaving and occupation
Any new book by the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago is an event; this one is a landmark in historical writing. His history of the Caribbean from 1492 to the present day is of special importance because it is the first complete history of the area as a whole to have been written. Dr Williams’s purpose, as he explains in his foreword, is twofold: to set the record straight by collating all existing knowledge of the Caribbean in relation to the rest of the world, and to provide, through greater awareness of its heritage of exploitation and neglect, a sure foundation for the economic integration of the region to which, as a statesman, he is firmly committed. Like his earlier study, CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY - to which this book is a worthy and logical successor - From Columbus to Castro contributes to our understanding of the modern world by illuminating one profoundly important but neglected and misrepresented area of it. Caught up in the political and economic net of the metropolitan countries for over four-and-a-half centuries, and for part of that time the ‘cockpit of the world’, the Caribbean has only recently begun to achieve independence. Today the task of interpreting accurately the colonial past as a guarantee of that independence is more necessary than ever before. In this book, in which author and subject are perfectly matched, Dr Williams has triumphantly succeeded in his task. Writing with great verve and vigour, he has shaped, out of a wealth of material, a narrative history compelling in its forward drive and startling in its insights. He concludes his definitive study with a sober forecast for the future. Dr Eric Williams has been Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago since 1956. INWARD HUNGER: THE EDUCATION OF A PRIME MINISTER, is Dr Williams’s own story of his distinguished career. He was recently elected President of the African Society of Culture.
Eric E. Williams (born 25 September 1911, Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago) was one of the most outstanding African Caribbean intellectuals of all time, author of Capitalism and Slavery (1944), classic on African enslavement in the Americas by the pan-European World – from his 1938 Oxford University doctoral thesis, and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, 31 August 1962, after centuries of the British/European World conquest, enslaving and occupation
Winner of the Casa de las Américas Prize. N. D. Williams’ award-winning first novel, set during the Kingston riots following the banning of Walter Rodney in 1968.
N. D. (Wyck) Williams (born 1942) is a New York-based writer who was born in Guyana. Born in Guyana, Williams went to Jamaica as a student to study at University of the West Indies at Mona in 1968. As a student he witnessed the riots following student demonstrations against the banning of the late Dr. Walter Rodney. This is now referred to as the Rodney riots, 1968. Williams writes of being powerfully influenced by the radical, nativist currents in Jamaican culture – reggae and yard theatre – of this period. His stories have been published in Jamaica Journal and Savacou, and in the anthologies One People's Grief (1983) and Best West Indian Stories. In 1976 his first novel Ikael Torass was awarded the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize. It draws on his experiences in Jamaica and particularly the Rodney episode. He also explores the role of the university and education as an agent of social division, as well as the revolt on campus and in the wider society against the repressive forces in Jamaican society. Williams lived for a time in Antigua, before moving to the U.S., where he lives in New York City. His works, from the short stories of The Crying of Rainbirds (1992), the novel, The Silence of Islands (1994), the two novellas My Planet of Ras and What Happening There, Prash in Prash and Ras (1997), to the short stories in Julie Mango (2003), all published by Peepal Tree Press, explore both an island and a diasporic experience. In 2002 Williams published his searching look at the teeming underclass of New York in his disturbing novel Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel. Two other collection of short stories followed: Colonial Cream in January 2003 and The Friendship of Shoes (November 2005).
In this outrageously out-of-order, hilarious novel, the reader discovers that lunacy is by no means restricted to the village madman, and that goodness and forgiveness may be rarer qualities, found in unexpected places. Aloysius is tolerated by neighbors but forced to eke out a living by doing odd jobs, using the hospitable woodlands for shelter. He is starved of human companionship; instead he has running conversations with trees and plants. Then love, or a peculiar version of it, comes to Aloysius in the form of a solidly built German lady, Inga Schmidt, who has come to Jamaica to photograph the flora and fauna.
Anthony Winkler (February 25, 1942, Kingston, Jamaica - September 18, 2015) was born in Kingston, Jamaica. He is the author of several textbooks and of a second novel, The Lunatic.
The Painted Canoe is the story of a poor Jamaican fisherman who falls asleep one night on a fishing trip and wakes up to find his small craft surrounded by the empty horizon with no land in sight. What follows is a heartfelt story of his fight for survival against the sea. His canoe is nearly swamped by a passing freighter; he is stalked, attacked and bitten by a shark; he nearly goes mad from fear and loneliness but still he refuses to give up. To kindle his strength, he daydreams about his wife, his two sons, his dead mother, the pastor of his village church, the English doctor who runs the government health clinic, revealing a tapestry of colorful characters.
Anthony Winkler (February 25, 1942, Kingston, Jamaica - September 18, 2015) was born in Kingston, Jamaica. He is the author of several textbooks and of a second novel, The Lunatic.
Black bean soup, Indian fritters, deep-fried plantain rings, and other delicacies of the Caribbean islands. Recipes and informational sections, illustrated with color photos. Part of the Time-Life Foods of the World series.
Limited edition of 497 copies. Includes poems by René Bélance (Haiti), Jean Brierre (Haiti), Roussan Camille (Haiti), Aimé Césaire (Martinique), Leon Damas (French Guiana), Gilbert Gratiant (Martinique), Etienne Lero (Martinique), Jacques Roumain (Haiti), Guy Tirolien (Guadeloupe).
Professor Wolitz was born on February 10, 1938 in New York City. He’s a Jewish American and is fluent in English, Yiddish, and French. He is Gale Chair and a Professor of Jewish Studies at UT-Austin. He is also a Professor of French and Slavic and Comparative Literature at UT-Austin. He has his B.A. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D from Yale University. He has written and published many articles and books. He has translated and even written opera librettos.
A collection of Haitian folktales for readers of all ages. When Diane Wolkstein, herself a well-known storyteller, traveled throughout the Haitian countryside in search of stories, she harvested a rich collection of twenty-seven tales, each of which is illuminated by fascinating introductory notes. From orange trees growing at the command of a child to talking fish, these stories present us with a world of wonder, delight, and mystery.
Diane Wolkstein (November 11, 1942 – January 31, 2013) was a folklorist and author of children's books. She also served as New York City's official storyteller from 1968–1971. As New York's official storyteller, Wolkstein visited two of the city's parks each weekday, staging hundreds of one-woman storytelling events. After successfully talking her way into the position, she realized "there was no margin for error," she said in a 1992 interview. "I mean, it was a park. [The children would] just go somewhere else if they didn't like it." She also had a radio show on WNYC, Stories From Many Lands, from 1968 until 1980, and she helped create the Storytelling Center of New York City. Wolkstein authored two dozen books, primarily collections of folk tales and legends she gathered during research trips. She made many visits to China, Haiti and Africa. Wolkstein was born in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey. Her father Henry was an accountant and her mother Ruth was a librarian. She received a bachelor's degree from Smith College and a master's degree in education from Bank Street College of Education. While living in Paris, she studied mime under Étienne Decroux. Wolkstein was in Taiwan to research a book of Chinese folk stories when she underwent emergency surgery for a heart condition. She died in the city of Kaohsiung at the age of 70.
C. L. R. James: A Political Biography offers the first sustained account of the life and work of one of the twentieth-century's most important radical intellectuals. C. L. R. James (1901-1989) was born and raised in Trinidad and became one of the most prominent figures to emerge out of the West Indian diaspora. He authored numerous books and essays on Caribbean history, Marxist theory, literary criticism, Western civilization, African politics, Hegelian philosophy and popular culture. His best known works, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, and Beyond a Boundary are classics of twentieth-century thought. James played an active part in democratic movements in the West Indies and Africa as well as in left-wing and Pan-African campaigns in Britain, the United States, and Trinidad.
Kent Worcester is the author, editor, or coeditor of eight books, including A Comics Studies Reader (2009) and The Superhero Reader (2013). He teaches political theory at Marymount Manhattan College.
An eye-opening report on two hostile neighbors. Like two roosters in a fighting arena, the Dominican Republic and Haiti are encircled by barriers of geography and poverty. They share one Caribbean island, Hispaniola, but their histories are as deeply divided as their cultures: one French-speaking and black, one Spanish-speaking and mulatto. And just as the owners of gamecocks contrive battles between their birds (a favorite sport in both countries) as a way of playing out human conflicts, Haitian and Dominican leaders often stir up nationalist disputes and exaggerate their cultural and racial differences as a way of deflecting other kinds of turmoil. Michele Wucker's vivid account of these struggles both on Hispaniola and in the United States takes us to the haunted mountains where, sixty years ago, the Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered 30,000 Haitians to be killed; to Vodou rituals in Dominican sugarcane fields where Haitians work as virtual slaves; and to the ringside of cockfights in all three countries. She focuses especially on the features in Caribbean history that are still affecting Hispaniola today, including the often contradictory policies of the United States toward both nations. Wucker's report on the life of Dominican and Haitian migrants in the United States is essential if we are to understand their contribution to the politics of our hemisphere.
Michele M. Wucker (born 1969) is an American author, commentator and policy analyst specializing in the world economy and crisis anticipation. She is the author of The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers we Ignore, Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong when Our Prosperity Depends on Getting it Right and Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians and the Struggle for Hispaniola. Wucker is of American, Belgian and Austrian Slavic descent, and lives in Chicago, Illinois. She holds a B.A. in French and Policy Studies from Rice University and a Master of International Affairs and Certificate in Latin American Studies from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. In 2012, she received a Certificate in Global Leadership and Public Policy in the 21st Century from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She worked as a news reporter at the Milwaukee Sentinel (now the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) in 1990, covering the local Hispanic community. She wrote about emerging markets finance at Dow Jones, AmericaEconomia, and International Financing Review. From 2000-2001, she was Latin America Bureau Chief for International Financing Review and editor of IFR Latin America. After publishing Why the Cocks Fight, she was appointed senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, at the time part of The New School, in New York City. In 2007, she became executive director, taking the think tank independent from the university, and was named President of the World Policy Institute in 2010. She was part of the Brookings-Duke Immigration Roundtable, which issued its recommendations in 2009. She was also part of the SUNY-Levin Institute New York in the World Advisory Council, which issued its recommendations in 2011 to New York City and State on policy responses to economic globalization. In August 2014, Wucker left the World Policy Institute to join the Chicago Council on Global Affairs as Vice President for Studies.In 2015, she left that organization and founded Gray Rhino & Company. In 2007, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on changing global conceptions of citizenship. In 2008, she became a Women's Media Center Progressive Women's Voices Alumna. In 2009, the World Economic Forum honored her as a Young Global Leader. In 2010, the Women's Media Center named Wucker a Woman Making History for her work on immigration and the relationship between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
This work of compelling lyrical unity tells the story of growing up black in the colonial world of Martinique. Not only does the young hero, Jose, have to fight the ignorance and poverty of plantation life, but he must also learn to survive the all-pervasive French cultural saturation — to remain true to himself, proud of his race and his family. His ally in this struggle is his grandmother, M’man Tine, who fights her own weariness to release at least one child from the plantation village, a dirt street lined with the shacks of sugarcane workers. First published in 1950. La rue cases-negres was inspired by Richard Wright’s BLACK BOY. ‘Everything in it is autobiographical,’ wrote Zobel, ‘but the story was patterned after my own aesthetics of composition.’ The movie adaptation, honored at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, has been released in the United States as Sugar Cane Alley. Joseph Zobel, born in 1915 in Petit-Bourg, Martinique, has published many collections of stories and a volume of verse, Incantation pour un retour an pays natal. His novel La fete a Paris is the continuation of La rue cases-negres.
Joseph Zobel (April 26, 1915, in Martinique – June 18, 2006 in Alès, France) is the author of several novels and short-stories in which social issues are at the forefront. Although his most famous novel, ‘La Rue Cases-Nègres‘, was published some twenty years after the great authors of Negritude published their works, Zobel was once asked if he considered himself ‘the novelist of Negritude.’ His most famous novel, La Rue Cases-Nègres (often translated as Black Shack Alley or Sugar Cane Alley), was published in Paris 1950. The novel is an account of a young boy raised by his grandmother in a post-slavery, but still plantation-based, Martinique. The struggles of the impoverished cane sugar plantation workers, and the ambitions of a loving grandmother who works hard to put the main character through school are the core subject of the novel, which also describes life in a colonial society. Zobel stated that the novel was his version of Richard Wright's Black Boy in that they are both semi-autobiographical. The novel was adapted to the screen by Euzhan Palcy in 1983 as Sugar Cane Alley. While La Rue Cases-Nègres is the most renowned work from Joseph Zobel, the author started his writing career in 1942 during World War Two with Diab-la (a tentative English title could be : The Devil's Garden), a socially conscious novel similar to Jacques Roumains' Masters of the Dew (published one year or more later). With Diab-la, Zobel tells the powerful story of a sugar cane plantation worker freeing himself from colonial exploitation by creating a garden in a fishermen's village of Southern Martinique. Leaving Martinique in 1946 to pursue ethnology and drama studies in Paris, Joseph Zobel spent some years in Paris and Fontainebleau, before relocating in Senegal by 1957. Writing a few short stories, he had a notable impact in the cultural life of French-speaking West Africa as a public radio producer. Also a noted poet and a gifted sculptor, Joseph Zobel retired in a small village of Southern France by 1974 and died in 2006. Keith Q. Warner, former chair of the Department of Romance Languages at Howard University, is a native of Trinidad. He is author of KAISO: THE TRINIDAD CALYPSO and editor of Critical PERSPECTIVES ON LEON GONTRAN DAMAS.
This work of compelling lyrical unity tells the story of growing up black in the colonial world of Martinique. Not only does the young hero, Jose, have to fight the ignorance and poverty of plantation life, but he must also learn to survive the all-pervasive French cultural saturation — to remain true to himself, proud of his race and his family. His ally in this struggle is his grandmother, M’man Tine, who fights her own weariness to release at least one child from the plantation village, a dirt street lined with the shacks of sugarcane workers. First published in 1950. La rue cases-negres was inspired by Richard Wright’s BLACK BOY. ‘Everything in it is autobiographical,’ wrote Zobel, ‘but the story was patterned after my own aesthetics of composition.’ The movie adaptation, honored at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, has been released in the United States as Sugar Cane Alley. Joseph Zobel, born in 1915 in Petit-Bourg, Martinique, has published many collections of stories and a volume of verse, Incantation pour un retour an pays natal. His novel La fete a Paris is the continuation of La rue cases-negres.
Joseph Zobel (April 26, 1915, in Martinique – June 18, 2006 in Alès, France) is the author of several novels and short-stories in which social issues are at the forefront. Although his most famous novel, ‘La Rue Cases-Nègres‘, was published some twenty years after the great authors of Negritude published their works, Zobel was once asked if he considered himself ‘the novelist of Negritude.’ His most famous novel, La Rue Cases-Nègres (often translated as Black Shack Alley or Sugar Cane Alley), was published in Paris 1950. The novel is an account of a young boy raised by his grandmother in a post-slavery, but still plantation-based, Martinique. The struggles of the impoverished cane sugar plantation workers, and the ambitions of a loving grandmother who works hard to put the main character through school are the core subject of the novel, which also describes life in a colonial society. Zobel stated that the novel was his version of Richard Wright's Black Boy in that they are both semi-autobiographical. The novel was adapted to the screen by Euzhan Palcy in 1983 as Sugar Cane Alley. While La Rue Cases-Nègres is the most renowned work from Joseph Zobel, the author started his writing career in 1942 during World War Two with Diab-la (a tentative English title could be : The Devil's Garden), a socially conscious novel similar to Jacques Roumains' Masters of the Dew (published one year or more later). With Diab-la, Zobel tells the powerful story of a sugar cane plantation worker freeing himself from colonial exploitation by creating a garden in a fishermen's village of Southern Martinique. Leaving Martinique in 1946 to pursue ethnology and drama studies in Paris, Joseph Zobel spent some years in Paris and Fontainebleau, before relocating in Senegal by 1957. Writing a few short stories, he had a notable impact in the cultural life of French-speaking West Africa as a public radio producer. Also a noted poet and a gifted sculptor, Joseph Zobel retired in a small village of Southern France by 1974 and died in 2006. Keith Q. Warner, former chair of the Department of Romance Languages at Howard University, is a native of Trinidad. He is author of KAISO: THE TRINIDAD CALYPSO and editor of Critical PERSPECTIVES ON LEON GONTRAN DAMAS. .
A memorable coming-of-age novel set in early twentieth-century colonial Martinique Following in the tradition of Richard Wright's Black Boy, Joseph Zobel's semiautobiographical 1950 novel Black Shack Alley chronicles the coming-of-age of José, a young boy grappling with issues of power and identity in colonial Martinique. As José transitions from childhood to young adulthood and from rural plantations to urban Fort-de-France on a quest for upward mobility, he bears witness to and struggles against the various manifestations of white supremacy, both subtle and overt, that will alter the course of his life. His ally in this struggle is his grandmother, M'man Tine, who fights her own weariness to release at least one child from the plantation village, a dirt street lined with the shacks of sugarcane workers. Zobel's masterpiece, the basis for the award-winning film Sugar Cane Alley directed by Euzhan Palcy, is a powerful testament to early twentieth-century life in Martinique.
Joseph Zobel (April 26, 1915, in Martinique – June 18, 2006 in Alès, France) is the author of several novels and short-stories in which social issues are at the forefront. Although his most famous novel, ‘La Rue Cases-Nègres‘, was published some twenty years after the great authors of Negritude published their works, Zobel was once asked if he considered himself ‘the novelist of Negritude.’ His most famous novel, La Rue Cases-Nègres (often translated as Black Shack Alley or Sugar Cane Alley), was published in Paris 1950. The novel is an account of a young boy raised by his grandmother in a post-slavery, but still plantation-based, Martinique. The struggles of the impoverished cane sugar plantation workers, and the ambitions of a loving grandmother who works hard to put the main character through school are the core subject of the novel, which also describes life in a colonial society. Zobel stated that the novel was his version of Richard Wright's Black Boy in that they are both semi-autobiographical. The novel was adapted to the screen by Euzhan Palcy in 1983 as Sugar Cane Alley. While La Rue Cases-Nègres is the most renowned work from Joseph Zobel, the author started his writing career in 1942 during World War Two with Diab-la (a tentative English title could be : The Devil's Garden), a socially conscious novel similar to Jacques Roumains' Masters of the Dew (published one year or more later). With Diab-la, Zobel tells the powerful story of a sugar cane plantation worker freeing himself from colonial exploitation by creating a garden in a fishermen's village of Southern Martinique. Leaving Martinique in 1946 to pursue ethnology and drama studies in Paris, Joseph Zobel spent some years in Paris and Fontainebleau, before relocating in Senegal by 1957. Writing a few short stories, he had a notable impact in the cultural life of French-speaking West Africa as a public radio producer. Also a noted poet and a gifted sculptor, Joseph Zobel retired in a small village of Southern France by 1974 and died in 2006. Keith Q. Warner, former chair of the Department of Romance Languages at Howard University, is a native of Trinidad. He is author of KAISO: THE TRINIDAD CALYPSO and editor of Critical PERSPECTIVES ON LEON GONTRAN DAMAS. .