Tag: Caribbean lit

The. lights on the hill Gareth St Omer

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The Lights on the Hill by Gareth St Omer

St lucian fiction

Source – Personal copy

I have longed to read more fiction from the Caribbean, as the books I have read over the years have always been unusual, and for me it is one of the few areas of the world where I hear very little discussion about fiction. I saw this in a charity shop, not knowing there was also a series of Caribbean writers from Heinemann, like their African writers series. I see on Goodreads that there were 35 books in this series. I have a couple in other editions, but if you have read any of them, I’d love to know which and how you found them, please. Gareth St Omer was part of a group of writers that emerged in the 60s from St Lucia, with Derek Walcott being the best known of them. Gareth Stomer taught in the us most of his career, and a lot of his novels have been republished by Peepal Tree Press (They are doing a great job bringing writers like this back in print )

“What are you thinking of?” Thea asked him.

“Nothing,” he answered.

“I knew it. One would think I should have learnt by now. Yet every time I ask the same question.”

“And every time I give the same answer?”

“Yes, every time. How many times have I asked that question in two years I wonder?”

He did not answer.

“Do you think you could tell me?”

“How should I know?”

“Of course. You wouldn’t. You don’t even hear me sometimes.”

“Now. You mustn’t exaggerate.”

“You must keep your secrets very well.”

“I have no secrets.”

His back was on the ground and his hands were under his head. The stars moved quickly, in formation, against the sky. He looked again and the illusion was gone. It was the clouds that moved briskly under the stars fixed above them. Below the clouds, in the distance, far away, clusters of dancing lights clung to the mountain top.

Tonight, because of the moon, they were less bright.

“Of course you have secrets. Everyone has secrets.”

The opening lines and yes Stephenson has a few secrets

The lights on the hill was originally part of a longer novel by Gareth St Omer, buit was brought out as a Standalone novella. The book follows a man named Stephenson, in his thirties, who is slowly struggling to reach the light on the hill of his life. He has had many failures in his life, both at work and in his personal life, and this book seems to show him experiencing an existential crisis. But the book also shows how the colonial past of the country he lives in shapes it, and how the church exerts its influence on a small island that is maybe known as very inward-looking and can trap a man like Stephenson.he is trying as he is now an adult student at university and has a girldfriend but will he escape his past of family he didn’t know and make a sucsess of himself. As we foolow a man trying to make good but caught up in his past and present holding back his future

“Those youngsters,” he used to say to Stephenson speaking of the four young men, fresh from school, who had come with Stephenson to teach on the island.

Stephenson, too, had found their antics trying most of the time. He would have been very much alone if Ronald had not befriended him. Ronald took him to his home. That first year Laura had not yet gone back to their own island. While Ronald and Stephenson drank Gordon’s Gin with orange, Laura sat and sewed or knitted, talking only infrequently. Mantovani was playing the Classics on a record. Laura was part white and part South American Indian. She was very beautiful and her speech was not always grammatically correct.

And it was through Ronald that he had met Rosa.

we learn more about what has happen to him over time

When this book came out, it was called one of the most daring and accomplished works of fiction by a writer who ranks among the best of the 20th century. This is what i love about my reading life is discoveries like this lost writers that were fifty years ago considered cutting edge and some how like I say Caribbean fiction seems out of fashion maybe but not sure why we are always seing existentalist fiction from the like of Kafka, Statre Etc on reels and instagram pictures because lets face it its easy to pick up what every one else like but for me this ranks up with those books as a piece of existenalist fiction but also it is a piece of post colnional fiction that world he is trapped in is because of the colonial past. Have you heard of or read St Omer, or any other writer from St lucia?

The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart

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The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart

Guadelope fiction

Original title – Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle

Translator – Barbara Bray

Source – Personal copy

I had a search for books to read this month, and I picked this because I had read it before but hadn’t reviewed it, so I quickly reread it. I love the Caribbean literature as it is a rich mix of styles of writing and often focuses on families or villages like this book does. Simone Schwarz and her husband had always highlighted political issues, especially around black females. They wrote a six-volume encyclopedia of black heroines that had been missed from history. I loved this. I doubt we will ever see that book, but it reminds me of the recent exhibition I went to in Cambridge, which highlights the experiences of black slaves and leaders in the abolition movement. Rise up. It was a deeply touching exhibition.

It was the first time I’d been away from home, but I wasn’t at all upset. On the contrary, I felt a kind of excite-ment, going along the white chalky road bordered with filaos with a grandmother whose earthly existence I’d thought was over. We walked in silence, slowly, my grandmother so as to save her breath and I so as not to break the spell. Toward the middle of the day we left the little white road to its struggle against the sun, and turned off into a beaten track all red and cracked with drought. Then we came to a floating bridge over a strange river where huge locust trees grew along the banks, plunging everything into an eternal blue semidarkness.

My grandmother, bending over her small charge, breathed contentment: “Keep it up, my little poppet, we’re at the Bridge of Beyond.” And taking me by one hand and holding on with the other to the rusty cable, she led me slowly across that deathtrap of disintegrating planks with the river boiling below. And suddenly we were on the other bank, Beyond: the landscape of Fond-Zombi unfolded before my eyes, a fantastic plain with bluff after bluff, field after field stretching into the distance, up to the gash in the sky that was the mountain itself, Balata Bel Bois.

Little houses could be seen scattered about, either huddled

I picked this long qutoes as it captures the village

The book is narrated by the Elderly Telumée Lougandor as she recounts her life in Guadeloupe with her grandmother, Toussine, who raised her after she had been abandoned by her parents. Through her two marriages, first to Elie, where she experienced marital violence at his hands, and he is a volatile person, once they are married. It is only years later that she meets Ambroise, a man who is the complete opposite of her first husband, the sort of perfect man. Her life is a mix of everything from just getting by, to loss, to love, to being part of a community of strong women with the distant scars of slavery still running deep in the community. Add to this the village set in the remote mountains of the island and the island itself, with its lush nature and flora, which is almost a character in itself. A book complete with oral tradition in the way the story unfolds, and a slight touch of magical realism, A tale of a strong woman getting by in a harsh world over many generations.

I thought of lying there on the pebbles for Elie to stretch out at full length over me, but instead of that, lost Negress that I was, I took to my heels and ran away by the river while he called after me: “But what did I say? What did I say?” But I kept running, and his voice got fainter and fainter, and soon all I could hear was the breeze among the cassias beside the path, and, somewhere, people laugh-ing, people singing. I was back in Fond-Zombi.

In her first violent marriage to Elie

I loved this book. It is a rich telling of one woman’s life, spanning many generations of her family, from those who were enslaved during the slave days, the first to experience freedom, to the post-colonial years. As I said, the village of Fond-Zombi is in a backwater of the island, so is a place where time itself moves much more slowly, as the island moves forwar,d it seeps gradually into the village a place where just beyond is the mountains the flora and faun and as I said the town itself is almost a character in itself. Nearly touches of magical realism here and there, this is practically a female version of 100 Years of Solitude, both deal with post-colonial worlds and with multi-generational tales. I loved the style of this book as we follow Telumée from childhood into her adulthood to the present. Do you have a favourite book from the Caribbean?

 

Heartland by Wilson Harris

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Heartland by WIlson Harris

Guyanese fiction

Source – personal copy

I have been listening to the 99 novels section of the Anthony Burgess podcast which covers the 99 books that Burgess had chosen as his favourite post world war 2 novels, and this is one of the books he had picked for that list from the Guyanese writer Sir Wilson Harris a writer that really should be better known as he is one of the most modern and experimental writers to have come out of the Caribbean 9 I do question is it Caribbean or actually a Latin American country maybe as it is the only English speaking country in Latin America. Anyway, Wilson Haris trained as a surveyed and had spent much time in the Heartland of Guyana, which comprises dense jungles and massive wide rivers. This scenery is at the heart of this book. Harris wrote many books about his homeland, and some of the characters in this book appeared in his other books.

Stevenson’s speculative frontiers collapsed with a rude shout from Kaiser and he turned abruptly. The man was here at last. Stevenson could never stop being curious every time he saw Kaiser, as if he wanted to confirm that this must be the strangest, most haunting or haunted creation of all things and beings he visualized. It was not merely the blackness of Kaiser’s skin, within whose flesh appeared incandescent eyes lit as from the density of coal.
It was the ghostly ash of the garments he wore; a breath of wind would surely have dispersed them, the most attenuated vest and shorts Stevenson had ever seen, pluckedin the nick of time, he was inclineds to swear, from some ancient fire.

One of the characters that seem ghost leike at times

We meet a prominent figure from Guyana’s life Zechariah Stevenson who is in disgrace as he is accused of defrauding people. But this son of a wealthy family as ever with people of money has been sent here into the Heartland of Guyana where the vast jungle and to watch over there, his family gets the money from the timber the forest in the jungle. The people he meets in the dense jungle just appear. Like Kasier, a shopkeeper and then Da Silva, he is a pork knocker, as they call gold prospectors here.  We often wonder if are they real, especially when he comes across the dead Da Silva, a long-dead body. This is a place where the present, future and past all seem to drift, and a man is thrown into this untamed world as his grip on the world around him starts to slip as he is caught in the fever dreams of the jungle and the vast rivers of Guyana as they drift through time.

Stevenson scrambled out of the river and grabbed his towel, holding it against his body as if he felt alien eyes upon his nakedness. The head of the morning sun had risen above a fist of trees across the river. And the events of yesterday seemed almost indistinguishable from a watchful dream in the past night. Nevertheless, they possessed enduring substance for him since on his return to the clearing on the river bank at Upper Kamaria – after recovering Kaiser’s line – he had opened the depot and counted three or four boxes labelled DaSilva. Kaiser had not been indulging in an idle trick or fanciful token after all.

Later on as he drifts between the resal and unreal at times

This is a hard book to describe plot-wise as it is more about place and atmosphere, that feeling of being caught in the dense unrelenting jungle and how it can affect from Heart of Darkness onwards we have seen the madness of being alone in the jungle can bring on someone. Even Stevenson’s name is a nod towards the great Robert Louis Stephenson, another man tainted and, in the end, died in a jungle environment. This is a land Harris knew well. He had worked in the Heartlands to look at the viability of taming the rivers to make Hydroelectricity of them `(my Dad has worked at these hydro plants from around Niagara, where the US side uses some machines still from the 50s ). For me, this book has more connections to the Latin American cannon with its use of magical realism (well, MAGIC HORROR REALISM ) , fever dreams, ghosts and also the use of the jungle as almost another character to the book reminds me of the great number of books I have read in recent years from Latin American writers like Samanta Schweblin or Mariana Enriquez. I wonder what Harris’s standing is like in Latin America ? is it just the influence of place, or is he well-known there? Have you Read Harris?

Winston’s score – A – one of the greatest writers can’t believe I’ve just discovered him will be reading him again !

The Emigrants by George Lamming

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The Emigrants by George Lamming

Bajan Fiction

Source – Personal copy

When I looked at the list of books for this roll of the club which is 1954 (Well I’m lat I reviewed three last week but I still had two to et finished and review and this is the first of those two)I really wanted to try and read books from my shelves as I have a habit of just going and ordering from the list when it comes out then forget the books and miss reading them so I decided collect what I had which was a fair few about 8 books and this was one of them and I had long wanted to review a few books from the wind rush writers whom George Lamming was part of in fact he may have been the first writer from the Caribbean to have put across that experience of coming to Post war Uk and how art felt . This book follows a group of men from all over the Caribbean on a boart to the Uk.Lamming initially taught English in Trinidad then he head to teach at a boarding school in England , he was also a broadcast on the show Caribbean voices a show that gave window to those first wave of writers like Lamming himself , his good friend Sam Selvon and Derek Walcott. This was his second book and focus much more on the experience of the emigrant.

The voices warmed to a rich peal of laughter and the Barbadian found no support for his correction. He raised himself and started with a feigned indignation down towards the Grenadian who on no occasion seemed willing to offend. The others laughed, enriching their banter about the small islanders. An altercation followed between the Barbadian and the Grenadian in which enumerate3d the virtues of his own island. The men hoisted themselves from the bunks and watched the adversaries who were not inclined to make any concessions

The boat can be weighted at time as people from the different islands clash

The book tries to capture a group of Emigrants as they travel on a boat from the Caribbean to the Uk this is the same journey the writer took himself in fact he was on the same boat as sam elevon when they came to the Uk there is Collis a writer how tries to see what is happening in proportion eight up what awaits them. Then we meet Dickson he is a teacher but he is a nervous character and sees the fear ahead of him and what may go wrong he is a real glass half empty type of person.Higgins a man with his dreams is happy to be going after see his paths blocked . As we see them head the narritve moves and gives the various feel of these and other character then we see what happens when they finally get there when the real England hits the version of England they all have had in the minds. As we see Higgins start to suffer as that intial optimism falls away. Then Dickson worst fears happen. We see what happened to many as they tried to settle in these large cities and a world that is so much different to there own.

When the strange man returned to the dec k it was highs who saw him first. He stood alone looking across the sea wondering what he should do next. He had found no real contact with the sailor, and he thought out certain way of approaching the West Indians. He scratched the back of his head, trying not to look in their direction.Higgins kept his head down thinking. He seemed to feel the strange man bewilderment, and his sympathy became more urgent. The men watched Higgins and wonder what was happening.The strange man couldn’t bear to be alone much longer. As the ship grew nearer the next stop which was England, the need for company became greater.

The boat draws closer the tense is there you can cut the air as they say.

This is a book that has a myriad of voice in it what he has tried to do is capture the Caribbean experience from every angle I this character but a lot of it is that list dream that feeling of how different the dream of Britain that they had is brought crashing to the ground when they step off that book he was a fan of Jouyce it seems and in part you c an see that here, Anthony Burgess was a huge fan of Lamming called him one of the best we have. This is a insight into a journey and experience that many people from the Caribbean took including the writer himself it is about the wanting of a better life the chance being able to Emigrate can bring but it also captures the woes and worries of this experience as well. it had a style I enjoyed it was jarring at times but I felt it worked as we jump in and out of these characters near the end we focus more on a few of the characters. It shows how hard it can be to leave behind all you know this should be a wider read book in fact all the wind rush books as they give a sense of perspective on the experience which although 70 years ago is still happening now with people want a better life !. Have you a favourite book from the Windrush generation of writers ?

Winstons score – A voices of the past caught in time of the wind rush experience

The roar of morning by Tip Marugg

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The Roar of Morning by Tip Marugg

Curaçao fiction

Original title – De morgen loeit weer aan

Translator – Paul Vincent

Source – Personal copy

I move to the Caribean tonight and the most well-known writer from Curaçao Tip Marugg. The small island just off the coast of Latin America. Has a number of writers. I picked this up as it was part of the Margellos world republic of letters book collection. It is a collection I have reviewed books from a number of times and one that to say they pick books from around the world always seem to find gems. This was written later in the writer’s life he had written a number of novels he is described on the dutch Wikipedia page as different from his flamboyant friend fellow island writer Boeli Van Leeuwen as he was more melancholic, more focused on the individual. he has a touch of Latin American magic realism in this book.

A dearth of drink obliges me to go back inside to replenish my supply of Dutch courage, but soon I’m back in my old place under the neon strip, on the same lukewarm paving slab, flanked by my fresh provisions.

At moments like this, when there is not a breath of wind, the night speaks with a chorus of primeval voices; the vegetation in my garden pats, as if the densly planted bushes were gasping for breath; the indju tree moans; the tiny, nameless creatures that forage for food only when the it is pitch dark make rustling noises, far off, an exhausted goat wth its head caught in a fence utters a death rattle

A wonderfully evocative passage of being sst in the dark of night.

A man sits Scottish whiskey in one and Dutch beer in the other he is a low point of his life. In fact, the fact he has those drinks in each hand is stopping him using the pistol that is nearby. His only companion at this time is his dog. He has decided this is the night and morning to end it all in what he calls the roar of the morning, He has seen birds dive to the death in the cliffs. He spends this time reflecting on his past and what caught him there. He reflects on his sexual awakening. The time he spent on the mainland where he discovered books ass the clock ticks. Later he recalls an old man with a huge sexual appetite that used to get all the younger women around due to his position. The time draws towards the morning his mind drifts as the booze starts to affect his mind and he is one of those drinkers that see the dark dogs when in the pit of drink he imagines the world around him in a fire.

I Spent my tenth and most of my elevnenth year – probably the period in your life when you see and hear most new things – on the mainland with my Venezuelan uncle. The man was neither Venezuelan nor even my real uncle, But I  called him that because he lived on the mainland and was married to a Venezuelan woman. He  was an odd charact3er, but I guess he meant well. In early of the oil industry he had worked for She;;, but after spending some time among the oil tanks that mushroomed on the north side of the harbourhe felt a vocation to become a minister. He went to Europe to study and returned a few years later, not as a protestant minister but as an evangelist belonging to some obscure sect obsessed with showing mankind the error of its was and threatening hellfire and damnation

This one event left a mark deep in his life

There is a podcast called Nocturne that deals with the wee hours here it’s the early morning between 1.30 and 3.00 madrugada, as the Spanish call it those dark hours when the mind can wander and one is maybe at our lowest ebb is caught wonderfully here our main character is a man that is caught between his Calvinist upbringing and island life in his way. of life make him A man in torment on the verge of suicide is like Lowrys character Geoffrey in under the volcano a man caught up in the bottle. The sexual awakening at times reminded me of Marquez’s works in the description of sex. This is a brooding work of one mans life caught in those two hours as he drinks and thinks back. As he says there is nothing better than a glass of Scottish and one of Dutch is maybe the way he is caught between two places. Another gem from Margellos world republic and another new country for the blog.

 

Memory at bay by Évelyne Trouillot

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Memory at bay by Évelyne Trouillot

Haitian fiction

Original title – La mémoire aux abois

Translator – Paul Curtis Daw

Source – review copy

Mwen tap rainmin konnin, date and jou ‘map mouri … Yeah! Wyclef Jean misie Refugee, Muzion If you had 24 hours to live, and you knew you were going to die what would you do? [Wyclef:] Yo, if I had left it just 24 hours to live I would go see my mother to tell her she me well high, her son, she can be proud Let me addresses thief, murderer She not loose, for that, I ‘ will kiss A kiss on the forehead and then in the street I’m returned two hours and a half, I called Jerry Duplessis J’dit to come get me, m’deposer Among my Mam’selle in her dress is so niceShe said ‘Wyclef, will eat at TapTap.’ ‘I said j’pas can because tomorrow j’serai not! J’viens only thank you from the bottom of heart Because with everything I did you would spend the m’quitter you, go elsewhere You’re a beautiful woman, no need to cry when I’m gonna go, you can t’remarier Mwen tap rainmin konnin, date and jou ‘map mouri … [Chorus:] And if you had 24 hours to live Would you sing? Would you dance? Would you cry? Or said: oh no I wanna leave me or said oh no I wanna go away! Imposs!

This is a translation of 24 heures a Vivre ,24 hours to live from a ep wyclef Jean did for Haiti he ran for president himself in 2010 .I connect the line I would see my mother as this is what the daughter in this book can’t do.

 

I was contacted by Paul the translator of this book as he had seen on the blog, I had reviewed two other books from Haiti and would I like to review this one. Evelyne Trouillot is a member of a literary family, her uncle was a historian and her brother Lyonel is a well-known novelist and her other brother is a leading Creole scholar. This book won the Prix Carbet a prize award to new voices and books from the Caribbean.

I head home with the smell of the old woman’s wthered flesh on my fingers. The vision of her form sprawled limply on the bed like a nameless doll accompanies me through the streets of Paris, Why had they added that room to my list ?

“whatever you do, mademoiselle, don’t reveal he name no one should know who she is. Besides we have no official confirmation. I thought you were only a child when you left your country

She is given the woman to look after thinking she wouldn’t remember her own past having left as a child!!

Memory at bay is both the story of two woman one an elderly widow, the former wife of the dictator who ran Haiti for the middle part of the 20th century Papa Doc a name that rings of blood and death. She is lying in a hospital bed dying as she does reliving her life. She is being watched over by a young nurse who escaped from Haiti to France and became a nurse, but along the way she lost her own mother to the regime of the woman she is looking after. As the book unfolds, we see both woman’s story told as we see both sides of this brutal regime. As the brutal years of the Papa doc reign are seen from the wife of the leader and the everybody in the form of  a mother and daughter who have to live under the regime.The daughter escapes and becomes the nurse but before she loses her mother she meets the old woman and a young woman and wife of the leader.

On my return to France, while I struggled to recover from my fatigue, the disturbing dreams began their nightly visitations. Soon afterward, as if to give substance to the macabre atomsphere that surrounded me, I first enter that woman’s room and encountered a face that was so recognizable, despite the ravages inflicted by exile and old age. That face today epitomizes for me all the horrors od a regime that left its grim mark on my native country

She met her as a schoolgirl and even now knows the faces of the old lady even thou she is losing her mind.

This is a book about what is memory, What is history as we see two sides of the same time told. Can we forgive those who do us harm ? What happens when we have to care for those who may have been connected to those that do use harm this young woman has all this on her mind as she cares for the older dying woman at times she wants to kill her. This is a powerful look at Haiti’s past, I remember the downfall of his sons regime baby doc when I was younger and the telling at that time of the brutal nature of his fathers regime. Evelyne has strung together two main characters and narraf=tives that bring both the overview of what happened but also the inner workings of day to day life.