-Caribbean Literature

Annie John is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. A classic coming-of-age story in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kincaid's novel focuses on a universal, tragic, and often comic theme: the loss of childhood. Annie's voice―urgent, demanding to be heard―is one that will not soon be forgotten by readers.

An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence, who is the very center of the little girl's existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother's benign shadow. Looking back on her childhood, she reflects, "It was in such a paradise that I lived." When she turns twelve, however, Annie's life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her. She begins to question the cultural assumptions of her island world; at school she instinctively rebels against authority; and most frighteningly, her mother, seeing Annie as a "young lady," ceases to be the source of unconditional adoration and takes on the new and unfamiliar guise of adversary. At the end of her school years, Annie decides to leave Antigua and her family, but not without a measure of sorrow, especially for the mother she once knew and never ceases to mourn. "For I could not be sure," she reflects, "whether for the rest of my life I would be able to tell when it was really my mother and when it was really her shadow standing between me and the rest of the world."

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

This story is told by a black British teenager u aeevery black girlAE u for she has no name until the very last chapters when she is teasingly called aePrincessAE by her husband. Somewhere in the 1950s Princess, London-based, is allowed to complete her 6th form final exams by writing a long paper on the aeWest Indian familyAE instead of sitting an exam. She thinks this a aegod-sendAE 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. Her mother thinks the change would be good for her health for she is asthmatic and it is the time of the year when London fog makes her ill. In Jamaica, much as her grandparents, middle class black Jamaicans and her parents in England, might not have liked it, Princess meets and spends time with her obscure Cousin Nothing, called Conut. She introduces her to the flora of Jamaica and in particular, to one plant which obeys certain divine principles and which is available to humans to make artifacts 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 aeAAE 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. aeEvery girlAE gets a scholarship to a London University but asks to be allowed to take it up in Jamaica. Here she completes graduate work and gets an assistant lectureship but more, she inherits an old house from Conut, from which she commutes to the university in Kingston. Under-stimulated by the academy, she chooses to continue the family study which she had done as her end of high school project and to do so by crafting the information into the mat, which mat becomes for her a shield against spiritual and physical evil. Making the mat of ancestors takes her into the history of young English men kidnapped and transported to Jamaica for illicit sexual activity, of Jamaican women launderers in Panama, of a African Jamaican/African American marriage in Panama which produces children brought up in Virginia USA, and who become aethe first Negroes toaAE; of two females who escape Governor EyreAEs violence in Morant Bay and re-settle in a aefree villageAE in St Ann. This work is not only a fictional family history but is also a comment on anthropological methodology, and African systems of thought.

Carnival takes on social and political importance in this recognized classic. The people of the shantytown Calvary Hill, usually invisible to the rest of society, join the throng and flaunt their neighborhood personas in masquerade during Carnival. Aldrick, the dashing "king of the Hill," becomes a glorious, dancing dragon; his lovely Sylvia, a princess; Fisheye, rebel idealist, a fierce steel band contestant; and Philo, Calypso songwriter, a star. Then a business sponsors Fisheye's band, Philo gets a hit song, and Sylvia leaves the Hill with a prosperous older man. For Aldrick, it will take one more masquerade this time, involving guns and hostages before the illusion of power becomes reality."

Here is Sandra Cisnero's greatly admired and best-selling novel of a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. Acclaimed by critics, beloved by children and their parents and grandparents, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, "The House on Mango Street" has entered the canon of coming-of-age classics even as it depicts a new American landscape. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous, "The House on Mango Street" tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong - not to her run-down neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza's story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for herself what she will become. "The San Francisco Chronicle" has called "The House on Mango Street" "marvelous... spare yet luminous. The subtle power of Cisnero's storytelling is evident. She communicates all the rapture and rage of growing up in a modern world." It is an extraordinary achievement that will live on for years to come.