PAGE ONE:

BOOK NEWS:

Tanya Shirley to launch new book at UWI, Mona this Thursday [pic: merchant]

Scholar-poet Tanya Shirley will launch her newest collection of poems, The Merchant of Feathers, on Thursday, January 8, 2015 at 6:00 pm in Lecture Theatre 3 (Faculty of Medical Sciences) at The University of the West Indies, Mona. The launch will be hosted by the Department of Literatures in English, UWI, Mona Campus.

Shirley, who has a reputation for writing vivid and arresting poems, has published in such august journals as Small Axe, The Caribbean Writer, New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology, and So Much Things to Say: 100 Calabash Poets. Her debut collection, She Who Sleeps With Bones, was a Jamaican bestseller in 2009, which reflects both the popular appeal and literary merit attached to these unusually frank and often highly personal poems.

The Merchant of Feathers (2014) is the thematically diverse, making it difficult to be typified; however, reviewers have been describing it as a collection that speaks to “contemporary Jamaica in all its exuberance and brokenness”. Tanya Shirley is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, Mona, where she now teaches in the Department of Literatures, as an adjunct lecturer. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland, USA. A Cave Canem Fellow, she has participated in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops and, more recently, read and taught at “Narrating the Caribbean Nation,” a conference-cum-festival held in the UK to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Peepal Tree Press.

Shirley has been an invited guest/reader at various local and international institutions and venues. In 2014, she read at The Poet Laureate Reading Series, Portland (Jamaica), the Stanza Literary Festival, St. Andrews (Scotland), the University of Glasgow (Scotland), and the Bocas Literary Festival South, San Fernando (Trinidad). In 2013, her appearances included readings at the April Rabbit, Newfoundland (Canada), the Yardstick Poetry Festival, Bristol (UK), the Kingston Book Festival (Jamaica), the ACLALS 16th Triennial Conference (St. Lucia). She has equally captivated audiences at the 8th World Poetry Festival (Venezuela, 2011), at British Colonial Hilton (Bahamas, 2010), and at the University of Miami (USA, 2003). The launch is free and open to the public.

Author explores era of slavery in new book [pic: blackest]

Inspired by a need to understand what a particular time of slavery could be like, author W J V Grant reveals a compelling tale through the eyes of a slave in her new book The Blackest Berry.

The Blackest Berry is set on the island of Jamaica during a time of slavery. Main protagonist Tessa deemed by her master to be ‘too puny’ is a slave and amateur botanist on the Racadam Plantation. However, while performing her tasks as a house slave; she manages to find time to develop her interest in the beauty of flowers, creating brief respites from her pain. But despite the suffering of terrible injustices Tessa’s remarkable and intriguing story remains delightfully witty.

“The general theme of my book encompasses aspects of power – through the dehumanisation of others for the sake of a few and how that willfulness prevails to this day,” Grant says.

W J V Grant was born and partly educated in Jamaica and England, where at 15, she joined her mother. She is the mother of four children and resides in a quiet suburb of Birmingham. Her research for this novel drew her into the vast archives of the transatlantic slave trade where she discovered a deep resonance with her own sense of identity.

The Blackest Berry

By W J V Grant

Softcover | 6×9 in | 362 pages | ISBN 9781499086782

E-Book | 362 pages | ISBN 9781499086775

Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

PAGES TWO & THREE:

Writer credit: Sharon Leach

Books:

The Year in Books

With 2014 now decidedly in the rear-view mirror, Bookends takes a look back at some of the best Caribbean books we discussed on our pages last year.

1 If I Never Went Home (Blue China Press) by Ingrid Persaud

On the surface, the novel is a family story that traces 10 or so years in the lives of two Trinidadian women. Bea is a 30-something-year-old migrant academic history teacher living in Boston, USA. She experiences a major depressive disorder characterised by a tendency to self-harm. She is hospitalised, recovers gradually, becomes romantically involved with a fellow Trinidadian, Michael Singh, they return to Trinidad to attend her father’s burial and she has a mixed reengagement with her immediate family. She terminates the romance, finds another profession as a psychologist and at the end of the novel begins a connection with the other main character, Tina. Tina, in turn, is taken in by a grandmother as a young girl when her mother suddenly dies in a road accident. She experiences a Trinidadian form of Oliver Twist upbringing with her grandmother in a Port-of-Spain suburb and, after a range of encounters as she grows up, eventually sets off to find Bea her rediscovered family link who has returned to Boston.

2 Black Sand: New & Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press) by Eddie Baugh

Black Sand is indeed a collector’s item – the best of Baugh in one book. I do have one issue with it, however. In the selection process, Baugh and his editors left out “Lunchtime With Linda” – a beautiful poem that describes raven-haired Linda switching lanes on the Los Angeles freeway, juggling the steering wheel, an apple, a can of beer and puffing a joint for lunch “then back in the office with her earphones plugged in to what you thought was a Dictaphone in her desk drawer, but was really Dexter Gordon on his sax”. Despite this omission, however, Baugh manages to reach a wide cross-section who will read or listen to his poems.

3 Seduce (Peepal Tree Press) by Desiree Reynolds

In this remarkable debut novel, told in prose that is poetic, delicate, vulgar and slyly funny, Desiree Reynolds has powerful things to say about race, class and the struggle between men and women. In Seduce, Desiree Reynolds, very much like Dennis Scott in An Echo in the Bone, takes the reader back to their past to explain the present. Like Scott, too, Reynolds has chosen death and someone’s transitioning period when it is believed they have not fully passed on to the other side. In other words, the nine-night or vigil, as the present time in which the story unfolds, whilst going back into history, the “bone”, to tell the full story of the main character, who in fact, could even be interpreted as the reader.

4 Gloria (Bloomsbury USA) by Kerry Young

Gloria, was in the running for the prestigious 2014 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in April, and we at Bookends were ecstatic. (Robert Antoni’s As Flies to Whatless Boys eventually won.) We absolutely loved Pao, Young’s pitch-perfect, beguiling first novel published in 2011 about a Chinese man negotiating love and life in postcolonial Jamaica. So we were delighted to discover that the story of Gloria, whom we met in Pao, is now continued in this prequel, of sorts.

It’s Jamaica, 1938. Gloria Campbell is 16 years old when a single violent act alters the course of her life forever. Taking along her younger sister, she flees their hometown to forge a new life in Kingston. But in a capital city awash with change, a black woman is still treated as a second-class citizen. From a room in a boarding house and a job at a supply store, Gloria finds her way to a house of ill repute on the edge of the city, intrigued by the glamorous, financially independent women within. It is an unlikely place to meet the love of your life, but here she encounters Pao, a Chinatown racketeer and a loyal customer who will become something more.

5 If I’m Not Back by Wednesday by Geoffrey Haddad

If I’m Not Back by Wednesday is a coming-of-age tale (based on the real-life story) of five young Jamaican boys – Gordon Cooper, George Hussey, Roger Bates and Geoffrey Haddad – students of Jamaica College, in the late-1960s, who become lost in the Blue Mountains with its heavy and continuous rainfall, dense fog, giant wasps, extremely stubborn elephant grass, seemingly cutlass-resistant giant ferns.

This book has all the trappings of a high-school reading-list staple. Five boys hatch a plan to conquer the wild in the dramatic Blue Mountains. They discard the tested and proven track to blaze a trail of their own; to write their own stories and histories, so to speak.

6 Limbo: A Novel About Jamaica (Arcade Publishing) by Esther Figueroa

Figueroa, an award-winning independent filmmaker known for such films as Jamaica for Sale (2008/9), Massa God Fish Can Done (2009) and Cockpit Country is Our Home (2007), can be proud of her first published novel, Limbo. It takes a sharp, witty and insightful look at Jamaica’s environmental crisis within the frame of the devastating impact of the tourist industry on the island’s natural resources. The novel’s heroine, Flora, a Jamaican scientist, must make a difficult choice between saving her tiny environmental organisation and the country’s resources or risk losing her job and perhaps her life in the process of standing up for what she really believes. The novel is a humorous look at Flora’s struggle to achieve change while making peace with herself and her island.

7 As Flies to Whatless Boys (Akashic Books) by Robert Antoni

In 1845 London, an engineer, philosopher, philanthropist, and bold-faced charlatan, John Adolphus Etzler, has invented machines that he thinks will transform the division of labour and free all men. He forms a collective called the Tropical Emigration Society (TES), and recruits a variety of London citizens to take his machines and his misguided ideas to form a proto-socialist, utopian community in the British colony of Trinidad.

Among his recruits is a young boy (and the book’s narrator) named Willy, who falls head-over-heels for the enthralling and wise Marguerite Whitechurch. Coming from the gentry, Marguerite is a world away from Willy’s labouring class. As the voyage continues, and their love for one another strengthens, Willy and Marguerite prove themselves to be true socialists, their actions and adventures standing in stark contrast to Etzler’s disconnected theories.

This tragic historical novel, accented with West Indian cadence and captivating humour, provides an unforgettable glimpse into 19th-century Trinidad & Tobago.

8 Writing Down the Vision (Peepal Tree Press) by Kei Miller

Miller’s Writing Down the Vision, winner of the non-fiction section of the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, is a collection of essays that present a range of experiences – personal and public – which the writer uses to articulate his vision and his understanding of the realities of life in Jamaica and the Caribbean. The judges noted, “Miller is an original thinker, a writer who knows his own mind and is wary of orthodoxies. He is uncompromising and honest in his interrogation of issues and his experiences of the worlds he inhabits, cutting through the normalcy to reveal the realities of these worlds.”

9 The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet Press) by Kei Miller

Miller does double duty on this list with his latest collection of poetry, which won the prestigious (and lucrative) Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection. The Forward Prizes for Poetry are the most prestigious awards for poetry in the United Kingdom and the republic of Ireland. The book, Miller’s eighth, which was also shortlisted for last year’s International Dylan Thomas Prize for Literature, is structured around the dialogue between a map-maker trying to establish order where he finds there to be none in an unfamiliar land and a rasta interrogating his project. Judges were impressed with Miller’s ability to “defy expectations” and “set up oppositions only to undermine them” in the work.

10 Oracabessa (Carcanet Press) by Lorna Goodison

Goodison’s Oracabessa was the winner of the poetry prize for the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. It is a book of risky journeys, mappings, and re-mappings through Spain, Portugal, Canada, and her homeland of Jamaica, as the poet navigates place, history, and imagination. According to the judges, “In Oracabessa the distinctive voice of Lorna Goodison – an elegant, captivating fusion of international English and Jamaican Creole – presents segments of autobiography as a series of travels. Goodison’s persuasive art is a many-sided celebration of spiritual search.”

11 All Over Again (Blouse & Skirt Books) by A-dziko Simba Gegele

This book won the 2014 Burt Award for Caribbean Literature and has since been longlisted for the tony 2015 International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award. Written in Caribbean or Jamaican English, All Over Again is the Jamaican answer to American children-oriented books, like the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney, and is recommended for school children, primarily in the 12-14 year-old bracket (and, really, anyone young at heart). Not as heavy as Michael Anthony’s classic Green Days by the River, Simba Gegele’s All Over Again is nevertheless a frankly-told story of a boy who loves and fears his father, loves and resents his six-year-old sister and absolutely loves and adores his mother.

12 The Moon Has Its Secrets (Jamaica Media Productions Ltd) by Barbara Blake Hannah

Five women tell the story in Barbara Makeda Blake Hannah’s new historical novel The Moon Has Its Secrets. Kofia, a young African girl, is kidnapped and taken to Jamaica to become a slave. Inspired and strengthened by the life lessons her mother gave her each full moon, she passes down the secret information to her children, one of whom becomes a legendary Jamaican heroine. The novel follows Kofia and her generations from 16th-century Africa to 20th-century Jamaica.

13 Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean: Outstanding entries in the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Peekash Press)

Published by Peekash Press – an amalgamation of Peepal Tree Press out of the UK and Akashic Books in the US – and prefaced by literary titan Olive senior, Pepperpot is the end product of a partnership with these two publishers and the Commonwealth Writers, CaribLit and the NGC Bocas Lit Fest. Pepperpot, like the soup, is indeed a vigorous and delightful concoction, an anthology that includes a little bit a man-ooman-infidelity drama; disappearing young children in the tradition of Ol’ Higue, though she’s never mentioned, but instead conjured in the figure of a friendly, familiar woman stirring her fruit stews in the kitchen; a girl ghost who doesn’t realise she’s dead; a young woman finally admitting to herself that she is in love with another woman; a bewitching woman who enters a bar in church clothes on Good Friday; a working woman caring for a senile father who once shielded her and her mother from armed robbers; a man ‘dat just born fi bad’; and a family preparing to welcome the Messiah into the world when their virgin daughter announces that she’s carrying Him.

14 A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead) by Marlon James

Before this book became the runaway hit it has become in a few short months (it’s included in practically every Best Books of 2014 list) we here at Bookends had predicted that. It was our pick for fall and this is what we had to say about it:

James has proven himself to be a writer of prodigious talent with his previous works, John Crow’s Devil and The Book of Night Women, and we’re convinced this newest addition will cement him as one of the region’s best fiction writers.

The novel, at an epic 700-plus pages – how much do we love meaty books that we can be immersed in at this time of year! – is essentially a gripping and inventive telling, from multiple points of view, of Jamaica’s history, its politics and scary beauty, with the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley’s life at its core. It’s peopled with an impressive cast of characters that include assassins, drug dealers, journalists, and, yes, even ghosts, and attempts to put into perspective the time of political instability of the late-1970s, the crack wars that extended to the streets of New York in the 1980s, and finally, the radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s that emerged after the decades-long history of violence.

15 Glimpses of a Global Life (Hansib Publications) by Sir Shridath Ramphal

In this memoir, Ramphal tells the story of the Commonwealth’s role in ending the Unilateral Declaration of Independence of Southern Rhodesia by a minority white regime and bringing Zimbabwe to independence; of aiding the struggle against apartheid and securing its end, and the release of Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s freedom; of the obduracy of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher against sanctions and the heroic stand against her by other Commonwealth leaders – from Africa, India, the Caribbean, Canada and Australia. It’s also a remarkable account of the Caribbean’s ambivalence about integration. As an insider from the formation of the West Indies Federation; its collapse; the creation of CARIFTA and Caricom in the effort to pool the individual sovereignty of each country into a beneficial whole; and the seminal work of the West Indian Commission in charting the course for the region’s holistic development, Ramphal recounts the opportunities, the failures to act on them, and the triumphs when regional governments acted together.

16 Musical Youth (CaribbeanReads Publishing) by Joanne C Hillhouse

Teen readers in the Caribbean and the world will have one more book to read now that the award-winning Musical Youth by Antiguan and Barbudan author Joanne C Hillhouse has been released. The book, which placed second in the 2014 Burt Award for Caribbean Literature, follows one eventful summer in the life of a group of Antiguan teenagers. According to the book’s blurb, guitarist Zahara and Shaka, a musical genius, find love and face challenges as they take part in a musical that they must get right by the end of the summer. Readers will be drawn in by the book’s cast of interesting characters and will love the musical thread that runs through the story.

PAGE FOUR:

Bookends serial:

The Wife

9

Bahamas, 1992

The girl had been working at the Atlantis Resort Hotel since she’d graduated from high school. Her older sister worked there as a caricaturist for the guests, and she’d managed to pull some strings to secure a job for her. True, she was only a maid, but it was one of the top hotels in the world. Movie stars and all manner of dignitaries vacationed there all the time; it wasn’t unusual to rub elbows with the rich and famous whom she always read about in People magazine. Besides, the job paid well. You had only to see how many Jamaicans there were on staff. Jamaicans followed the money. But that was okay: Management liked employing them because they were hard workers, more diligent than Bahamians, who resented the Jamaicans for taking away their jobs. Surrounded by the familiar accents, the girl felt, for the first time since she’d arrived in the islands, that she belonged.

She’d been in the Bahamas already three years. This was her life. She had no great ambition to do or be anything else. Every morning, as she ferried across to Paradise Island, she would look out at the calm aquamarine water and think about how her life had changed. Although her surroundings reminded her of Jamaica, she remembered every day that she was no longer in Jamaica. If she’d stayed there, would she have gotten involved in the hospitality/tourist industry? She didn’t think so. Her parents would have wanted more for her. Sometimes she missed her parents. But she didn’t allow depression to keep her spirit down. She was now 19 years old; she’d become a woman. She was looking forward to having a family of her own some day: a nice husband and a couple of children.

In the meantime, she was enjoying herself. She had many boyfriends. Well, not boyfriends, exactly. She slept with many guys. That was great. She’d never have guessed that she’d have wound up with the sex life she had. It was enviable. Her sister envied her, she was sure. She didn’t even have a man. But then, Maxine was old and dried up. Already, she was near 30.

Yes, the girl thought. Thank God for youth, thank God for my body.

Each morning, as she prepared for work, she would stand damp from her shower, looking at herself in the dresser mirror of the dark little room she occupied in her sister’s rented house. The house was small: two bedrooms, which were occupied by her sister and her sister’s roommate; the room she slept in was originally intended to be a storage room, in the back, just off the kitchen, but she made do with it. She’d cock her head, squinting at her naked body in that dark room whose light switch always had to be flipped on once anyone was in there. She would stand admiring her naked body, her legs slightly apart, rubbing her fingers down her dark, curling pubic hairs and then fondling her breasts before slipping into her bra and panties. She’d lost the baby fat she still sported on her arrival, three years before. Now she was curvy in all the right places. Her breasts were full and round, and her waist had gotten small. But her hips were big; she had the perfect Caribbean woman body.

And the men all just loved her. Seldom did a week pass without her sleeping with someone different. She was now dealing with a different class of males. These were men, not the boys from her high school days. And working at the hotel made it easy to meet them. Tourists didn’t care. Especially American tourists. While they were on vacation, they wanted to forget who they normally were and assume different personas. So sleeping with the young black maid that cleaned their rooms was no big thing. Sometimes, the men even got their wives or girlfriends to play along. No harm, no foul.

And, for the girl, it was all so exciting. Reciprocating was pure fun. She didn’t even accept the money they would sometimes offer. In fact, she was offended whenever a misguided guest showed poor judgement in that regard. Once, a TV soap star she admired had invited her to his room. When she got there, expecting to at first be offered wine, she’d instead been given documents to be signed and a hefty cheque guaranteeing her silence. She’d slapped the pampered star in his face and had run blindly from the room.

But, by and large, her experiences had been good. She’d been mostly careful; she’d gotten pregnant only once. And her sister, as far as she knew, was still in the dark about how she was living.

The only problem she was facing now was her supervisor, a Bahamian woman who’d recently begun to harass her. “Hey, Miller,” she accosted her one day. “I’m hearing reports you’re engaging in certain activities with the guests.”

“What kind of activities?” the girl asked. She was standing in front of her locker in the changing room, preparing to go off duty.

The supervisor, a woman with a hard face and equally hard manner, sneered. “Activities this hotel doesn’t approve of. Sex activities, that’s what kind of activities.”

She was standing near the girl now. The girl, whose back was turned to her, could still smell the cheese from an omelette she’d seen her eating, earlier, on the woman’s breath. She turned around. She was wearing only a brassiere on top.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The supervisor came even closer. The girl was suddenly aware of the buzz of the fluorescent light overhead. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the supervisor mimicked, so close now the girl felt her hot, cheesy breath against her face.

Then the supervisor reached forward to caress one of the girl’s breasts. “Oh, yes, you do,” she said, thumbing a nipple. “Everybody does.”

The girl’s breath caught. The message the supervisor was sending was clear. She didn’t want to lose her job. But, clearly, she’d have to play the game with this woman. It wasn’t that she had a problem being with a woman: she’d been with other women before. It was simply that she didn’t want to be forced to be with one she wasn’t attracted to.

But, even as she stood there and allowed the woman to slide her fingers under her brassiere and find the full ripeness of her breast, she knew she what her decision would be.

TO BE CONTINUED