Ancestors
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 "intercovery") 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.
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Arrival of the Snake-Woman
The Toronto author Olive Senior's Jamaican birthplace provides the setting for these powerfully engaging stories that span a period of roughly 150 years, from the closing days of slavery in 1838 to the 1980s. The tensions wrought by rapid change and conflicting loyalties are at the heart of these stories, most beautifully evoked in the novella "Arrival of the Snake-Woman". Here a young boy narrates the seminal event of his childhood in the late nineteenth century: the coming of a lonely Indian indentured woman into a mountain village. Senior's stories are leavened with wit and humour and the intricate play with language; her characters emerge as triumphant examples of the human spirit unravelling the complex weave of race, class, and cultural and ethnic identity.
First Canadian Edition
"Arrival of the Snake-Woman contains some of Olive Senior's masterpieces. A new edition is a caus for celebration." - H Nigel Thomas, from the Afterword
"Arrival of the Snake-Woman has consilidated (Olive Senior's) reputation as one of the most accomplished writers of short fiction and as one of the Caribbeans finest creative minds." - Caribbean Week
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At the Full and Change of the Moon
Written with lyrical fire in a chorus of vividly rendered voices, Dionne Brand's second novel is an epic of the African diaspora across the globe. It begins in 1824 on Trinidad, where Marie-Ursule, queen of a secret slave society called the Sans Peur Regiment, plots a mass suicide. The end of the Sans Peur is also the beginning of a new world, for Marie-Ursule cannot kill her young daughter, Bola -- who escapes to live free and bear a dynasty of descendants who spill out across the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Haunted by a legacy of passion and oppression, the children of Bola pass through two world wars and into the confusion, estrangement, and violence of the late twentieth century. [Brand has] a lush and exuberant style that may put some readers in mind of Toni Morrison or Edwidge Danticat. -- William Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review; A delicately structured, beautifully written novel infused with rare emotional clarity. -- Julie Wheelwright, The Independent (London); Rich, elegiac, almost biblical in its rhythms . . . One of the essential works of our times. -- The Globe & Mail (Toronto)
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Brown Girl in the Ring
The rich and privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways-farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, and the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother.
She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends.
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Butterfly in the Wind
From early in her life, Kamla is surprised by a contrary inner voice which frequently gainsays the wisdom of her elders and betters. But Kamla is growing up in a traditional Hindu community and attending schools in colonial Trinidad where rote learning is still the order of the day. She learns that this voice creates nothing but trouble and silences it. In this book, the voice is freed.
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Collected Poems
Victor D. Questel established himself as one of the finest new Caribbean poets in the 1970s with three collections, all published in his native Trinidad: Score (1972) published jointly with his friend Anson Gonzalez, Near Mourning Ground (1979) and his posthumous Hard Stares (1982). Sadly, Victor Questel died too young at 33 in 1982 and who knows how his writing would have further developed. What is evident is that his poetry developed rapidly in the ten years between first and last publications, and that he left many fine poems that continue to speak to the present."
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Dreaming in Cuban
"Remarkable...An intricate weaving of dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic...Evocative and lush...A rich and haunting narrative, an excellent new voice in contemporary fiction."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Now available in a Spanish language edition from Ballantine Books.
Here is the dreamy and bittersweet story of a family divided by politics and geography by the Cuban revolution. It is the family story of Celia del Pino, and her husband, daughter and grandchildren, from the mid-1930s to 1980. Celia's story mirrors the magical realism of Cuba itself, a country of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. DREAMING IN CUBAN presents a unique vision and a haunting lamentation for a past that might have been.
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Higher Ground
In Africa, a man recounts his days within the grinding machinery of the slave trade. Though spared manacles and a hellish ocean crossing by assisting in the degrading business, he is forced finally to confront an inescapable, vicious paradox - in the eyes of both his masters and his own people, he is a pariah. In America, Rudi Williams serves life imprisonment in a Southern jail, brutalised by his guards and isolated from his fellow inmates. Through his letters he writes home to explain himself, and to educate his family in the radical politics of the emerging Black Movement, we come to know a young man whose refusal to bow to the system not only upholds the remnants of his dignity but also seals his fate. In Europe, where the wounds of war are still open, a woman finds that she cannot, after all, to escape the ghetto. For in England, as formerly in Poland, the world outside is hostile, while inside, in her heart, her life is one of stifling fear and dreadful seclusion.
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Lizards Under the Roof: A Novel
This story takes place on an island with the familiar characters, issues and sights of Caribbean life. At the centre of this world are the Weavers, a mixed-race, middle-class family, and the Mayers family, whose ancestors, the Pindars, tried to uphold tradition, only to discover that love transcends even tradition. Eve, the Weavers' house help who is from a nearby village, is a calm witness to the dramas which are unfolding between these two families drawn together by a series of strange circumstances. With the help of Alexander and Ranee, pioneers of their religious faith, everyone pulls through the difficulties they face as a result, and manages to resolve many issues, maintain family ties, preserve friendships, forge new friendships and grow spiritually into stronger, better human beings. They remind us of some of the mistakes that we have made in our lives as a result of making uninformed or wrong choices. We cannot help but read between the lines that to err is human, and to forgive, divine. 'Lizards Under the Roof' is a novel stating and proving that people from different cultures, races, religions, nationalities and social standing can live together in harmony, once the spiritual impulse brings the understanding that we have more in common than what divides us. The greatest gift of God, our soul, bestowed at conception, is what all of us share and this makes us equal. The innumerable prejudices dividing us are all man-made. God desires only that we live in unity and peace, showing forth love to all of His creation. This story involves individuals and families living and interacting on an island in the Caribbean, bringing out the changes in the way of life under the impact of history, roughly spanning a period from just before World War One to the early Nineties.
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Lucy
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.
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Midnight Robber
It's Carnival time and the Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance, and pageantry. Masked "Midnight Robbers" waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. To young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favorite costume to wear at the festival-until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgiveable crime.
Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half-Way Tree. Here monstrous creatures from folklore are real, and the humans are violent outcasts in the wilds. Tan-Tan must reach into the heart of myth and become the Robber Queen herself. For only the Robber Queen's legendary powers can save her life . . . and set her free.
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More
From Austin Clarke, the critically acclaimed author of The Polished Hoe--winner of the Giller Prize--comes More, a powerful new novel of survival in a cold and alienating world. Certain to become a classic in contemporary world literature, More carries readers into the lonely life of an immigrant domestic--abandoned years before by a faithless husband, her life devastated by her son's involvement in gang culture and crime--and her remarkable journey from tragedy back to the light. An unforgettable portrait of the black immigrant experience, it is a novel to be read and remembered.
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Nothing's Mat
Nothing's Mat is told by a black British teenager - "every black girl" - for she has no name until the very last chapters when she is teasingly called "Princess" by her husband. Somewhere in the 1950s London-based Princess is allowed to complete her sixth-form final exams by writing a long paper on the West Indian family instead of sitting an exam. She thinks this a godsend and that all she has to do is to interview her parents. Her father tries to help her with his side but they both find that their kin will not fit into the standard anthropological template. Her father thinks it a good time for her to go to Jamaica and meet her grandparents, who can better help her with her study.
In Jamaica, much as her middle-class black Jamaican grandparents and her parents in England might not have liked it, Princess meets and spends time with her obscure cousin Nothing, called Conut. Conut introduces Princess to a plant that obeys certain divine principles and is available to humans to make artefacts for their comfort. Accordingly, they begin to make a mat and as they twist straw and bend it into intricate shapes, Conut tells her the family history so that their creation becomes for her a mat of anthropological template. The resulting shape presented to her teacher earns her an A and the comment that she has managed to project the West Indian family as a fractal rather than fractured as the published literature sees it.
Her studies and subsequent academic career take her to London University and then back to Jamaica, but under-stimulated by the academy, she chooses to continue the family study from high school and to do so by crafting the information into the mat, which becomes for her a shield against spiritual and physical evil. Making the mat of ancestors takes her into myriad histories of young Englishmen in Jamaica, of Jamaican women in Panama, and of African Americans in Virginia, among others.
This work is at once a fictional family history and a comment on anthropological methodology and African systems of thought.
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Sugar Cane
Sugar cane- A novel of the Eternal Triangle - this time with a rastafari cast in the role of a gentle understanding lover, the woman who found identity in his arms and the school master from whom she fled because he increasingly abused her sexually. Sugar Cane - is the alias of an aspiring song writer and through his attempts to break into the world of entertainment we are given the behind the scenes activities of small time producers. About the Author Alex Morgan was born in Tivoli Gardens, Jamaica, on December 24, 1970. He attended Dintill Technical High School and later obtained his law degree from the University of London. Mr. Morgan presently lives in Portmore where he is at work on his next novel.
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Summer Lightning
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.
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The Fiction of Robert Antoni
The Fiction of Robert Antoni: Writing in the Estuary is the first full-length study of the work of this important Trinidadian/ Bahamian Caribbean writer. When his first novel, Divina Trace, appeared in 1992, one critic compared it to a collaboration between James Joyce and Gabriel García Márquez. But Antoni's fiction is startlingly original. Each of his subsequent books is quite different from the one before, but all have their common origin in generations of experience in the West Indies, much of which was passed down to Antoni through a rich family tradition of storytelling. The novels are marked as well by Antoni's almost unique ability to navigate both the headwaters and tributaries of Caribbean folk tale and the limitless oceans of modernist and postmodernist texts. Taken together, Antoni's work postulates and embodies a Caribbean sensibility that is estuarial: almost every paragraph displays the multiple tributaries that form Caribbean culture, as well as the impulse to mix, mingle and reach out to the wider world, like a river flowing into the sea.
Patteson places Antoni's work in the multiple contexts of Caribbean storytelling, twentieth-century literature and contemporary Caribbean fiction, then explores each of his innovative and complex texts. In these diverse narratives Patteson finds reflections on the nature of human consciousness and its relationship to language, culture and storytelling itself, as well as sharp insight into the region and its tormented history. This book confirms Antoni's relevance to the literature of the Caribbean and the world.
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The Lonely Londoners
The Lonely Londoners from the brilliant, sharp, witty pen of Sam Selvon, this is a classic award-winning novel of immigrant life in London in the 1950s.
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The Nine Lives of Livingstone Crandon
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The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V.S. Naipaul's Fiction
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The Wine of Astonishment
Bolo is a champion stickfighter, tall, good-looking, the bravest of all the young men in Bonasse. When, time and time again, he sees his people humiliated by change and American troops, his instincts as a leader come to the fore. The stand he makes, however, takes bizarre and tragic forms.
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Understanding Popular Culture
What is popular culture? How does it differ from mass culture? What do popular texts reveal about class, race, and gender dynamics in a society? This book takes a new approach to the study of such cultural artifacts as jeans, tabloid newspapers and TV game shows. Fiske differentiates between mass culture - the cultural products put out by an industrialized, capitalist society, and popular culture - the ways in which people use, abuse, and subvert these products to create their own meanings and message. Companion volume to Reading the Popular, this book presents a radically different theory of what it means for culture to be popular: that is, literally, of the people.
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Water With Berries
Teeton lives three lives in Englandone with a bohemian group of artist exiles, another is his curiously intimate relationship with his landlady, and finally as a secret revolutionary from the Caribbean island of San Cristobal. Thus far, Teeton has kept each aspect of his life separate from one another, but when he returns home and joins an incipient revolt, his once separate worlds begin to fuse together with disastrous results. This novel is a powerful study of the impossibility of disentangling British and Caribbean lives, the nature of misogyny, and the conflict between the calls of art and revolution.
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