Reading Paule Marshall's novel Brown Girl, Brownstones threw up a number of exciting firsts for me. It was the first time I was reading a work by an esteemed author with her roots firmly planted in Barbados. And it was the first book I’d read for the first-ever book club I'd attended.
THE ArtsEtc Independence Reading List turns seven this year!
The IndyList, as we like to call it, is a selection of 12 Barbadian books to make friends with over the coming year.
Terry Connolly’s cover photo, Soon Ripe, suggests the many branches of Bajan Lit. It won gold at NIFCA.
ArtsEtc Editor and 2nd-place Colly winner Linda M. Deane with top awardee Kerry Belgrave. Between them is then Governor of the Central Bank of Barbados DeLisle Worrell. Photo Copyright © 2017 The Barbados Advocate.
THERE WERE some repeat performances for the 2016 Frank Collymore Literary Awards.
The three winners had all taken first place in previous years, but this time Kerry Belgrave came out on top with his poetry collection @bb.now/tek culture?.
He took home the coveted prize—and $10,000—for his latest effort.
MARTIN M. BOYCE, a self-styled occasional writer, is the winner of The Carolle Bourne Award for Literary Innovation for 2016.
Boyce won with “Thin Line Between,” a piece that meshes (or mashes) poetry and prose, Standard English with Nation Language, Barbadian culture seemingly with every culture—challenging them all along the way.
During the 50s and 60s—after the Second World War, before independence—hundreds of Barbadians left their island home for countries like England, the United States, Canada. They left in search of a better life they felt they could not or would not achieve if they stayed in Barbados.
Some of these expatriates succeeded brilliantly in their quests, distinguishing their country of birth (Barbados broke away peacefully from Britain in 1966) as much as themselves. Others were less fortunate. All faced hardships: racism, joblessness, the cold comforts of an alien environment.
GEORGE LAMMING has achieved what few in this country would have thought possible. His novel In the Castle of my Skin elevates our common speech to poetry and our common lives to literature, infusing it all with a gentle humour that allows the reader to “laugh off the licks.” It is a bildungsroman in the usual style, the story of a boy becoming a man, but companioned with the story of a people moving from infancy and dependence to maturity and self-determination.
The cultural critic Imran Siddiquee, writing for The Atlantic, once commented, “If the United States were to truly transform into a totalitarian state, or suffer an environmental catastrophe, it's safe to say society’s deepest divisions wouldn't magically disappear overnight.” For the US, race would certainly be among those "deepest divisions." And yet YA dystopian fiction, even of the American variety, often appears to exist in a racial vacuum.
The peculiar dichotomy that is evident in Anatomy of a Scream (Pudding House Press, 30pp, 2007) suggests there is a beauty and redemption in the inevitable sufferings and tribulations that are seemingly our birthright. The work as a whole is modern and edgy, and typifies a pre-apocalyptic view of humanity as it tethers on the brink of sanity.
