Not That Caribbean: New Writing from the Antilles

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a senior lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the University of the West Indies–St. Augustine. Her publications include Border Crossings: A Trilingual Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers, co-edited with Nicole Roberts; Echoes of the Haitian Revolution 1804–2004; and Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks (1804–2004), co-edited with Martin Munro. Loosely inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw’s new novel, Mrs. B (Peepal Tree Press Ltd.), focuses on the life of an upper-middle-class family in a contemporary Trinidad who have retreated to a gated community in response to the turbulence and violence surrounding them. Her daughter Ruthie’s easy ascent through school and university has been Mrs. B’s pride and joy for some time. But Ruthie has disgraced herself with a married man and a suicide attempt, and is, Mrs. B and her husband will soon discover, pregnant. Ruthie’s return and the state of her marriage provoke her to some unaccustomed self-reflection.

Nicholas Laughlin is the editor of the literary journal the Caribbean Review of Books and the culture and travel magazine Caribbean Beat. He is the program director of the Bocas Lit Fest, Trinidad and Tobago’s annual literary festival, and a co-director of Alice Yard, a nonprofit contemporary art space in Port of Spain. The Strange Years of My Life (Peepal Tree Press) is his latest collection of poetry. Despite the book’s title, these poems are rarely autobiographical and have few straightforward stories to tell. They puzzle over accidents, coincidences, and codes, as they describe journeys and wonders, edging towards a sense of the world’s curious strangeness, the complications of what we call history, the contretemps of geography. For these poems, every sentence is a kind of translation, and language is a series of riddles with no solutions, subtly humorous at one phrase, sinister at another, heartbroken at the next.

Sharon Leach is the author of the short story collection What You Can’t Tell Him, a featured columnist for the Jamaica Observer, and the coordinator and editor of that publication’s weekly literary arts supplement, Bookends. Her fiction has appeared in several journals, including AfroBeat Journal, Caribbean Writing Today, and Jamaica Journal. She was one of the first recipients of a scholarship to the Calabash Writers Workshop and, in 2011, she was awarded the Musgrave Bronze Medal from the council of the Institute of Jamaica. Love It When You Come, Hate It When You Go (Peepal Tree Press) occupies new territory in Caribbean writing: the characters of Leach’s stories are neither the folk of the old rural world, the sufferers of the urban ghetto familiar from reggae, nor the old prosperous brown and white middle class of the hills, but the black urban salariat of the unstable lands in between. These are people wondering who they are—Jamaicans, of course, but part of a global cultural world dominated by American material and celebrity culture. Bringing a cool, unsentimental eye to the follies, misjudgments, and self-deceptions of her characters, Leach never loses sight of their humanity or their individual natures.

Vladimir Lucien graduated with honors with a degree in literatures in English and theater arts from the University of the West Indies–Trinidad and is currently pursuing a master of philosophy in cultural studies at the University of the West Indies–St. Augustine. Lucien’s collection of poetry Sounding Ground (Peepal Tree Press) is winner of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. These poems contain stories of ancestors, immediate family, the history embedded in his language choices as a St Lucian writer, and heroes such as Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, Kamau Brathwaite, and a local steelbandsman. This is a collection that is alive with its conscious tensions both in subject matter and form. There’s a tension between the vision of ancestors, family, and of the poet himself as being engaged in the business of acting in the world and building on the past, and a sharp awareness of the inescapability of age’s frailty, the decay of memory and of death. In the music of the poems themselves, there’s an enlivening counterpoint between the natural rhythms of spoken Creole and the metric organization of the line and its patterns of sound.