Tag: Trinidad Guardian Sunday Arts Section

48. House of Ashes by Monique Roffey

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Twenty four years have elapsed since the July 1990 attempted coup by the Jamaat al Muslimeen. Those who recollect the events of those six days in Trinidad and Tobago’s history do so with collective unease, channeling repressed fury and a kind of malaise that’s difficult to translate into common speech. This is what Monique Roffey’s fourth novel, House of Ashes (Simon & Schuster, 2014) seeks to do: to transubstantiate 1990’s Red House horror into fiction that grimly vows never to forget.

Roffey, whose third novel, Archipelago, was the winner of the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, has in her new book a creative undertaking not dissimilar to a holy ritual, one replete with its own unfair allotment of both bodies and blood.

Narrative takes a three-pronged approach in House of Ashes. In addition to segments told in a mostly plot-propelling omniscient voice, the author employs two speakers to shoulder most of the novel’s heavily symbolic baggage. One of them, Ashes, is a mild-mannered, bespectacled scholar, a gentle academic who follows devoutly in the wake of the coup’s enigmatic Leader. Aspasia Garland, Minister for the Environment, is Roffey’s second principal mouthpiece. Garland is one of the government officials held hostage in the House of Power, by the Leader’s gun-toting lackeys (of whom Ashes is also a firearm-wielding, reluctant member.)

Through Ashes and Aspasia, the author works hard to show how terror may share a mutual cell of confinement, in the hearts of both terrorist and victim. Though he adheres to the faith-prescribed tenets of social justice that his Leader has invoked, in this storming of the island’s House of Power, Ashes struggles with doubt. It is Ashes, who, mid-skirmish during the storming of the House, perceives the absurd levy of so much violence. He describes the bloodied scene unfurling before him with a kind of disjointed helplessness:

“Men firing and men returning fire and a clatter of bullet-hail and it didn’t seem to matter who was shooting at who, just that a storm was going on and the revolution was still taking place.”

Aspasia’s accounts are the only ones conducted in the first-person narrative voice, and her fearful bouts of introspection summon a dreadful immediacy to the novel’s proceedings. Unable to rest easily during the prolonged occupation of the House of Power, Aspasia regards the malevolent forces surrounding her in sinister, allegorical terms. “The darkness activated my deepest fears,” she thinks:

“Would the looters be able to climb through the windows? Would jab jabs now show up in the dead of night? Would the gunmen shed their combat fatigues to reveal themselves as devils underneath?”

Ashes and Aspasia are citizens of Sans Amen, though this fictitious island, relocated to the northern end of the archipelagic chain, is easily and identifiably Trinidad, beneath the patina of a reissued title. Arguably, Roffey is letting herself off the hook here; there are a number of ways in which the novel might have benefitted from bravely claiming this story as Trinidad and Tobago’s, in every appellative act possible.

Still, the examination of Sans Amen’s political climate, and its history of quelled insurgencies, is intricately constructed, then distilled through the dissatisfaction of the island’s people. Sans Amenians are a caustic, confrontational lot, though not immune to their own passive occupations of cowardice, and fleeting moments of grace. The author paints both the principal and unnamed characters who reside here with thoughtfulness, using her considerable boon for human portraiture to render them as real people.

Is this the definitive coup novel that Trinidad and Tobago needs? No, perhaps it is not. House of Ashes is lit from within by an earnest fire, and the quality of Roffey’s vast intentions here is more convincing than the work she’s produced. This is emotionally-charged fictive reportage, a dizzyingly ambitious treatment that inevitably falls short, but has the assiduous and requisite strength to at least fall well.

In sensitive, brave prose (marked by forays into repetitiveness), Roffey shows the reader that human animals all respond in essentially the same ways, when staring down the steel barrel of their own fear. Though House of Ashes cannot be thought of as a 1990 coup primer, what it gets undeniably right is our primordial response to terrorism.

This review first appeared in its entirety in the Trinidad Guardian‘s Sunday Arts Section on August 3rd, 2014, entitled “Converting real horror into fiction.”

47. The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

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Published by Del Rey in 2013.

Would you care for a bit of inter-species, mixed faction romantic mingling, housed in a travelogue-formatted space odyssey? That’s at least some of what Barbadian writer Karen Lord is getting up to, in her second novel, The Best of All Possible Worlds.

What’s remarkable about Lord’s oeuvre is that it’s near-unmatched: very few Caribbean writers, resident in the Caribbean, commit themselves to speculative fiction. Lord tells stories that are not only fascinating emotionally and anthropologically, but she’s doing it in a singular literary field.

Lord’s first novel, Redemption in Indigo (Small Beer Press, 2010) was longlisted for the 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. In its unpublished manuscript format, the novel won the 2008 Frank Collymore Literary Award. The Best of All Possible Worlds also received the Frank Collymore award, in 2009.

As with so much speculative fiction, the ambitions of Lord’s second novel are vast – and for the most part, they find confident footing. The story is narrated principally by Grace Delarua, a plucky biotechnician and resident of polycultural planet Cygnus Beta. Delarua is assigned to a social research expedition in service of the Sadiri, a proud, intellectually advanced race whose home territory has been obliterated. Represented by their chief councillor, Dllenahkh, the Sadiri seek out potential mates most similar to their own core temperament and physical appearance, on the many separate homesteads scattered throughout Cygnus Beta’s outposts and provinces.

Perhaps Redemption in Indigo bore more easily recognizable hallmarks of folkloric treatment (unsurprisingly, given that it’s a creative retelling of a Senegalese folk tale.) However, the avoidance of monoculturalism is gratifyingly strong in Lord’s second work. Cygnus Beta is described as “a galactic hinterland for pioneers and refugees,” and is populated with a diverse set of races, each with their own identifiable quirks and passions. Dllenahkh’s Sadirian measured equanimity finds a consistently pleasurable foil in Delarua’s Cygnian matter of factness and emotional volubility. The two give every indication, in the novel’s earliest stages, of being well-suited to the kind of romance that not only links two people, but solidifies tenuous bridges of cultural commingling.

This seems to be one of the central premises Lord works out in the novel. The universe’s various citizenries enact premeditated (and often brutal) acts of separatist violence against each other: witness Ain’s cavalier destruction of Sadiri, and the massive devastation this genocide left in its wake. Despite unfathomable loss and crippling exile, Lord prompts her central characters deeper into an understanding, and appreciation of, mutual dependency. Almost all of the novel’s players express strong attachments to concepts of home, kinship and domestic succor. Delarua says it herself, during an unexpected trip to her sister’s homestead:

“Blood is blood, you know? There’s too much shared history and too many cross-connecting bonds to ever totally extract yourself from that half-smothering, half-supporting, muddled net called family.”

It is perhaps slightly ironic, then, that Lord suggests that the connections we make, rather than those into which we are born, hold greatest sway. This isn’t a novel concept, but it’s engagingly transmitted through the writer’s exploration of psychic bonds, particularly the psionic linkages that Delarua and Dllenahkh test with each other. It’s not an especially groundbreaking way to talk about sensual or sexual intimacy in science fiction, but Lord recycles it well. Through these episodes, it feels like we see the potential couple most clearly, wherein they allow themselves to interface with vulnerability and trust. As Dllenahkh puts it, there can be a certain

“transcendence to bonding… feeling the bones, tendons and nerves of another being – not as a puppet master but like a dancer fitted to a partner, able to suggest a movement with a light press of silent, invisible communication.”

The novel’s greatest flaw is also one of its most affecting charms: it is both episodic in nature (as opposed to tackling one core issue head on in the plot), and it wants to say a great many things about a great many things. If the best of all possible worlds, according to the aphorism, is the one we’re living in now, then reading Lord grants us pathways to other places no greater than this Earth, but no less captivating.

This review first appeared in its entirety in the Trinidad Guardian‘s Sunday Arts Section on April 6th, 2014, entitled “Confident new Caribbean sci-fi novel.”

42. Light Falling on Bamboo by Lawrence Scott

On By Novel NicheIn Reviews 2012, Trinidad Guardian Sunday Arts Section1 Comment

Published by in 2012 by Tindal Street Press.

“Don’t forget where you’ve come from. Don’t forget the ideas of freedom that have carried us this far,” Michel Jean Cazabon’s mother urges her favourite son from her deathbed. Michel, who has returned to his birthplace, Trinidad, after eight years of artistic apprenticeship and training in Europe, will find this final wish to be complex and fragmented, like so much else in his life. He is drawn repeatedly to the stunning natural beauty of his homeland, and captivated by the noble elegance of those who have toiled in its fields. Despite the pleasures of being an artist in his natural domain, he is soon reminded that island life goes hand in hand with its own specific set of perils. Temptations, including the form of his childhood playmate Josie, beckon in Cazabon’s moments of weakness, even as he fondly awaits the arrival of his French wife and children on Trinidadian shores. As a painter and a son of the plantation class, he finds himself divided in more ways than he wishes to be, quickly learning that no creative muse comes without a past story.

Scott’s latest novel is nothing less than remarkable, blending in ambitious detail the real life of one of Trinidad’s founding artistic figures, with a fictional account of what his most personal moments might have resembled. An intimate biography of the actual Michel Jean Cazabon is not a matter of public record, as the author himself remarks in his historical notes. Light Falling on Bamboo would probably read as seedy conjecture in the hands of a writer less sensitive to character development. The reverse is true here: one is gifted a portrait of Cazabon as he might plausibly have been. The reader leans towards believing, rather than discrediting, the artistic licenses that Scott himself has taken – what emerges is the study of a complex, haunted figure.

Divisions run through the novel, which begins in 1840s Trinidad and spans more than five decades. These ruptures are not simply evident in Cazabon’s conflicts, but echo throughout the structure of Trinidadian society. While crossing the greens on his way to the Governor’s residence, Cazabon muses that “he could have been somewhere in Hertfordshire”, so strong are the parallels of the local atmosphere with that of a British pastoral scene. Money is described as the province of power; those who possess it are the white landowners and dignitaries for whom Cazabon is commissioned to paint epic vistas. These members of the elite ruling class continue to consider themselves superior to the former slaves who built the plantation empires. As Cazabon himself admits with deep guilt, the slave trade is at the heart of his family’s financial success too – a success he tries to distance himself from with dedication to his art.

Light Falling on Bamboo presents Cazabon’s Trinidad with vivid imagery; each description is ornate, infused with the colours the artist favoured in his famous pieces. Michel Jean’s earliest daydreams in the novel revolve around painting, evoked by events as routine as a carriage ride through Port of Spain, where “he noticed the light on water and on the surrounding hills changing all the time from lemon to subdued white, plain greys and blues, the piercing fire of the sun lighting up the greens and ochres. He longed to paint.”

It is painting that keeps Cazabon’s self-described demons at bay; it is painting that cements his purpose as a human being, caught as he is between rapidly-changing worlds. As he reflects to Governor ‘Ping’ Harris in an intense conversation, “The people have made this landscape… I mostly paint out the hardship and keep the dignity. Not that I am blind to what has happened here.” No aspect of Scott’s prose feels blinkered: in the writer’s imagined portrayal of a luminary artist, the reader is given one of the finest examples of art reflecting what is best about nature, and vice versa. This is a multi-layered, sympathetic characterization of Cazabon – as an artist, husband, son, and as a figure who fully embodies both tragedy and triumph at different phases of his life. It is impossible to term Light Falling on Bamboo a biography, but one imagines that Cazabon himself would have been pleased with the result.

This review first appeared in its entirety in the Trinidad Guardian‘s Sunday Arts Section on November 11th, 2012, entitled A remarkable imagined portrait of Cazabon.

40. Island Pursuits by Heather Rodney-Diaz

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Published in 2012 by Crimson Romance.

Chance encounters have an often-mystifying way of turning one’s life around. This is the case for Second Lieutenant Adrian Mendez and Cory Phillips, who meet under unfortunate circumstances at a police station, in the early hours of New Year’s Day. Mendez, a former U.S. Marine, has returned to his homeland of Trinidad, in the interests of serving and protecting his countrymen. Instantly mesmerized by what he describes as Cory’s “sun-kissed island goddess” beauty, Adrian soon comes to realize that the alluring, intelligent Ms. Phillips is unlike any woman he’s ever known. As he steadily falls for her, despite the cautions of his closely-guarded heart, Cory also struggles with her feelings for this enigmatic, dashing military man. As a woman with more than ample reason to despise the armed forces and what they represent, the island goddess’ emotions for this man in uniform are complex from the very start. Will this stop them from expressing their truest selves beneath the relentless blaze of the Trinidadian sun?

As a debut offering, Island Pursuits plays it close to the traditional structure and character development of any successful romance novel. There are no bold narrative leaps of experimentation made here; nor will the reader find any genre-defying calculations intended to push the romantic envelope. This is one of the ways in which the story is safe: it tells the tale of relatable people, alternately pursuing or fleeing from desire that threatens to overwhelm them with its intensity. The chronicle of Cory and Adrian’s fiery courtship cannot be said to break moulds or pioneer inventive new structures for romance writing. Thankfully, the novel is far from being a colour-by-numbers affair. Although the character types are ones that fall into neat archetypes – the courageous soldier torn between duty and ardour; the feisty career woman who’s been once burnt, twice shy – Rodney-Diaz serves them up with humour, framing them in believable situations as opposed to fantastical ones.

What is most laudable about the novel is that it is set on Caribbean soil: not the Caribbean of an idealized weekend getaway, not a foreigner’s beach idyll, but the living and breathing entity that is an everyday Trinidad and Tobago. The fact that the story is grounded in an environment so largely unexplored by mainstream writers of romance fiction is one of its highest points of merit. The reader has the luxury of a true immersion of place, within these pages. She can relate immediately, for instance, to the sights and sounds evoked by a run around the Queen’s Park Savannah.

“They started walking at first, making small talk with each other along the way as Gothic churches, historic buildings, the U.S. Embassy, the Zoo, and the President’s House all came into their view. They spoke about their day and week so far, about the extremely hot weather and Carnival coming up.”

The author captures without unnecessary embellishment details that might otherwise be lost in a different climate, or on chillier shores. Much of Trinidad and Tobago’s natural beauty is on display in the novel, interspersed with highlights of the nation’s dynamic culture. Witness, for instance, these familiar descriptions of Carnival’s colourful spectacle: “Already runaway beads and other remnants of discarded costumes lay strewn about the streets. Varying hues of brightly coloured materials in golds and oranges, blues and greens dazzled in the midday sun.”

One hardly expects issues of a serious nature to be given much scope in the romance genre, but beneath the adult-scenario sizzle, many books of this persuasion tackle concerns that are more troubling than a cheating boyfriend’s roving eye. Island Pursuits continues admirably in this tradition, focusing on injustices within the judicial and protective services systems. Rodney-Diaz writes bravely and convincingly of the dangers that form an uneasy part of opposing the law, even when one is on the side of the innocent. There are deep-seated troubles at the heart of this complicated land we inhabit, and oftentimes the rewards for persistence may seem uncertain. Her characters have their own burdens to bear, and do not seek love out as a Band-Aid for all their worries. Love, however, continues to be a reliable anchor in the world crafted by the author.

This review first appeared in its entirety in the Trinidad Guardian‘s Sunday Arts Section on October 14th, 2012, entitled Love, Trinidadian-style.

A free electronic copy of this novel was provided by Heather Rodney-Diaz for review. The opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own, and are not influenced by her generous gift of gratuitous literature.

39. Daughters of Empire by Lakshmi Persaud

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Published in 2012 by Peepal Tree Press.

Amira Vidhur, an educated, upper-class Indo-Trinidadian, migrates with her husband and three daughters to Mill Hill, London, in the 1970s. Life in this charming suburb is far from unassuming, and Amira must adapt quickly to the vast differences in culture and expectation. Striving to be a dutiful wife, wise mother, friendly neighbor, accomplished gardener and, in the midst of all this, a self-sufficient woman, Amira’s journey is often met by challenges. She seeks the counsel of her bossy elder sister Ishani, a Trinidad-based businesswoman who has remained home to run the family store. Despite Ishani’s often comically-phrased advice, Amira learns that she must chart her own path, in uncertain territory, with lessons she’s learned while on Trinidadian soil.

Readers often expect that stories strongly populated by female characters will be rooted, for better or worse, in domestic issues and an excess of emotion. Though the concerns of home and family play a vital part in Lakshmi Persaud’s newest novel, Daughters of Empire, they cannot be said to rule it, either. Amira is the predominant narrator, yet space is made for the perspectives of other women to shine through: not just Ishani’s voice is heard, but also the voices of Amira’s three daughters, Anjali, Satisha and Vidya. Dedicating itself to the span of generations, Persaud’s tale traces the journeys of these women, and others, as they do battle with society’s demands. Injustices are experienced on a minor and massive scale; these heroines are betrayed, scarred and manipulated, but it is their own sense of community and personal strength that encourages them to persist. The blueprint of Amira’s resilience becomes a mantle taken up by each of her daughters in distinct ways. It is especially intriguing to see how the three Vidhur children hold fast to their parents’ ideals, and how they create their own mottos for survival, too.

Written in a sweetly engaging style, Daughters of Empire shies away from the gritty, harsh narrative structure that defines so much of contemporary fiction. Persaud could be partially likened to a Caribbean Jane Austen, underscoring the deepest of issues with a light, graceful hand. If the novel sometimes reads like a giddy comedy of errors, it is worth noting that it confronts questions of race, class, gender, xenophobia and spirituality, from a series of outlooks. The reader will find her assumptions challenged on even the simplest of matters, finding out in the process that sometimes the least refined arguments are the ones most worth having.

Past and present, England and Trinidad, rural country roads and commercial city centres: this is a novel of polarities, of opposite ends finding unexpected meeting places. Persaud’s storytelling is more sophisticated than mere comparison, though; it also considers this: how do we live ‘abroad’, when these foreign landscapes are swiftly becoming our homes? When her happiness is threatened, Amira wonders, “She was living at the close of the twentieth century and still following her mother’s way. But how could you stop the past walking beside you?”

There is, admittedly, a way in which the Vidhur clan loves, admires and respects its members that seems a little too perfectly… satisfying. At certain sections of the novel’s progress, one is forced to consider whether or not this dynamic, self-sufficient band of brilliant and multi-talented individuals can’t weather every obstacle that life slings in their direction. Amends are made frequently in Persaud’s narrative, with seemingly effortless elan, scripted with the most cloying of diplomacies. If this is not how people reconcile in reality, the reader may well conclude, then, by Shiva’s trident, they damned well should.

Natural beauty is everywhere in Daughters of Empire, often unearthed in the most unlikely of places. The persistence of Nature and the constant rhythms of the seasons act in contrast to the unstable currents of human interaction, a reminder that the world continues to revolve while we ponder its mysteries. In the fragrant, delicious meals that Amira prepares, there is a richness of flavour and texture that woos even her most reluctant of neighbours to her London dinner table. Similarly, Amira’s old teachers who run a cookery school in rural Trinidad channel this knowledge, passing it on to their students: that an appreciation for the art of cooking can influence one’s entire life positively.

“They learned about the fibres, textures and flavours of vegetables, meats, fish and spices… the structure of the fibres, the strength of the raw materials’ natural flavours influenced the choice of spices as well as the methods of cooking… they began to transfer this training to their lives and their dealings with those they encountered. Methods of cooking became the methods of communicating with others, how to speak to bring understanding […] They had been laying the foundations for them to reinvent themselves as well as recipes.”

The earth is filled with this untapped splendour, Persaud’s novel seems to suggest, and it remains the reward of those who seek beauty with unfailing honesty and appreciation, asking nothing in return. In this way, Amira, who once described herself as “still in the infant class on how to live a good life”, and the other remarkable women she loves, are able to navigate their own courses confidently, reminding themselves that there is goodness at the heart of most, if not all things.

A marginally shorter version of this review first appeared in the Trinidad Guardian‘s Sunday Arts Section on October 7th, 2012, entitled ‘Caribbean Jane Austen’ novel tackles hard questions.

35. Is Just a Movie by Earl Lovelace

On By Novel NicheIn Caribbean Writers Challenge 2011, Reading Challenges, Reviews 2012, Trinidad Guardian Sunday Arts Section5 Comments

Published in 2011 by Faber & Faber.

Winner of the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

On the islands named Trinidad and Tobago, it is the 1970s, and the Black Power uprising has come and gone. The men who led it with courage and determination have seen their dreams of social change shattered, their purpose suddenly uncertain. Among these former revolutionaries is KingKala, a poet-kaisonian returning from detention to find that his former comrades-in-arms have either fled or adapted strange new personas. KingKala is joined in bemusement by Sonnyboy Apparicio, a fellow songster and man of action who no longer knows in which direction his fortune, to say nothing of his responsibility, might lie. When the chance to perform roles in a promising foreign film emerges, KingKala and Sonnyboy leap at the opportunity, only to learn that the parts in which they have been cast, that of exotic tribesmen, are to be short-lived. Faced with this dilemma – of whether to die the complacent on-stage deaths they have been assigned, or to challenge this assumption – the two men begin to grow closer. Their camaraderie sets one of the multiple backdrops for the events in Earl Lovelace’s Is Just a Movie, a novel of myriad contemplations on life, love, and the issue of identities on a personal and national scale.

Winner of the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Is Just a Movie is Lovelace’s first published novel in over a decade. A work marked by much anticipation, it is told in that signature style of an ease in storytelling, of a writer’s tongue primed in the rich awareness of local landscape and local concerns. The characters who populate this novel strike the reader as people known throughout a lifetime, their stories, dreams and grievances akin to those overheard at the market, the mosque, in Woodford Square or on the streets during Carnival Tuesday mas. KingKala, self-avowed “maker of confusion, recorder of gossip, destroyer of reputations, revealer of secrets”, does not so much preside over the happenings in the fictional village of Cascadu as he observes them, sometimes in silence, sometimes chiming in, but always vigilant.

It is Sonnyboy who more often claims the focal role; in his frequent forays into different jobs and titles, he is a portrait of a nation’s expectancy; he channels the frustration of his unrealized dreams, along with his ever-persisting desire to be seen in his community not as a badjohn, but as someone more: as a man capable of rising above the weight of old, unwise decisions.

Perched on the shoulder of the narrator, KingKala, the reader can expect to shift seamlessly through decades, major occurrences, seasons of both nature and politics. The Prime Minister who rules both uneasily and assuredly over the nation is seen at one instance in the heyday of his governance; in a later scene, he appears to still be in power, far past his expected due. The everyday grit of ordinary circumstance is pitted against the suggestion of otherworldly happenings. This subtle marriage of the literal and the fantastical is woven together with an unblinking skill; it convinces utterly, making no digression seem unnecessary, no tall tale excessive. It feels perfectly natural for villagers to be playing cards in one chapter, then lining up to officially sell their Dreams for money in another. Ancient historical figures are invited to celebrate the nation’s successes; prime ministers declare their intentions to live forever; miracles remain within the realm of hope. A multitude of voices accompany single encounters, acting as a reminder that there are a whole host of ways in which reality can be perceived. Not every story needs to be told within rigid lines; Is Just a Movie benefits from the intricate tapestry of its structure, presenting a reading adventure as ornate as it is serenely guided.

The narrative never focuses doggedly on Sonnyboy alone, allowing the stories of the other inhabitants of Cascadu to be told in vivid, enduring detail, with equal measures of humour and sobriety. Through Sonnyboy’s experiences are filtered the hopes and dreams of unforgettable figures: of Franklyn, whose unmatched prowess at batting causes an entire village to creak to a standstill; of the beautiful Dorlene, whose near-mishap with a falling coconut prompts her to literally turn her life around. Daily events shape the fabric of everyday communal life, ranging from the commonplace to the fantastic: the swift decline of corner shops, the disaster of a flambeau-lit political party’s campaign, the unexpected miracle accompanying a funeral.

Told in language that soothes and thrills, Is Just a Movie is a novel replete with symbols by which Trinbagonians can map their multiple places in history. When Sonnyboy hears the sound of steelpan for the first time, “the notes flying out like flocks of birds…like a sprinkling of shillings thrown in the air, like a choir of infants reciting a prayer,” he is attuned to a timeless magic. Not every revelation is meant to be comforting, however – as a Laventille shopkeeper grimly comments, “What was performance in Carnival is now the reality of life. The devil is no longer in the make-believe of Carnival; he is right here on our streets. The Midnight Robber is not a character in our fiction, he is in possession of real guns.”

In this most recent offering from a master literary craftsman, the abiding messages of resistance, and of the pride one earns from self-recognition, illuminate every page. It is writing that unhurriedly allows us to see ourselves as we are, blemishes and beauty marks alike, and to grow in the power of that incredible knowledge.

This review first appeared, in its entirety, in the Trinidad Guardian‘s Sunday Arts Section on September 2nd, 2012. You can view it here.

This book, and 11 more, are part of my official reading list (which can be found in my sign-up post here) for the 2011 Caribbean Writers Challenge.

34. The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman by Loretta Collins Klobah

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Published in 2011 by Peepal Tree Press.

Winner of the Poetry Category Prize, OCM Bocas 2012.

Shortlisted for the overall OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2012.

Shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, 2012.

We lead complex, beautiful, many-dimensioned relationships with the Caribbean islands we inhabit. They require different masks, evolving responses to unpredictable seasons: whether we luxuriate in the heated thrust of Carnival, or mourn our murderous headlines, we, people of these particular islands, contain multitudes. This is one of the many gracefully-articulated messages woven into the fabric of Loretta Collins Klobah’s poems. At their forefront gleams the titular persona, the twelve foot neon woman, a resistance heroine, a glorious Madonna for the 21st century. She resonates with passion as much as she snarls in discontent, this unabashed Puertorriqueña, and in so doing she provides both anchor and platform for Klobah’s wondrously sung pieces.

Indeed, it is singing that comes first to mind as one allows this collection to simmer in the blood, registering the finely-wrought heat of its movements, the attention paid to dance and the rhythms many claim as indigenous to our shared shorelines. In “The BBC Does Bomba”, barrio children set themselves free to the persistent, encouraging tattoos pounded out on Modesto Cepeda’s barrel-drum, becoming receptacles of kinetic splendour.

“Girls raise the ruffled circle-skirt
to salute the drum, flick wrists
con fuerza until the butterfly skirts snap
por la derecha, por la izquierda,
the flower-print cotton
faldas swinging like machetes
over the harvest.”

Wrapped up in the flowing undulations of dances like these, the poet reminds us, are examinations that pierce, conducted by both foreign and local eyes. The question of perceptions, of how Puerto Rico and the wider Caribbean sees itself, how we are seen by others, runs through several of the poems, keenly felt in pieces such as “Googling the Caribbean Suburbs”. Here, the narrator conducts a search that zooms in on satellite images of her home from space, the rows of houses making up, in impersonal relief, the neighbourhood whose inhabitants she knows intimately, having shared her life in close communion with their own. “Google Earth makes us out as small, blurred spaces,” the penultimate line of the poem reports, closing with, “That’s how we look, from out there.”

Embedded in this discussion of how we see ourselves are uncompromising, angry refrains against the criminal violence exploding through Puerto Rican and all Caribbean streets. Klobah’s voice rings out against the censorship of police brutality, gang warfare, injustices against children. These poems do the opposite of presenting a unified touristic front: they impel in language that abjures the severity of academia for the warmth of the pueblo, for the anxious concerns of living, working, struggling Caribbean people. “We have created a new world where the indiscriminate gun is always at our backs,” laments the narrator, in “El Velorio, The Wake (1893)”, a poem that paints in vivid and excruciating detail the preparations for the funeral of a child killed by a stray bullet.  Unforgettable images of sorrow in the wake of destruction accompany many of these examinings, in the shape of a halo of flies around a child’s head; of corpses that “lie in little beds of straw in the war zones”; of five young bodies tumbling off a fortress wall, “their surprised appendages flailing like starfish legs, turning like pinwheels.”

At the epicentre of all this, the soul’s purely decadent delight with its own rhythms is allowed to unfurl. Poems like “The First Day of Hurricane Season” possess this self-ownership without apology or shame, as its narrator, a woman in the full glow of her maturity, savours the taste of her life as it is now.

“I brew fresh ginger tea with coarse brown cane sugar,
cut a papaya, and watch the sun bead its juices.
No one ever taught me to expect that a phase of life
spent without a lover could be as happy, simple, and rich
as this.”

There is a way, too, that Nature reaches out to graze its fingertips against the wetness of human experience in the poet’s verse. The veil between what we fabricate for convenience, and what the land offers us for survival: this seems thinnest and most porous in pieces such as “Night Wash”, wherein a woman, post-washtub-rinsing, hears night beckoning her. “When one frog sings alone,” she listens, “it sounds like someone weeping, or hiccuping after the kind of hot-eyed, bottomless weeping that I have not had for a very long time.” Even amidst the uncertainty of violence, about which nothing is definite other than its eventuality, these poems are sheathed in sylvan hope. They can show you the way back to your own open heart,  gently, with the grace of forests, bamboo cathedrals, singing frogs.

If we run the risk of becoming inured to daily senselessness, then Klobah’s poems pull us back from the brink of ennui, reminding us what fiery solace can live in raised arms of protest. There is a balance here of old worlds meeting new, of the slavery barracks colliding with street art, of our ancestors melding into the patterns of fierce pop and rap songs.

The twelve-foot woman herself, she who can claim many names in daylight or in darkness, holds this cultural syncretism proudly in the cradle of her belly. In the lushly-titled “The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman on Top of María’s Exotik Pleasure Palace Speaks of Papayas, Hurricanes, and Wakes”, she sways in her hard-won confidence. She has wrestled her autonomy from the clutches of slave owners and abusive lovers, from history’s cruelties and a nation’s difficult congress with itself. She channels “Oya, orisha of whirlwinds and cemeteries”, making no apologies for her pain, no reparations for her sweet, Boricua music, intent on “writing my son and daughter all my love songs,” a woman warrioress we both need and recognize triumphantly.

A marginally shorter version of this review first appeared in the Trinidad Guardian‘s Sunday Arts Section on August 19th, 2012. You can view it here.

Andre Bagoo interviews Loretta Collins Klobah in the September/October issue of Caribbean Beat, here.

32. Archipelago by Monique Roffey

On By Novel NicheIn Reviews 2012, Trinidad Guardian Sunday Arts Section4 Comments

Published in 2012 by Simon & Schuster.

One day, Gavin Weald uproots himself from the staid, reassuringly placid existence he’s meted out for himself and his six year old daughter, Océan, and quite literally takes to the sea. Companioned by their loyal hound, Suzy, and enough furtively-acquired supplies to see them well out of Port of Spain waters, they set sail on Gavin’s old Danish boat, Romany, to visit the Venezuelan Los Roques archipelago. Gavin once frolicked there in his heyday, before the advent of his family, before the coming of the great brown flood waters that devastated his home and its now distressed, fragile occupants. Other Weald family members will not be making the trip with them. Each precarious marker of the voyage out is signalled by Gavin’s fear, his nauseous uncertainty over where the right path might lie. As he shepherds this most unlikely of crews across the startlingly blue seas for which his daughter is named, he is reminded that there is a shape to his oldest of dreams that he scarcely registers, one that the sea will send surging to the fore.

Overweight, beset by painful psoriasis and more than his fair share of daily nightmares, Gavin Weald resembles no archetypal moulds for an adventurer-hero. Before he sneaks Romany out of the TTSA harbour, the burden of his aging body weighs heavily on him, so disparate from the younger, fitter, carousing image of his youth. Soon after he and Océan slip the bonds of Trinidadian waters, though, Gavin feels that settled knowing of the sea stir in his bones.

“The sea makes him feel lonely and yet so very much himself; she makes him gather himself up, a self which has vanished some time ago into the element of air. Overnight, the fluid in his veins is catching up with the fluid and the rhythms of the sea; he feels like the sea appears, placid, powerful.”

For all of our protagonist’s uncertainty, his prevarications on both dry land and shifting water, the quiet splendour of Roffey’s characterization means that we want no other guide for our travels. Gavin is less overtly reassuring than he is persistently earnest, a sentiment that earns him further unwarranted harshness from life, yes, but also visits upon him moments of sublime grace, such as the raw pleasure of seeing Océan snorkel for the first time. Everyone, the author subtly reminds us with each sea-swell and map-charting, can face bold and complicated terrain. Peregrinations of discovery are not merely for the flat-chested or unflinching.

Islands are everywhere in this stunningly rendered novel, reminding or teaching us anew about our individual selves against their history-mired backdrops. The long arm of human injustice, greed and excess runs on no shorter a leash here, as Gavin, Océan and Suzy dock in multiple ports to discover. Beach-combing through the sea’s washed up treasures on one of the Los Roques islands, Gavin muses on the disturbing assortment of plastic debris and shattered coral, thinking, too, of how oil swallows up life around them, oil destroying nature. Father, daughter and dog confront the garish spectacle of cruise liners; the beguilingly pink slave huts at Bonaire; the uneasy history that built the Panama Canal, with equal parts wonderment, dread and curiosity. Nothing seems clear about human progress: it all glimmers, like the Sea Empress tourist ship, “grotesque and a spectacle in its own right.”

We’re taught in some of our earliest creative writing classes that one of the great bankable conflicts worth exploring in both fiction and non- is Man’s relationship, and struggle, with the environment. The novel mines this persistently (and not necessarily in the ways you’d expect, either), but it also reveals in both frustrating and gleeful detail what we learn about ourselves in the process. The sea cradles the real possibility of a different life for Gavin and his daughter, bound up in which is the re-scripting of their damaged intimacy. Water of one sort has the potential to heal, if not completely, then life-sustainingly, the rupture caused by water of another chaotic provenance.

“It feels like he and Océan have blended. They have softened in themselves and with each other; the sea has dissolved them, and they are suppler in their skin. They have been disappeared for weeks now, and they are sun-henna brown […] He didn’t expect to feel so lost in his own escape; a new space has opened up, an ocean.”

This wilful act of disappearance reminds or encourages the reader of what solace and redemption there might be in unmooring. If no-one is sympathetic to your plight, the sea will have you, but one cannot bargain with her for support or guidance. Gavin marks every leg of his journey with unlooked-for allegiances of varying intensity, with keen observations of the shifting natural landscapes around him. Reflecting on South America’s bloody history of invasion, torture and revolt, he muses that “Recovery takes time; it is the story of the still emerging Caribbean.” The land aches for the erasure of trauma, much as the individual does: Roffey stresses here that neither on regional nor personal fronts can rooted suffering be brushed away, not without investigation and the watchful calendar’s cycle.

Archipelago’s trajectory reminds the reader in both subtle and unapologetic flourishes that through our best-laid plans for Nature, Nature herself persists. The novel is replete with achingly beautiful descriptions of the world that frames these seafarers. Even in the midst of tantalizing doubt, of crippling loneliness, Gavin cannot but soak it in, the “skies… reflecting sea reflecting sky reflecting sea; this world is so electric in its shades of blue…”. Storm weather holds its own relentless magic, at once spellbinding and cautionary:

“That evening the sky pinks over. Grey and indigo clouds stay still in the sky like towering puffs of cream, like staircases made of foam. Forks of lightning appear miles away, silent delicate veins of gold, fizzing down from the clouds.”

The further Gavin, Océan and Suzy plot their course, the more they allow themselves to drift into the arbitrary shelter that Nature provides, learning in increments that the best harbours can turn hollow, learning, also, that there is refuge in unexpected places. This hard-won reassurance beats at the maritime heart of Archipelago: that the perilous journey, no matter how hurricane-beset, finds its own natural way of leading you back to yourself.

A marginally shorter version of this review first appeared in the Trinidad Guardian’s inaugural Sunday Arts Section on August 5th, 2012. You can view it here.

To read my impressions of Roffey’s novel prior to its launch, you can check out my Bocas 2012 coverage of her discussion with Rivka Galchen and Anita Sethi, here.