Jan.-March 2016: Literature from the Caribbean Islands

Mark (thorold) and I are delighted to be cohosting this Caribbean Islands thread. Mark has posted some detailed background information and some thoughts to explore when reading. I have posted lists of authors by country. Enjoy!

The four topics below are meant as an introduction to ways of exploring some of the things that are going on in Caribbean literature. They were prepared against tight deadlines and aren't really meant to be scholarly or exhaustive, but we hope they will give the group at least some starting points for a lively discussion.

Caribbean themes: 1 External views

Reading Globally is about exploring the ways writers from “other” places see the world, but sometimes it's also interesting to follow the gaze of writers from “here”, looking out towards the “other". Readers and writers in the "old world" have been fascinated by the "new" pretty much since Columbus got back from his first voyage, if not before, and those views are reflected back in the works of Caribbean writers. (Sorry for all the scare quotes: I just want to point out that there are a lot of terms we need to use that are not straightforward and really need discussion and analysis we don’t have time for just now. For the rest of these topics, please assume scare quotes whenever necessary!)

One of the key literary themes coming out of the European encounter with the New World is the idea of it as a kind of Garden of Eden irreparably damaged by the arrival of outsiders, which challenges the mainstream argument that Europeans had a duty to Christianise the new lands and make money out of them. One of the most important early non-fiction sources for this view was Bartolomé de las Casas, whose Short account of the destruction of the Indies (published in 1552) blew the whistle on Spanish atrocities against the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, but Thomas More's Utopia was already drawing on this kind of idea in 1516; similar ideas were taken up by Michel de Montaigne in his essay "Des Cannibales", ca. 1580. Contrasting the "indians" with the Portuguese sailors arriving on their shores, he wondered which were the real savages.

Shakespeare's The Tempest (ca. 1610) draws directly on Montaigne, not only in the foolish optimism of Gonzalo but also in the way the relationship between the islander Caliban and his European masters is set out as a prototype for slavery ("You taught me language; and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse."). In the postcolonial period, The Tempest has been reimagined and discussed by many Caribbean writers, most famously in Aimé Césaire's Haitian adaptation Une Tempête (1969) - but there have also been some very interesting postcolonial versions from the "old world", notably the film versions by Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway and Marina Warner's novel Indigo: or mapping the waters (1992), which puts Sycorax at the centre of the story.

Another very important thread, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, has been the existence of slave-worked Caribbean plantations as an offstage source of income for European characters. The Palestinian-American critic Edward Said famously pointed out how it shifts our view of Jane Austen's world if we pay proper attention to the role of Sir Thomas Bertram's sugar plantations - and his relationship with his slaves - in Mansfield Park. Jean Rhys, who grew up in Dominica, did something similar for the Brontës by putting the first Mrs Rochester and her creole background at the centre of her Jane Eyre-prequel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).

Slave income plays a more important role in real life than we sometimes realise, too: for example, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Barrett and her future husband Robert Browning, who later became prominent in the campaign against slavery in the USA, both came from formerly slave-owning families with plantations in the Caribbean - Robert's father had worked for a short time on the family plantations before renouncing his inheritance in disgust and taking a low-paid clerical job in London; Elizabeth's father came close to bankruptcy when he was obliged to free his slaves. The Booker Group, original sponsors of the important literary prize, owned 75% of Guyana’s sugar plantations from the 1830s on, and relied heavily on indentured labour for a long time. (It also later owned 50% of one of Jamaica’s most important assets, Ian Fleming…)

The Caribbean has also long played a role as an exciting location for adventure stories: one of the earliest was Oroonoko (1688) by the proto-feminist and former spy, Aphra Behn, which deals with a slave revolt in Suriname, a country she may or may not have visited in the 1660s (practically nothing about Behn's early life is known for certain). But there are plenty of other examples: even German literature gets a foot in the door with Kleist's 1811 novella Die Verlobung in St Domingo, set during the Haitian slave rebellion. More recent examples include Graham Greene's very dark novel about Duvalier-era Haiti, The comedians and his comic spy thriller, Our man in Havana.

The craze for pirate literature was kicked off in the 1720s by Captain Singleton and A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates - probably both by Defoe, although the latter claims to be by a "Captain Charles Johnson". The age of Caribbean piracy was almost over when Defoe was writing, but it is still a popular theme to this day. The high-point of the genre for most readers was Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883). The continuing popularity of the Caribbean as a setting for thrillers might have a lot to do with Ian Fleming's residence in Jamaica, but it probably also owes something to the ideas of luxury and lawlessness that come from this pirate theme as well.

Things to think about:

- Would it have made such a big difference if Sir Thomas Bertram made his money from English coal mines or from Irish estates rather than from sugar plantations?

- The ship in The Tempest is on its way from Tunis to Naples. Does it matter that Shakespeare doesn’t actually locate his island in the Caribbean?

- A lot of the stories mentioned here have violent (ex-)slaves going on the rampage and murdering white people: how much of this is necessary for drawing attention to the horrors of slavery, and how much is simply racist sensationalism?

- Pirates: entertaining and a boost for tourism, or just a silly distraction from the real story of slavery and exploitation?

Caribbean themes: 2 Language and performance

I have crossed an ocean
I have lost my tongue
from the root of the old one
a new one has sprung

Grace Nichols, "Sugar Cane", from i is a long memoried woman

I ent have no gun
I ent have no knife
but mugging the Queen's English
is the story of my life

John Agard, "Listen Mr Oxford Don", from Mangoes and Bullets

I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation

Derek Walcott, "The schooner Flight" from Collected Poems 1948-1984

"We in the Caribbean have a ... kind of plurality: we have English, which is the imposed language on much of the archipelago. It is an imperial language, as are French, Dutch and Spanish. We also have what we call creole English, which is a mixture of English and an adaptation that English took in the new environment of the Caribbean when it became mixed with the other imported languages. We have also what is called nation language, which is the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers, the servants who were brought in."

Edward Kamau Brathwaite History of the voice, 1984

The history of the Caribbean region has given it a unique and very lively mixture of languages. After Columbus visited the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola in 1492, all of the region sooner or later fell under Spanish, French, English, Portuguese or Dutch colonial administration (often more than one of these, as islands changed hands in various wars). The disruption caused by the colonisers quickly led to the - largely unintended - extermination of most of the original Taíno and Carib population, leading the colonial powers to import millions of slaves speaking West African languages and, after the end of slavery, about half a million Asian indentured workers speaking languages like Hindi and Urdu.

All of this linguistic heritage weaves together in complicated ways to form a whole spectrum of creoles and patois that vary between communities and between different parts of the region. Nowadays every Caribbean territory has one or more of English, Spanish, Dutch and French as official languages, and some places, like Haiti and Suriname, also officially recognise the local creoles.


Louise Bennett

It's only been in the last couple of generations that creoles have been taken seriously enough to develop a written tradition, which probably accounts for the strong connection between creole literature and performance: the great Jamaican poet and folklorist Louise Bennett ("Miss Lou", 1919-2006) is perhaps the most famous example - even though she was a hugely popular stage and radio performer, she couldn't get her work published until well into the 1960s.

Attitudes really shifted with the publication of Kamau Brathwaite’s trilogy The Arrivants in the early 1970s, which pushed for the adoption of “nation language” (see the quote from Brathwaite above) as a literary - and political - medium. This idea has been followed and developed further by many other writers, including a lot of crossover between poetry and music (dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, for example).

If you want to get a proper feel for Caribbean poetry, you really need to listen to some performances as well as seeing the poems on the page. The Poetry Archive has a rich selection of audio recordings you can listen to with the text in front of you: for a contrast, you could try Kamau Brathwaite’s “The Making of the Drum” http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/masks-i-libation-ii-making-drum and Benjamin Zephaniah’s “Reggae Head”, for instance: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/reggae-head (but beware - that site is a notorious time-sink…)


Derek Walcott

The St Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott (1930-) is firmly in the tradition of mainstream English literature, probably about as far away as you can get from the ex-Black Panther Linton Kwesi Johnson and he is notoriously opposed to the idea of performance poetry, but even his work makes a lot of use of creole speech rhythms: in poems like "The Schooner Flight" and the book-length Omeros, you can find a sophisticated reference to Dante or T.S. Eliot mixed in with non-standard creole syntax which is there not merely to create contrast but because it gives him ways to manipulate the sound and rhythm of the line that he wouldn't have otherwise. How could you write a line with the impact of "I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard” if you only had standard English?

In French, the towering figures of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon (both from Martinique) seem to have set the tone for 20th century Caribbean writers, emphasising a Marxist, postcolonial view they called négritude which looked especially to the common African heritage of colonial oppression and slavery, so that there was less drive to explore the specific local culture of the islands by writing in creole.

The exception to this in French writing is Haiti, which has a rich literary culture of its own going back to the nineteenth century (see Île en île for an extensive bibliography of Haitian writers). In recent years quite a few writers have been publishing in Creole (although most also work in French, and the well-known Haitian exile Edwidge Danticat writes in English). The most distinguished Haitian writer is the eccentric Frankétienne (1936-), rumoured to have been on the Nobel shortlist, whose Dezafi (1975) is claimed as the first novel entirely written in Haitian Creole. (Short extract in Creole and French here: http://creoles.free.fr/Cours/dezafi.htm)

There is a tradition of Dutch writing in the Antilles, largely founded by Cola Debrot (poet, doctor, and eventually governor of the Netherlands Antilles: 1902-1981). The best-known poet in the Antillean creole, Papiamentu, seems to have been Elis Juliana ("Òmpi Elis", 1927-2013) - in case you're curious there are some examples of his work here. Anyone who can read a bit of Spanish or Portuguese should be able to get the gist of them.

(There should be some more about Spanish-language writers and language choice here, but I don't know enough: I suspect that the cultural exchange with the South American mainland makes the question of local dialects less important in Cuba and the Dominican Republic than it is for English or French writers.)

The Poetry Archive has a handy guide to the language of Caribbean poetry : http://www.poetryarchive.org/articles/guide-language-caribbean-poetry

Footnote: Rule of thumb for assessing the importance of poetry in any given culture: count the number of poets in jail and in government. This rule works because poetry is a low-cost, censor-proof medium that is good at working under the radar of oppressive regimes, whether colonial or postcolonial. A society where poetry really matters is probably a society where lack of education, money and/or free speech constrains access to other forms of political discourse. In the Caribbean, poetry, usually improvised live, often performed in local musical styles that are the descendants of traditional African forms (calypso, mento, ska, reggae, dub, ….), became the recognised way of spreading subversive ideas - the Twitter of its day. The poets who spent time in jail in Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere were not there for writing about palm trees and tropical sunsets.

Things to think about:

- Creoles are the heritage of colonialism and slavery: should writers feel uncomfortable about buying into creole culture rather than looking to Africa?

- as outsiders, do we find creole texts enriching or just deliberately obscure?

- are we being patronising when we enjoy the performance aspects of creole writing?

- are we more uncomfortable with Linton Kwesi Johnson telling us to fight the police, or with Derek Walcott hijacking the Western Canon for St Lucia and Trinidad?

Caribbean themes: 3 Slavery and displacement

Slavery is the most defining element in the history of the Caribbean region. The Europeans who went to the Caribbean in the first few decades after Columbus were not farmers or settlers looking for a new life: they were adventurers who had borrowed money to pay their share in a voyage, and they were looking for a quick profit to take home. Ideally gold and silver, in the worst case high-value cash crops, the most profitable being sugar. Either way, they needed cheap labour to do the digging, and since the locals had an inconvenient habit of dying off when put to work, they soon started to look to West Africa for new supplies.

Between 1500 and the mid-19th century, something like 10-12 million Africans (estimates vary considerably, of course: no-one has complete records), were shipped across the Atlantic against their will. The Portuguese - and later the British - did most of the actual shipping. The bulk of the slaves ended up in Brazil and Spanish South America, but more than 20% went to Caribbean territories. As a rough indication of the scale of things, the biggest Caribbean plantation economy at the end of the 18th century was the French colony of St Domingue (later Haiti) with some 700 000 slaves. British Jamaica and Spanish Cuba had around 300,000 each; most other territories had some tens of thousands of slaves.

Slave rebellions took place in most colonies at various times: they were usually localised and were suppressed rapidly and brutally (all the colonial powers kept troops in the region for that purpose). The most celebrated and successful rising was in St Domingue (Haiti), where slaves outnumbered free residents by at least ten to one. Against the background of the French revolutionary wars, there was a series of risings and conflicts between 1791 and 1803, culminating in the declaration of Haitian independence on the 1st of January 1804 by the ex-slave general Jean-Jacques Dessalines (successor to the famous Toussaint Louverture, who had died in French captivity a few months earlier). Haiti thus became the first independent postcolonial state (outside the USA). The new state survived largely because the French weren’t in a position to do anything about it at the time, and later achieved formal recognition in exchange for agreeing to pay reparations to former landowners. But it remained politically unstable, vulnerable to interference from powerful neighbours, and never really found a way to rebuild its economy after the collapse of the plantation system. It is still one of the poorest countries in the world to this day.

Oddly, the most famous accounts of the Haitian revolution - at least for outsiders - were all written by people from neighbouring countries: the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s The kingdom of this world (1949); Isabel Allende’s The island beneath the sea (2009), and most importantly the classic history of the rising from a black, Marxist viewpoint, The Black Jacobins (1938), by the Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James. But Haitian writers have of course also written extensively about their own history, going right back to Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre (1776-1806), a mixed-race Haitian educated in France, who was secretary to Dessalines at the time of independence. More recently, Edwige Danticat makes a lot of use of historical themes in her novels.

For the other colonial powers, the Haitian rising (together with domestic agitation by Evangelicals and human-rights groups) marked the real start of the dismantling of Caribbean slavery. Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and had abolished slavery in all its colonies by 1833; Spain took a bit longer, but didn’t have many colonies left after the 1820s (except Cuba, where slavery persisted until the late 19th century).

By 1833, sugar planters were forced to look elsewhere for their labour. In many places the solution was indentured servitude - essentially a time-limited form of slavery, now banned by international agreements (but still widely practiced in some countries). Large numbers of indentured labourers for the Caribbean sugar industry were recruited in the 19th and early 20th century, especially from Madeira, China, and the Indian sub-continent. As a result, a large fraction of the modern populations of Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago and Suriname are people of Asian descent, and there are substantial minorities in many other Caribbean territories. The Trinidadian-Asian Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul has written extensively about this heritage - most famously in his novel A house for Mr Biswas (1961) and his non-fiction travel book The middle passage (1962). Other important Asian-Caribbean writers include the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen and Naipaul’s Trinidadian contemporary Sam Selvon.

Many - or probably most - Caribbean writers find they have to deal with slavery in their work: both the cruelty of the slave trade and slave labour and the displacement/loss of cultural identity that it created are big themes everywhere. Some, starting with Césaire and Fanon, have looked primarily to Africa to rebuild the missing cultural link - Brathwaite, who lived and taught in Ghana for some years, had a big influence on this approach. Others try to reimagine the past with the previously overlooked stories of the slaves put back into the foreground: obvious examples would be Walcott (especially in Omeros) and Dabydeen (see Turner, Slave song, and the novel The counting house). But this is arguably also what Jean Rhys was doing with Wide Sargasso Sea.

Things to think about:

- If a writer who wasn't there tries to imagine the experience of a concentration camp victim in fiction, it feels crass and presumptuous, yet we don't often see readers expressing similar concerns about representations of slaves in fiction. Why not?

- Is trying to reestablish contact with West African culture a worthwhile project for Caribbean writers, or just a postcolonial pose?

- Who freed the slaves: Wilberforce or Dessalines?

- The European powers and the US all profited from slavery and kept it going: should we still feel guilty for what our ancestors did over 200 years ago? Is there merit in the idea of reparations?

Caribbean themes: 4 Colonization in Reverse

Wat a joyful news, miss Mattie,
I feel like me heart gwine burs
Jamaica people colonizin
Englan in Reverse

Louise Bennett “Colonization in Reverse” (1966)

Whilst the history of the Caribbean is mostly about people coming in from outside, there is a very important movement in the opposite direction as well. Most migration out of the Caribbean has been since the end of the Second World War, but of course it goes back a long way further than that, e.g. the refugees who left Haiti after the Rebellion and ended up in the USA in the early 19th century.

Apart from the migration to the UK discussed here, many people from the Caribbean have also moved to other colonial powers, especially France, the Netherlands and the USA, and have had an impact on the cultures of those countries. And of course there is also a lot of internal migration within the Caribbean region, for economic, political, or family reasons.

Britain encouraged (skilled) workers from the Caribbean to migrate during the labour shortages of the fifties and sixties: the iconic moment (in hindsight) was the arrival of a group of 492 Jamaicans on the Empire Windrush in June 1948. The Windrush passengers came more or less by accident - it was a troopship that was returning empty from Australia and they were offered cheap passages - but in the following years some big British employers (including the National Health Service, British Rail, and London Transport) set up permanent recruitment agencies in the Caribbean and began shipping large numbers of motivated, skilled young people to England. Which wasn’t good news for anyone in Jamaica or Barbados who needed qualified nurses, engineering apprentices, etc.

What took the British - and many of the new arrivals - by surprise was that contrary to what they had always believed about themselves, ordinary British people were not all that comfortable with large numbers of black people coming to live in their neighbourhoods and join them in the workplace, especially if they ate strange food and played reggae music. Suddenly racism was an open issue in British society, and black people were finding themselves at the receiving end of casual discrimination.

Many landlords refused to accept black tenants (but there’s no documentary evidence for the famous “no blacks, no Irish, no dogs” sign, which is now thought to have been invented for propaganda purposes by Irish nationalists in the 1980s). Caribbean immigrants unable to rent got together and set up housing clubs to raise the money to buy cheap property themselves, a process Sam Selvon describes in his novel The housing lark (1965).

Britain introduced legislation to combat race discrimination in the sixties, and at the same time altered immigration rules to make it more difficult for people from the “new commonwealth” to settle in Britain. A couple of generations later, people of Caribbean origin probably account for a bit more than 1% of the British population, with about half of those living in London, and they have had a big impact in many cultural areas, especially music and poetry. And despite the “no blacks, no Irish…” thing, the British have been keen to take Caribbean culture on board. At the high-cultural level, the BBC started a tradition of taking Caribbean literature seriously with the iconic radio show Caribbean Voices in the 40s and 50s - regular contributors included Naipaul, Selvon, Brathwaite, Walcott, Lamming, and just about everyone who was subsequently anybody in the world of Caribbean letters (if you are in the UK, you might still be able to listen to a documentary the World Service made about the show in 2009: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003nwck). Every pot-smoking teenager in the last forty or fifty years has aspired to display at least a bit of Rastafarian iconography, and Caribbean music is so popular that for a time one of the most successful bands in the country was a white(!) reggae group from Birmingham.


Subversive iconography?

For the early days of Caribbean settlement in the UK, see especially the poetry of James Berry (who arrived in 1948) and the fiction of George Lamming (especially In the castle of my skin) and Sam Selvon (The lonely Londoners), who both arrived in 1950. Naipaul also wrote extensively about his early days in Britain, but he was lucky enough to win a government scholarship to study in Oxford, so his experience was a little different from most of his contemporaries. E.R. Braithwaite’s semi-autobiographical account of his experiences as a black teacher in an inner-city school in London in the fifties, To sir with love (1959 - famous because of the 1967 film with Sidney Poitier) is another classic of the time, but modern critics find it hard to swallow Braithwaite’s implication that racism is only really unjustified when its victim is an intelligent, educated person.

For more recent views of Caribbean communities in Britain, you could try the poetry of Benjamin Zephanaiah or Grace Nichols - both subversive and often comic, and both very concerned to challenge stereotypes (Zephaniah is also a very successful writer of poetry for children). Or the novels of Beryl Gilroy, who came to England as a student in 1951, but didn’t start writing fiction until the 1980s, or Andrea Levy, whose parents were on the Windrush (especially Small island).

Things to think about:

- Why did it take the arrival of Caribbean migrants to make the British discover racism?

- One of the first people to disembark from the Windrush was the famous calypsonian Lord Kitchener. Is it possible to have more levels of postcolonial complexity than that in one sentence?

- Would suggesting that they don't like dogs be an effective way of blackening the names of evil landlords anywhere else in the world?

The following lists of authors by country were derived by first searching for the Caribbean literature tag on LT and then looking at individual countries. So they probably leave out certain authors who were not tagged, and I welcome additions.

Also, as Mark notes above, Caribbean authors move around a lot, and not just to the former colonizer. I have tried to indicate where authors also lived (based on LT's Common Knowledge. Again, additions are welcome.

Antigua
Jamaica Kincaid (also US)

Barbados
Edward Kamau Brathwaite (also UK)
George Lamming (also Trinidad & Tobago, UK)

Bonaire
Cola Debrot (also Curacao, Venezuela, the Netherlands)

Cuba
Reinaldo Arenas (also US)
Alejo Carpentier (born in Switzerland, also Venezuela, France)
Jane Duran (also Chile, US, UK)
Cristina Garcia (also US)
Nicolás Guillén
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Guillermo Cabrera Infante (also UK)
Mayra Montero (also Puerto Rico, Mexico)
Leonardo Padura
Carlos Pintado (also US)
José Manuel Prieto (also USSR, Mexico)
Severo Sarduy (also France)

Curaçao
Elis Juliana

Dominica
Phyllis S. Alfrey (also UK, US, Trinindad & Tobago)
Jean Rhys (also UK, France, and many other places)

Dominican Republic
Julia Alvarez (also US)
Junot Diaz (also US)

Guadeloupe
Maryse Condé (also France, Guinea, Ghana, Senegal)
Simone Schwarz-Bart (also France, Senegal, Switzerland)

Guyana (on mainland South America but often included in the Caribbean)
John Agard (also UK)
Martin Carter
David Dabydeen
Fred D'Agular (also UK, US)
Wilson Harris
Roy A. K. Heath (also UK)
Karen King-Aribisala
Edgar Mittelholzer (also UK)
Grace Nichols (also UK)

Haiti
Myriam Chancy (also Canada, US)
Marie Chauvet
Edwidge Danticat (also US)
Jan Dominique
Frankétienne
Dany Laferrière (also Canada)
René Philoctète
Jacques Roumain
Philippe Thoby-Marcelin
Lyonel Trouillot

Jamaica
Louise Bennett
James Berry (also UK, US)
Jean Binta Breeze (also UK)
Colin Channer (also US)
Staceyann Chin (also US)
Michelle Cliff (also US)
Garfield Ellis
Lorna Goodison (also US)
John Hearne (also US)
Marlon James
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Kei Miller (also UK)
Mervyn Morris
Patricia Powell (also US)
Claudia Rankine (also US)
Andrew Salkey (also Panama, UK, US)
Dennis Scott (also US)
Olive Senior (also Canada)
Michael Smit

Martinique
Patrick Chamoiseau
Aime Cesaire (also France)
Frantz Fanon (also Algeria and France)
Edouard Glissant (also France, US0

Montserrat
E. A. Markham (also UK)

Puerto Rico
Victor Hernandez Cruz (also US)
Rosario Ferre (also US)
Rene Marquez (also Spain, US)
Luis Rafael Sanchez
Esmerelda Santiago
Mayra Santos-Febres

Santa Lucia
Derek Walcott (also Grenada, US)

St. Kitts
Caryl Phillips (also UK, US)

Trinidad & Tobago
Floella Benjamin
Neil Bissoondath (also Canada)
Dionne Brand (also Canada)
Merle Hodge (also UK)
Amryl Johnson (also UK)
Lynn Joseph (also Dominican Republic, US)
Oonya Kempadoo (also Guyana, Santa Lucia)
Earl Lovelace (also US)
Shani Mootoo (also Canada)
Shiva Naipul (also UK)
V. S. Naipul
Elizabeth Nunez (also US)
Monique Roffey (also UK)
Samuel Selvon

US Virgin Islands
Tiphanie Yanique (also US)

>1 rebeccanyc: and >2 thorold: Incredible job, especially given the tight timelines. Thanks so much. It will be a great quarter.

>11 SassyLassy: Thanks, Sassy. It was fun.

Some of the books on my TBR that I might read.

The Chase and Reasons of State by Alejo Carpentier
Paradiso by Jose Lezama Lima
Firefly by Severo Sarduy
Dirty Havana Trilogy by Pedro Juan Gutierrez
Three Trapped Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Massacre River by Rene Philoctete
Brother I'm Dying and Krik Krak by Edwidge Danticat

Of course, I look forward to exploring some of the other authors too.

Roxane Gay, Myriam Chancy, Jan Dominique could be added to the list of Haitian writers.

I'm thinking of reading A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, by Bartolome de Las Casas and Empire's Crossroads, by Carrie Gibson. Additionally, I'm looking for some fiction that would be available on Audible written by a classic woman author, but I'm having difficulty. It's a tough combination I guess. If anybody has any good ideas, let me know!

ETA: Really, I could read any sort of fiction to add to my non-fiction, but I try too hard to double up on my challenges. If you were to pick ONE fiction book what would it be? (Has to be available on Audible - since that's where most of my open reading time is.)

>14 The_Hibernator: Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea should be available and probably qualifies as a classic - have you read Jane Eyre? It's a sort of prequel.

I'm thinking of reading Jamaica Kincaid 's Annie John since it's on the 1001 list. I'm also including multiple challenges at the same time.

Thanks Janet! You're right! Wide Sargasso Sea IS a woman author classic. That's perfect. I might even pick it up to read physically since it's not available on Audible. I also wish some of the Derek Walcott books were available on Audible (sigh).

Fabulous job, Mark and Rebecca, especially on such short notice (and during the winter holiday season)! I posted this list of potential unread books from my TBR collection on my 2016 Club Read and 75 Books threads:

Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps
Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnificent; Texaco
Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light; The Farming of Bones; Krik? Krak!
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; The Wretched of the Earth
Frankétienne, Ripe to Burst
Marlon James, The Book of Night Women
Linton Kwesi Johnson, Selected Poems
Oonya Kempadoo, All Decent Animals
George Lamming, The Emigrants
Earl Lovelace, Is Just a Movie; Salt
E. A. Markham, The Three Suitors of Fred Belair
Paule Marshall, The Fisher King
Shiva Naipaul, Fireflies; North of South
V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival; The Loss of El Dorado; India: A Wounded Civilization;
The Writer and the World: Essays
Orlando Patterson, The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth; The Ordeal of Integration
Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe; The Lost Child; The Nature of Blood
Claudia Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
Monique Roffey, Archipelago
Simone Schwarz-Bart, The Bridge of Beyond
Lyonel Trouillot, Children of Heroes
Derek Walcott, Omeros

I'll start with Texaco.

Wow!!! As the host for the next quarterly thread, it's going to be a tough job following in your footsteps. In the meantime I will enjoy following this one. I haven't studied the list of authors yet, but I'd like to sample at least a few from the francophone ones. I can see a lot of additions to my wishlist in the future.

>1 rebeccanyc:, >3 thorold: et al: TERRIFIC intro!

Some of your "things to think about" I find a bit puzzling but it'll probably iron itself out in reading.

Would it have made such a big difference if Sir Thomas Bertram made his money from English coal mines or from Irish estates rather than from sugar plantations?

I don't understand quite difference to what? Marxist literary criticism, for example, points out the role of the underclass and its exploitation in bourgeois literature all the time--it's just a question of what one chooses to think about.

- are we more uncomfortable with Linton Kwesi Johnson telling us to fight the police, or with Derek Walcott hijacking the Western Canon for St Lucia and Trinidad?

I'm A-OK with both! Regarding the "Western Canon", I don't believe it's possible to hijack something we kept being hit with over the head (or did, if we happened to have a pre-multi-culti education).

The European powers and the US all profited from slavery and kept it going: should we still feel guilty for what our ancestors did over 200 years ago? Is there merit in the idea of reparations?

Yes and yes!

>13 BLBera: I added Myriam Chancy and Jan Dominique, but Roxane Gay, per LT's Common Knowledge, was born in Nebraska and went to college in Michigan, so I didn't add her.

>14 The_Hibernator: If I were to pick one fiction book by a woman, it would be The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwartz-Bart, a totally amazing book, but I doubt it's available on Audible.

>17 kidzdoc: Great list, Darryl, and thank you.

Gay identifies herself as Haitian American; I wasn't sure if the criteria is strictly birthplace. She's worth reading, anyway. Her An Untamed State was one of my favorites last year.

>21 BLBera: I listed people who were either born in the country or lived there for a long time. So many people's parents came from other countries to the US or the UK or Canada that I had no way of finding them and thought it wasn't right to include them if they were born in some other country than the Caribbean or never lived there.

I've read four of Edwidge Danticat's books and can recommend them all. Krik Krak is a series of short stories and my review says that if you don't know anything about the upheavals in Haiti you might need some research to understand the situation. Behind the Mountains is written through the mind of an 8 year old and is thus very affecting. Breath, Eyes, Memory is from the POV of a 12 year old. Danticat's writing is both beautiful and assured.

I know that I have both V. S. Naipaul and Jamaica Kincaid on my shelves, among others, so I need to do some searching for this group read.

Thank you for the great intro! Sounds like it's going to be an interesting group read this quarter.

I'm excited about this! I have a small list of suitable books, at the top of which is A History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, which has been on my radar for some time.

Rebecca and Mark, thank you for setting up this first-quarter thread. The introductory content is very helpful. I don't know how much I'll participate but I will start with Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat. I also have her Breath, Eyes, Memory to read.

I wouldn't mind rereading some Jamaica Kincaid, now that I think of it.

It's good to see that we've stirred up some enthusiasm!
I'm making a start on the theme with a back to back read of El reino de este mundo and The black Jacobins - two books I came across during the lightning research campaign for the introductory posts and realised I should have read years ago. And I've picked up a recent collection by John Agard, Travel light, travel dark.

Two views of the Haitian Revolution:

The black Jacobins (1938, reissued 1980) by C.L.R. James (Trinidad, UK, etc., 1901-1989)
El reino de este mundo (The kingdom of this world, 1949) by Alejo Carpentier (Cuba, France, etc., 1904-1980)
 

These two books were both written to reclaim the Haitian Revolution as a pivotal event in Caribbean/Latin American history, challenging the standard (European) view in which it was presented as a minor sideshow in the French Revolutionary Wars. Both James and Carpentier want to show us the specifically American character of the events, and to stress that they arose primarily from the active involvement of the people of the colony, especially the (mostly African-born) slaves. Both cover roughly the same timespan and - as you would expect - write about many of the same people and events, but beyond that they are quite different in form and focus.

The Trinidadian-born scholar C.L.R. James was a revolutionary Marxist who somehow managed to combine a highly successful day job as a cricket writer (his memoir Beyond a boundary is still often cited as one of the best cricket books ever) with a long career of political activism in which he was, inter alia, adviser to many of the future leaders of postcolonial Africa. The black Jacobins is a classic bit of Marxist historical writing, in which James sets out the case for seeing the slave labourers of the Caribbean sugar plantations as the first modern industrial proletariat. But there's more to it than just political theory: James is clearly fascinated by the complicated interactions between the different social groups within the French colony (slaves, free blacks, Maroons, "Mulattoes", white administrators, and the slave-owning plantocracy) as well as the effect of the rapidly-changing political situation in France (the Paris mob and the left-wing intellectuals opposed to slavery on the one hand; the maritime bourgeoisie with shares in the sugar or shipping trades on the other), and of course the periodic involvement of Britain, Spain and the USA, also torn between preserving their own stakes in slavery and doing down the French. Since most of the parties involved changed sides a couple of times between the 1780s and 1804, the course of the conflict is hard to follow, even in James's very lucid account, and no-one comes out of it with very much credit apart from the mass of the Haitian people with their unshakeable demands for freedom. Even James's great hero, Toussaint Louverture, who is practically a saint in the earlier chapters (and the greatest general since Alexander) makes a critical error of judgement by remaining loyal to France after the Peace of Amiens gives Napoleon the chance to attempt to re-establish control over the colony.

The Penguin edition comes with a postscript added by James in 1980, which provides a superbly concise summary of Caribbean history and culture from Toussaint to Castro, including quick sketches of most of the major literary and political figures of the region (most of them personal acquaintances, of course).

Alejo Carpentier was also a political radical who had to spend quite a bit of his life in exile outside Cuba, but his project in writing about Haiti was more aesthetic than directly political. He was keen to contribute to the development of a specifically Latin American literature, reflecting his view that the American view of the world differed from traditional European views because of the role of collective belief (both indigenous and arising from African-derived ideas like Santeria and Voudou), which could create a kind of objective reality for fantastic events (lo real maravilloso). For him the key thing about the Haitian revolution thus seems to be the interaction between political and mythical elements in shaping the awareness of the people. He was clearly also influenced very heavily by his recollections of some of the sites he visited on his famous trip to Haiti in 1943, especially Henri-Christophe's palace and fort. Instead of a linear account of the events, we get a fragmented, impressionistic view, where we see a few key incidents from the points of view of relatively unimportant characters, giving Carpentier the possibility to abstract and generalise in a way that wouldn't be possible in a classic non-fiction account or a traditional historical novel. The result is very interesting and colourful, and it seems to achieve what Carpentier intended, but of course it lacks one of the important things you normally look for in a historical novel, the opportunity to identify with the characters.

Thank you for the great reviews! I know next to nothing about the French ex-colonies in the Caribbeans, but I remember reading about the complex multi-tiered social hierarchy based mostly on how many of your ancestors were black slaves. I wish I remembered which book (probably a novel) I read this in. Both books sound interesting and will probably end up in my wishlist.

I loved The Kingdom of This World, but I love Alejo Carpentier in general. I've had The Black Jacobins on my TBR for years and I suppose if I'm ever going to read it, now would be the time.

>30 rebeccanyc: I'd definitely recommend The black Jacobins!
I'm curious to find out more about Carpentier's musical side: I think I might try Concierto barocco next.

review posted at Rebecca's suggestion:


Nine Coins/Nueve monedas by Carlos Pintado, trans. by Hilary Vaughan Dobel

This is an LTER book.

Cuban born, living in Miami, Pintado won the National Poetry Series' Paz Prize for Poetry for Nine Coins/ Nueve monedas. As the title suggests, the 88 page book is a bilingual volume with the English translations by Hilary Vaughan Dobel facing the Spanish originals.

This intensely lyrical collection ranges in form from sonnets to prose poems. These are poems of the night -- full of shadows, expressing intense desire, and an ever-present sense of death. The poems are highly allusive, referencing other writers, literary characters, visual artists, and a wide range of myths -- Egyptian, Classical and Eastern. In his introduction to the volume, Richard Blanco writes, "The urgency in these poems feels as if the poet's very life depended on writing them." The reader is hurtled through Blanco's dream visions and emotions.

I wish my Spanish were far better than rudimentary. Dobel, the translator, is a poet herself and consulted with Pintado on the translations, but much of the music of the original poems, especially the sonnets, seems to be lost in the translations.

A MITAD DEL POEMA

A mitad del poema hay siempre un miedo:
toda mano vacila, tiembla el ojo,
La palabra se pierde en su despojo.
A mitad del poema have siempre un miedo.
Como el náufrago al mar, el verso agita
la quietud memoriosa del silencio--
¿o sera que la muerte es el silencio
que en el sueño su estatua precipita?
A mitad del poema, equidistantes,
el inicio y el fin son ya un pasado
y un mañana, dudosos, vacilantes.
A mitad del poema, algo sagrado
nos empuja a seguir por lost distantes
abismos que abre el sueño en lo soñado.

HALFWAY THROUGH THE POEM

Halfway through the poem there’s always a fear
The eye is a-tremble, the whole hand falters,
and the word has been stripped bare and finds itself lost.
Halfway through the poem there’s always a fear.
Like a sailor who’s fled from a ship as it sinks,
verse troubles the silence, its long-minded peace--
Or is it that death is truly the sound
of what’s silent, a statue that falls in a dream?
Halfway through the poem’s a point equidistant--
where starting and ending have turned into past
and tomorrow, days doubtful and hesitant.
Halfway through the poem, it seems something sacred
will force us to follow it down distant depths
where it opens the dreaming into what is dreamed.

The translations of the more open verse and prose poems work better for me, but being able to go back and forth between the English and Spanish preserves much of the original feel even of the sonnets. Carlos Pintado is definitely a poet I will be on the watch for. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection.

Hilary Vaughn Dobel on translating Carlos Pintado's "Mudras":https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/own_words/Carlos_Pintado/

"The Moon" in the NYT Sunday magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/magazine/the-moon.html?_r=0

Another two for the price of one review (plenty of time to sit in armchairs and look out at the rain during the holidays...). Two contrasting views of the first generation of Caribbean immigrants to Britain, written half a century apart:

The lonely Londoners (1956) by Sam Selvon (Trinidad, UK, Canada, 1923-1994)
Small island (2004) by Andrea Levy (UK, 1956- )

  

The Lonely Londoners was Selvon's second novel, written in the first couple of years after he arrived in Britain from Trinidad. As you might expect, it deals with the problems and hardships of newly-arrived Caribbean immigrants in London: the difficulty of finding decent jobs and accommodation, coping with British people who hadn't yet learnt to live with people from different backgrounds, and so on. What you don't expect, though, is what Selvon does with this subject-matter. Never one to fit into anyone else's stereotype of what a postcolonial writer should be, he sets the squalor of immigrant life against the glory of exploring your youth and independence in a city like London. He turns it into a glorious, upbeat poetic celebration of London and of Caribbean individuality: imagine Damon Runyon writing Mrs Dalloway after listening to too many calypsos, or James Kelman if he were a few decades older and Trinidadian not Glaswegian, and you get the general idea, but you really have to read it yourself.
Like a lot of British writing of the 1950s, it's all rather misogynistic: it's a novel about a bunch of young men on the loose in which women appear only as disposable girlfriends or embarrassing mothers, but Selvon usually makes it pretty clear that he doesn't intend you to take his narrator's view of things entirely at face value.

Small island is a much more conventional sort of historical novel, with a straightforward linear narrative in which the four main characters take turns to tell the story. Gilbert is a young Jamaican man who has served in the RAF during the war and returns to settle in England in 1948; Bernard is an English RAF veteran of about the same age; Hortense and Queenie are their respective wives. The central idea of the book is the startling difference between colonial and metropolitan views of Englishness: the Jamaicans have grown up in a cultural tradition and an education system designed to make them proud of their status as citizens of the Empire and subjects of the King, and to look to Britain as the source of history, literature and everything else that matters in their lives. They are shocked and puzzled when they come to England and find that most people have no notion that the West Indies even exist, and cannot imagine that there might be black people who think of themselves as British, and even less that those black people might have skills and training that equip them to do anything more than the humblest of jobs. Levy develops that idea nicely enough, and she puts in a lot of very nice, mostly accurate or at least plausible, period detail. What there is is definitely very good, but from the clutch of big awards this book has won I was rather expecting to get something that goes a little deeper than giving the generation of fifty years ago a mild rap on the knuckles for being credulous optimists/small-minded bigots.

...and today's bonus short:

Concierto barroco (Concert baroque, 1974) by Alejo Carpentier (Cuba, etc.)


A fun little novel from quite late in Carpentier's career, in which he illustrates his idea of the baroque as the definitive American style. The plot doesn't make much sense, as you would expect from a truly baroque work: a wealthy Mexican gentleman travels to Venice in the early 18th century accompanied by his black Cuban servant, they bump into Vivaldi during a carnival party and give him the idea of writing an opera about Montezuma, there's a jam session in the Ospedale della Pieta with Scarlatti and Händel on keyboards, Vivaldi on strings and the Cuban playing percussion, and this is followed by a picnic breakfast on Stravinsky's grave (we also get a glimpse of Wagner's funeral procession, a touching farewell at the railway station and a Louis Armstrong concert!).

In between, we learn that the plot of the opera Vivaldi writes, Motezuma(*) (apparently they couldn't decide between 'n' and 'c', and ended up with neither), is almost equally strange, featuring various love affairs between Mexicans and Conquistadors and a happy ending in which Cortes and Montezuma celebrate the friendship of their two peoples! The Cuban is disgusted by this distortion of history, but everyone tells him that the necessities of art take precedence.

It's all very fast-moving and entertaining, without any long philosophical asides, but there are also plenty of wonderfully baroque descriptions in which detail after detail is piled on to the point of absurdity (a gloriously decorated silver chamber pot plays an important role in several of these...). Not all that much to do with the Caribbean except in a very indirect sense, but definitely an enjoyable book.

(*)There really is such an opera, incidentally: first performed in 1733 it's thought to be the first ever written on an American theme. At the time Carpentier was writing only the libretto was known to exist, but the music has since been rediscovered in Kiev and became the subject of a complicated copyright dispute that would certainly have been grist to Carpentier's mill, had he known about it. (There is a recording now, you can listen to it on Spotify if you're curious...)

>33 thorold:, >34 thorold:

Gasp! Are you sitting reading somewhere in my library?! ;) I too liked the Selvon but didn't even make it to the end of Small island, the voice just didn't grab me, everything was predictable... Carpentier was a musicologist and writes well about music--even when he's on the surface writing about other stuff, as in The lost steps--the plot progresses like a musical theme.

Not nearly as good as the Bachianas brasileiras, but worth a listen (assuming one is not prone to head-exploding for such sacrilege ;)):

Bach to Cuba: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 (1st Movement)

I wasn't aware of this book of Carpentier's , but of course I knew of his love of music. I'll have to look for it.

Some of the options on my list for this theme:

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Dominica)
De dochters van de zwarte godin by Micheline Dusseck (Haiti)
The House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferre (Puerto Rico)
Crick, Crack, Monkey by Merle Hodge (Trinidad and Tobago)

>33 thorold: Thanks for the very useful overview of authors from this region and for starting off the discussion.
Interesting double review of the novels by Sam Selvon and Andrea Levy. I've been reading a book by Sigrid Löffler (for non-Germans: a fairly well-known public literary critic here) on Die neue Weltliteratur ("the new world literature"), which for her seems to be mostly post-colonial writing in English. She compares precisely these two novels as reflections on "generation Windrush", the first major wave of immigrants to the UK from the colonies after WWII, which British society was not really ready for. Small Island comes across as being a bit too didactically conceived (which seems to have been the experience of others here), but I'd added The Lonely Londoners to my reading list because it sounds like he does quite daring things with language in order to imitate the creole spoken by his characters.

This sort of reinvigoration of English via a multilingual culture where oral literature is still important had also struck me when reading Derek Walcott; I'll probably use this theme read as an excuse to revisit his Omeros, which is an amazing blend of European literary traditions and local Caribbean culture.

I may also use it as an opportunity to track down some stories by Nalo Hopkinson (Jamaica), who I don't think has been mentioned in this thread yet. She is known primarily as a science-fiction/fantasy writer and has been quite important in introducing issues of race and gender and multi-culturalism into that genre.

A small update: I'm about halfway through Texaco, another book which "does quite daring things with language". I'm reading it in French, and it's very difficult to imagine how it would work in translation - it will be interesting to compare notes with Darryl (>17 kidzdoc:).
At the very least, it disproves my suggestion (>4 thorold:) that French-Caribbean writers might be more interested in ideology than in experimenting with language.

The postman brought me some more Carpentier yesterday, and a couple more poetry collections, so I'm not going to run out of Caribbean reading matter any time soon!

Oh, you make me want to start reading Texaco now! But I have started too many books already. I'll put it on top of the "read next" list.

Has anyone here read anything by Glenville Lovell? I stumbled across Fire in the Canes at a used book store and thought it sounded intriguing (although I didn't buy it because it was a German translation, which seems a bit silly when I'm capable of reading the original).

>41 spiphany: Fire in the canes sounds as though it could be interesting, but the excerpt he has on his site (http://www.glenvillelovell.com) failed to sell it to me. The prose style in the excerpt from his most recent book doesn't really grab me either: he must be someone you read for the story. On the other hand, he does have a rather splendid author photo...

Texaco really sucked me in towards the end: it took me about eight days to read the first two-thirds, and 24 hours for the rest. I also have a distinct feeling that it's going to turn out to be one of the best books I read in 2016. You have been warned!

Texaco (1992, English 1997) by Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique, 1953- )

 

Texaco is essentially an oral history of Martinique from the 1820s to the 1980s, told from the point of view of Marie Sophie Labourieux, the founder of an illegal shanty-town built on the fringes of an oil depot in Fort-de-France. With only a little bit of necessary time-compression, Chamoiseau manages to fit this whole span (containing inter alia the end of slavery and collapse of the plantation system, the 1902 volcano disaster, two world wars, and the transition from colony to overseas Département) into the combined memories of Marie Sophie and her father Esternome, who was born a plantation slave and later became a joiner and smallholder before moving to Fort-de-France in the aftermath of the eruption that destroyed St Pierre. Marie Sophie works for most of her life as a domestic servant, but falls into the role of a community leader in her old age when she finds herself fighting the city and the oil company for the right to squat on the waste land below the tank-farm.

We are supposed to imagine Marie Sophie telling her story to the Urbaniste - a town-planner who has come to see Texaco for himself before advising the city to clear it or incorporate and improve it - but the author comes back in an afterword to explain to us that it's actually based on a series of interviews he, in his self-defined capacity of Marqueur de paroles (i.e. collector of folklore), had with the woman who was the original for Marie Sophie. In addition, the text is punctuated by excerpts from notebooks in which Marei Sophie recorded her own thoughts or the memories of her father, and with letters from the Urbaniste to the Marqueur de paroles.

The text itself is a complicated mixture of formal literary French, street language and Creole, always exciting, always poetic, and constantly undermining our expectations and prejudices. It's divided into sections in the way academic historians like to do "periodisation", but the periods are far from conventional: Temps de pail, Temps de bois-caisse, Temps de fibrociment, Temps béton (straw age, packing-case-wood age, asbestos age, concrete age). Creole words are introduced deliberately and systematically, and always turn out to have far more levels of meaning than the equivalent term in standard French.

Two terms in particular, turn out to be key concepts that keep on expanding in meaning and complexity as we go on through the book: l'En-ville, which is not just the city but the whole idea of urbanisation and everything associated with it; and the competing anarchistic Noutéka, ("us-ness"), an evocation of the powerful mutuality of small communities. Creole is rooted in African spirituality and in the disruptions of slavery, but we're never allowed to forget that Creole has a huge stake in the French language as well. Marie Sophie turns out to be a fan of Montaigne and Rabelais, and just when we're least expecting it, she will hit us with a couple of alexandrines buried in the middle of a passage of prose (...du matin de chaque jour aux beaux néons du soir). Or we suddenly get a couple of pages of vers-libre that looks suspiciously like a parody of Césaire's Cahier d'un retour. And there are some really awful jokes - as when de Gaulle visits the island and no-one is quite sure afterwards whether his speech was celebrating the Frenchness of the Martiniqueans ("Mon dieu, mon dieu, comme vous êtes français!") or exclaiming at their colour ("Mon dieu, mon dieu, comme vous êtes foncés!").

This novel won Chamoiseau the most prestigious French literary award, the Prix Goncourt, in 1992 - he was only the second Caribbean writer to win (the first being his fellow-Martiniquean, René Maran, in 1921). It's not hard to see why: it uses both language and history in original and exciting ways to show us where creole culture comes from, what it can do, and why it matters that little bits of anarchic individuality like Texaco should be able to exist in the world.

Fantastic description of Texaco, Thorold.

I'm deep into A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. It's a worthwhile and engrossing read, although it took me awhile to get into the flow of it. It's interesting to contrast the utterly casual and violent misogyny of all of the male characters with the strength of the single female character of note.

Wonderful review of Texaco. It sounds like it needs to be read in French -- I can't imagine how a translator would be able to catch the nuances of the language shifts.

>43 thorold: I just bought Texaco and mean to start reading it very soon. Great review!

>45 janeajones:
I'm curious about the translation: I'm sure it would be a real challenge for the translator. I know it won some awards. The one LT review to date that explicitly talks about the translation is quite positive about it, whilst wondering how much has been lost. It sounds as though the translator managed to convey at least some of the essential playfulness of the text - if you took that away the book would probably seem like a poor Toni Morrison pastiche...

I've started on another Alejo Carpentier novel, El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a cathedral). I'm reading it on paper (for some reason it doesn't seem to be available in Spanish as an e-book) and I'm really noticing how frustrating it is not to be able to tap on the difficult words to bring up a dictionary. Talk about 21st century problems! It looks like an entertaining read, but I suspect that progress will be slow.

On the strength of a passing mention in Texaco, I've ordered a couple of books by the Haitian writer Jacques Stéphen Alexis (who isn't yet on Rebecca's mega-list above...). He sounds like someone worth following up, I'll report back when I know more.

Fabulous review of Texaco, Mark! I plan to read it next week, when I'll have several days off from work and can give it the attention it deserves.

Hmm. I'm going to have to keep a very low profile around here for a while if it turns out that everyone hates Texaco :-)

Superb review of Texaco. I love those words L'Enville and noutéka. Also love the ambiguity of DeGaulle. He was far less ambiguous in Canada: "Vivre le Québec libre!"
As Jane says, it will be interesting to see how the translation works.

Another very impressive book, quite different from Texaco in terms of style, approach, language and just about everything else. But much closer to my normal "comfort zone", and a bit less exciting to read, since it ticks several boxes that had put it on my list already quite some time ago. I had a pretty good idea what to expect from it before I started:

El siglo de las luces (1962, Explosion in a cathedral, 1963) by Alejo Carpentier (Cuba, etc.)



This is an historical novel in the fullest sense of the term: it works as a novel with a storyline that gives us an entertaining fictional view of events from the past, it brings in extra context from the perspective of the time in which it was written, and it pushes us to think more generally about the nature of political commitment and historical change. I don't know if it was ever available in socialist Hungary, but if it was then I'm sure György Lukács would have found quite a few copies under the Christmas tree the year it came out (do Marxist philosophers even have Christmas trees?).

Carpentier looks at the effects of the French Revolution in the Caribbean by following the career of the French colonial administrator Victor Hugues. (No relation to the Notre Dame chap, but Carpentier mischievously finds a reason for him to exclaim "Les cloches, les cloches!" the first time he appears...). Hugues was almost a forgotten figure in the 1950s, but Carpentier became interested in him when he realised that the same person was responsible for implementing the abolition of slavery in Guadeloupe in 1794 and reintroducing it in French Guiana barely a decade later. From the little Carpentier could find out about the early political career of Hugues it was clear that he must have begun as someone ideologically committed to the Revolution - how did he go from being a Jacobin disciple of Rousseau and Robespierre to enforcing Napoleonic directives that went against all the beautiful, logical ideals of the Age of Enlightenment?

We follow Hugues through the eyes of two young middle-class Cubans, the cousins Esteban and Sofia. They have grown up in a house full of subversive books and scientific toys in Havana, and make friends with Hugues when he calls at their home on a business trip shortly before the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution. There's a great deal of Candide-like zipping about the region and across the Atlantic in ships as a complicated triangular relationship develops between the three of them, in which erotic bonds are made to compete with political disenchantment.

There are some very beautiful lyrical passages in which Carpentier shows us how the baroque complexity of the Caribbean natural environment and its human history can't be reduced to the arbitrary "rational" concepts of political theory, which are especially represented in the book by the two machines of political power Hugues takes to Guadeloupe: the printing press and the guillotine. Just one example: I was especially struck by the description of a rain shower in Guadeloupe in Ch.XXII, which brings in practically an entire symphony orchestra of musical metaphors.

There are also a lot of implicit references to 20th century history, although Carpentier never officially steps outside the frame of his 18th century narrative. When he writes about Hugues's veneration of Robespierre and his utter disbelief when he hears about the coup of 9 Thermidor, it is pretty obvious that Carpentier is thinking about Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956, for instance; Billaud-Varenne in exile has a certain resemblance to Trotsky, and I don't think anyone could read the final chapter without thinking about the Spanish Civil War. Carpentier was of course writing whilst the Cuban Revolution was in progress, so I would imagine there are a lot of references to Cuban politics as well, if you know where to look.

This is another of those books where publishers around the world have had their fun changing the title: in the Spanish original it's El siglo de las luces ("The century of lights", or "The age of enlightenment"), and at least the French, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish and Swedish editions have taken this over literally. The English publishers, on the other hand, were obviously afraid that it would be mistaken for a history textbook and chose the more dramatic Explosion in a cathedral (from the title of a painting that hangs in the home of Esteban and Sofia, and which Carpentier uses as an image of the collision between the Enlightenment and the Baroque). The Germans do the same with Explosion in der Kathedrale, but the Dutch take another striking image out of the text and call it De guillotine op de voorsteven ("The guillotine on the prow").

My Caribbean TBR list seems to be getting longer and longer. Yesterday I started Amour, colère et folie by Marie Vieux-Chauvet (about time for another female author!). I've also got several poetry collections on the go, for which I want to post a group review in the next few days.

Other recent arrivals and books still in the post include:

- Jacques Stéphen Alexis L'espace d'un cillement and Compère général soleil
- Patrick Chamoiseau Solibo magnifique
- Maryse Condé Traversée de la mangrove
- Reinaldo Arenas Antes que anochezca
- Edward Kamau Brathwaite The arrivants
- Aimé Césaire Cahier d'un retour au pays natal - I realised that I didn't have a copy of this any more, so I splashed out on the Bloodaxe parallel text edition, which has enough critical apparatus on board to make a thirty-page poem stretch to fill a 160 page book.

Hmm. I'm beginning to wonder whether Q1 is going to be long enough. That re-read of Omeros might have to wait...

Poetry roundup part 1:

Cahier d'un retour au pays natal = Notebook of a return to my native land (1939, revised 1947, 1956, etc.) by Aimé Césaire (Martinique, 1913-2008)
Read in the Bloodaxe parallel text edition with a translation and introduction by Mireille Rosello, 1995
 

Aimé Césaire is one of the key figures in postcolonial literature, and his Cahier is one of its seminal texts, discussed on just about every course on the subject. In fact it's so seminal, and its historical importance and relevance to later generations of writers are so well explained in the textbooks, that it's scarcely ever necessary actually to look at it. Which is a shame, because as well as being a key moment in literary history, it is an interesting and rewarding poem in its own right.

It's a surprisingly modest work in scale: a free-verse poem that takes up about thirty pages in print, so that it's not at all inconceivable that it would fit into an actual "notebook" in manuscript. To summarise something that can't and probably shouldn't be summarised, Césaire, who was studying in Paris at the time, imagines himself revisiting Martinique, watching what's going on at the break of dawn ("au bout du petit matin") from the point of view of a sparrow-hawk. And what he sees is not attractive or nostalgic: everything is tainted with dirt and disease and the damage done by slavery and colonialism. He looks back in time to see slaves being tortured by landowners, or Toussaint Louverture in his cell in the Jura (surrounded by the "white death" of snow). He thinks about a black man he has seen on a tram in Paris, apparently crushed by his sense of inferiority, and he comes to the realisation that blackness - Négritude - is something to celebrate and assert. The "great black hole" he wanted to drown himself in a little while ago is now the place where he can fish out and exploit "the night's malevolent tongue".

There is a lot of anger here, but it's expressed in surprisingly beautiful and complex language. Césaire was a poet first of all, even if he did end up devoting the last sixty years of his life to politics. You can get a lot of enjoyment out of the sweep and rhythm of his words, and the baffling variety of registers he uses. Unfortunately for us, he was also trained as a classics teacher, and had a habit of pillaging the remoter reaches of the Latin and Greek dictionaries for words that ought to but didn't - as yet - exist in French. When you read Cahier, it is often more difficult to come to terms with these obscure classical coinages than with the handful of specifically Caribbean terms he uses. At a few points this leads to real problems: crucially, for example, no-one has ever been quite sure what Césaire meant by the last word of the text, verrition - it possibly has something to do with turning or sweeping, but if so, why is it qualified by the adjective immobile?

(Rosello mostly translates these words into equally obscure or made-up English terms, to preserve the difficulty of the original. Thus verrition becomes "revolvolution". This is probably a trick you can only get away with in a parallel text: in a standalone translation it would be rather baffling.)

Eighty years on, it's easy enough to see the blind spots that weren't so evident in 1939 when the first version of the Cahier appeared. There's a lot of declamatory Whitmanesque penis-waving, and not much role for women in Césaire's view of the world; many people have pointed out how négritude's simplistic race-based focus forces it to overlook many of the ethnic and social complexities of the Caribbean, and more recently Patrick Chamoiseau and his co-authors in Éloge de la Créolité have challenged Césaire's exclusion of Creole language and culture. (Chamoiseau's novel Texaco is in many ways a direct challenge to the attitudes expressed in the Cahier, but it is careful to treat Césaire the person and politician with considerable respect and affection.)

The Bloodaxe edition comes with a very comprehensive introductory essay by Professor Rosello, who also did the parallel text translation. Without taking sides noticeably, she sets out the background to the poem's composition and discusses its reception and current (1995) views of its importance, and provides a fairly comprehensive bibliography. One rather striking omission is that she doesn't get into any detail about the textual history of the poem, beyond remarking that it first appeared almost unnoticed in a review called Volontés in 1939, and that it only really came to the attention of the critics in a new edition with a preface by André Bréton in 1947. From what I've read elsewhere I know that Césaire revised the poem quite heavily on at least three occasions, so it seems at least odd not to mention which version of the text is being used and why.

If you can live with that, this edition seems to be a very good way to approach the poem if French isn't your first language. Rosello's translation is fairly literal but by no means plodding, so depending on how good your French is, you can switch back and forth between the original and the translation quite comfortably.

>52 thorold: My Caribbean TBR list seems to be getting longer and longer. It's working! That's the reason we do these threads.

I'm really enjoying your reviews and the way you put the works in context. My Caribbean wish list is growing.

Poetry roundup part 2:

Turner: new and selected poems (1995, 2002) by David Dabydeen (Guyana, UK, 1955- )
Travel light, travel dark (2013) by John Agard (Guyana, UK, 1949- )
Wicked World! (2000) by Benjamin Zephaniah (Jamaica, UK, 1958- )

   

The main work in Turner is an extended poem written in reaction to J.M.W. Turner's painting "Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon coming on" (1840), now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship). Dabydeen sadly doesn't pick up the comment attributed by Mark Twain to a Boston reporter, that the painting resembles "a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes", but instead lets himself be provoked by Ruskin's famously ecstatic comments, which completely ignored the painting's political message and treated it as though it were an abstract composition.

In Dabydeen's version, the long-overlooked drowning African slave in the foreground of the picture (whom the poet calls "Turner") becomes the narrator of the poem. After many years in the water he is trying, unsuccessfully, to reconnect with his past. Things are complicated by various other characters in the poem also called "Turner", including the captain of the slave-ship and a stillborn child. As the poem moves around unpredictably in time and place between Africa, Guyana, and India, and the slave-Turner and the captain-Turner both keep shifting ages and genders (and even numbers), this isn't a poem to read if you want to keep a close grip on what's happening and why. There's a lot in the poem to enjoy in terms of language and images, but in the end I'm not sure if we are really any further than agreeing with Dabydeen that slavery was cruel and evil. And an impression that somewhere a tortoiseshell cat has been at the tomatoes...

I found some of the other poems in this collection, where Dabydeen plays around with Guyanan creole, more interesting.

Tie me haan up.
Juk out me eye.
Haal me teet out
So me na go bite.
(from "Slave song")

---

John Agard is a poet who always has a sense of fun tucked away somewhere in the background of his work, even when he's dealing with serious subjects, and he particularly enjoys bringing apparently incongruous ideas together. There's a lot of this in Travel light, travel dark - Handel's Water Music takes on the slave trade, a racist Saxon complains in a pub about Norse immigrants, Old Father Thames contemplates a sex-change, and so on. I particularly liked "Prospero Caliban Cricket", an hommage to C.L.R. James, in which he puts new life into the most overworked postcolonial literary allusion with a calypso-style cricket commentary:

Caliban arcing de ball
like an unpredictable whip
Prospero foot it like chain to de ground.
Before he could mek a move
de ball gone thru to de slip.

---

Benjamin Zephanaiah may be well known for his punchy reggae-inspired performance poetry, but he also quietly seems to have built up quite a career for himself as a children's writer. Wicked World! is the first of his collections for children I've had a chance to look at. It's a set of poems about how people from different parts of the world are all different and we should all do our best to live together happily - "Be cool mankind". The poems are quite charming and occasionally interestingly quirky, and the bold pen-and-ink illustrations by Sarah Symonds work well with them, but I had the feeling that it was all a bit too nice really to get the message across.

GUADELOUPE



The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart translated from the French by Barbara Bray
first published in 1972 as Pluie et vent sur Telumée miracle

It's difficult to write about this book without sounding trite. At times it is delightful, at other times it is devastating. My fear of just about any adjective to describe it though is based in a terror of making it sound like those dreadful blurbs on the backs of the novels so loved by certain book clubs. That would be to make it what it definitely is not. I can see some careless blurber using "inspiring" or "multi generational" or even worse, "heartwarming". That would be an injustice.

The novel starts as the personal narrative of an old woman, looking back at her childhood. However, it quickly becomes clear that it is also a narrative of country, and beyond that, of slavery, a condition that has many forms.

At age ten, Telumée Lougandoor was sent from her village of L'Abandonée to live with her grandmother for the best and worst of reasons. Her grandmother, Queen Without a Name, took her far from the world, over the Bridge of Beyond.

Queen Without a Name's cabin was the last in the village; it marked the end of the world of human beings and looked as if it were leaning against the mountain. Queen Without a Name opened the door and ushered me into the one little room. As soon as I crossed the threshold I felt as if I were in a fortress, safe from everything known and unknown, under the protection of my grandmother's great full skirt.

This sounds like the entry to a magical world, but Queen Without a Name was one of the most realistic women ever. Her life was now to teach Telumée how to live so that she would always be the one in charge, spiritually and materially, but to accomplish this in a way that wouldn't scare the child. Thursdays were story night in the hut:

Above our heads the land wind made the rusty corrugated iron roof creak and groan. But the voice of Queen Without a Name was glowing, distant, and her eyes crinkled in a faint smile as she opened before us a world in which trees cry out, fishes fly, birds catch the fowler, and the Negro is the child of God.

The knowledge of what it is to be a people apart, scorned and abused, the descendants of slaves, permeates the writing. The cane fields were still out there, waiting for those who couldn't make it on their own. Abolition had done little to change things.

The Bridge of Beyond may have led to a world beyond the slavery of the fields, but there was still the slavery of entrapment, of loving unwisely. This was a lesson Queen Without a Name worked hard to impart. However it is a lesson every generation has to learn for itself; one Telumée pondered from different angles throughout her life.

Simone Schwarz-Bart grew up in Guadeloupe and moved to Paris in her teens. She married André Schwarz-Bart, author of The Last of the Just. The two felt compelled to tell the stories of their respective peoples, those they felt were the most oppressed: the Jews and the Africans, each in their own diaspora. Although they collaborated on several books, they wrote their peoples' stories separately. Queen Without a Name's message applies equally well to both:

Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn't ride you, you must ride it.

_________________

cross posted from my Club Read 2016 thread

>56 SassyLassy:
Thanks - perfect timing! I was just starting to think about chasing up that book, because Rosello mentioned it a couple of times in her introduction to Cahier d'un retour, and it sounded interesting. Obviously it is.

Since I have trouble resisting Victorian memoirs, a little diversion from the heavy literature to look into a Jamaican woman who did her bit to shake up 19th century Britain:

Wonderful adventures of Mrs Seacole in many lands (1857) by Mary Seacole (Jamaica, UK, 1805-1881)



Even if it's something of an exaggeration to call her "the black Florence Nightingale", Mary Seacole was clearly a resourceful and enterprising woman who simply went ahead and did the things she wanted to without bothering too much about what society might expect of her. Not what you would think of as typical mid-Victorian behaviour. She grew up in a middle-class creole background in Kingston, Jamaica (her father was a Scottish soldier, her mother a free black Jamaican), was left a widow at the age of 39 and went off to Panama where she ran hotels and stores in out of the way places, most of her customers being miners on their way to or from the California goldfields.

By her own account, she was interested in medicine from an early age, and she describes her mother as a "doctress", but she never had any access to formal medical training. In Kingston she was friendly with the British troops stationed there, and helped out with nursing during several outbreaks of disease. When the Crimean War broke out, she immediately tried to volunteer as a nurse, but was repeatedly turned down - she implies that this was due to racism, but it might well have had more to do with her reputation and her CV. As a widow who had kept a pub in a mining camp she wouldn't have been a good match to the sort of profile Miss Nightingale, with her high-flown ideas about the purity of the profession, was looking for.

Having been turned down, she set out for the Crimea on her own initiative together with a business partner, a friend from Jamaica called Mr Day. They set up the "British Hotel", a canteen and store for the British forces besieging Sebastopol, a service that seems to have been much appreciated by her customers. As well as selling basic necessities and serving food and drink, she ran an informal first-aid post and dispensary, where she handed out her famously efficacious home-brew remedies. (She doesn't mention whether Jamaica's most famous herbal remedy was included in the ingredients...) William Howard Russell of the Times and the chef Alexis Soyer were among her regular guests, as well as a whole alphabet's worth of anonymised British officers.

The British Hotel remained in business until the last redcoat left the Crimea, but unfortunately it didn't make her enough money to pay off what she'd borrowed to set it up. When she got back to England, she found herself in the bankruptcy court, and had to pass the hat around her military friends. Part of her fundraising campaign was the publication of these memoirs, which were clearly something of a rushed job. Unlike most Victorian memoirs they are commendably short (around 200 pages). The late Mr Seacole only rates half a paragraph in Chapter I, and the pace is pretty relentless in the Panama chapters too: it's only when we reach the Crimea that we slow down to a proper Victorian crawl. Even through the terribly cliché-ridden Victorian prose of her incompetent ghostwriter, you can get a feel for her enormous energy and drive. It's easy enough to imagine that she must have had quite a robust sense of humour, too, but that has sadly been lost in the cleaning-up process.

Mary Seacole rather bizarrely got involved in an unedifying political row 125 years after her death, when she was suddenly "rediscovered" and voted to first place in an internet poll of "100 great black Britons" in 2004. There was a brief, opportunistic flurry of TV documentaries, course modules, streets, buildings and hospital wards named after her, etc., followed by the inevitable grumpy reaction from Peter Hitchens and friends (who came to the unoriginal conclusion that it was "political correctness gone mad") and medical professionals (who thought it rather disrespectful to those who had broken barriers of race and gender to become qualified doctors and nurses), whilst the unfortunate Education Secretary of the time got caught in the middle of it all.

(I read the memoir as a Gutenberg text)

Jamaica

I've been meaning to read this book for some time. Thanks to this quarter's theme, I finally did.



Marlon James's novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, was the book I kept running into last year. First it did well, and received accolades during The Morning News Tournament of Books, then it won the Man Booker Prize. In between those two events, it was the topic of many discussions and the receiver of many glowing reviews. It really didn't interest me, being described as being the complex story of an attempted assassination attempt on the Jamaican Reggae singer, Bob Marley, with the book being narrated by an uncountable number of characters and much of it in impenetrable dialect. It sounded like a book that was more appreciated than loved, and one that was fueled mostly by testosterone.

All of those things that made me not want to read A Brief History of Seven Killings are true, except that, after the first few chapters, the dialect was not so impenetrable as I'd feared. There are a lot of characters narrating a chaotic and wide-reaching plot, but they are each different from one another, and the cacophony of voices serves to create a clearer picture, rather than to confuse. It is a story set in a deeply misogynistic time and place, both in Jamaica in the 1970s and New York in the subsequent decades, but James has put as the novel's most well-rounded and empathetic character, a woman as counterpoint. The presence of Nina Burgess in the novel does not completely counter the sheer quantity of rape, abuse and dismissal perpetuated on any woman unfortunate enough to exist in this novel, but it does remind the reader that women existed as people even when the men running things didn't see them as such.

The novel follows a number of characters, as they negotiate life in West Kingston, and mostly in the slum called Copenhagen City. Marley, who is simply called the singer, is someone who can bridge the divide between the warring factions of the city, the two political parties whose conflict roams bloodily through the slums. He's a constant presence off-stage, as the various characters revolve around his presence, or absence. He's the never clearly seen center of the novel, giving it a structure and plot, so that what looks from the outside like chaos is really a carefully planned and executed look at Jamaican life during a tumultuous point in its past.

For me, this novel worked best when I finally stopped wanting to understand what every word meant and how each character fit into the story. Once I just let myself just read, it fell into place around me. I still don't know what "bombocloth" means. This is a brilliantly written book that deserves the accolades which it has received; it's a book which pulls none of its punches and smooths none of its rough edges for ease of consumption.

>43 thorold:

Texaco sounds interesting and will be a book I'll have to look for next I'm in France. I'm particularly interested in it because it takes place in Martinique, which is where my uncle went to live to escape his depression before finally returning to Paris and taking his own life. I wasn't able to visit Martinique while he lived there but I've always been curious about this country which gave him a brief respite from his grievances.

---

On another note, I'm starting to lose track of all of those who speak/read French here on these boards. I used to be one of the few but now I feel like we're taking over!

>60 lilisin: It's great that LT is getting steadily more diverse, so that it's an environment where more of us can feel comfortable about revealing our secret language skills. Sortons des placards! :-)

(I think I actually joined LT a few weeks before you, the first book in French I reviewed was La vie, mode d'emploi in June 2007, by the look of it)

I'm really pleased and surprised by the way this theme has steered me towards writing from the Spanish- and French-speaking bits of the Caribbean, which I knew next to nothing about before we started. If you'd said "Caribbean literature" to me a couple of months ago I would have had English-language poets like Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite and Grace Nichols in mind, but not much more.

>43 thorold: I remember looking at Texaco many times in the bookstore . . . and never buying it. But your review makes me want to read it.

>51 thorold: I found Explosion in a Cathedral fascinating and impressive. And I'm impressed you read it in Spanish!

>56 SassyLassy: As I said on your Club Read thread also, I absolutely adored The Bridge of Beyond.

>62 rebeccanyc:
Texaco was almost a "near miss" for me, too: it's probably sheer luck that I was on holiday in bad weather with no other distractions and it was sitting there in the Kobo store waiting for me to download it (I did check out the existing LT reviews, which made it sound interesting). I had to read quite a bit before it really hooked me, but I'm very glad I stuck with it.
As I said, Explosion in a cathedral was practically a foregone conclusion: I was seeing it on lists and had it marked down already (partly because of your review, partly because of the subject) when I first made a serious attempt to read books in Spanish, two years ago. I think the only reason it took me this long to get to it was that I was trying to focus on authors from Spain at that point. My Spanish still isn't all that good, and I'm sure I miss some of the subtleties, but it's fun to push yourself a bit, and you never get anywhere if you don't try!

Back to Haiti, with another book that turns out to resist any straightforward kind of categorisation:

Amour, Colère et Folie (1968, reissued 2005; Love, Anger, Madness, 2009) by Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Haiti, 1916-1973)

 

The triptych Amour, Colère et Folie is a merciless attack on Haitian society in the second half of the 20th century: amongst other things, Vieux-Chauvet exposes the damaging effects of a long tradition of racism and class-prejudice, the competing demands of two rapacious and terminally-conservative religious traditions (Voudou and Roman Catholicism) and the economic disaster resulting from a succession of corrupt governments selling off whatever they could to the USA. All this has left the Haitian people collectively too cowardly to stand up to state terrorism.

Duvalier is never actually mentioned, and in fact one of the three stories is ostensibly set long before he came to power, whilst the two others describe fictional political movements whose iconography has more to do with Nazi Germany than with Haiti, but in all three cases it's clear that the crimes they commit are exactly those most associated with the Tontons Macoutes. Duvalier got the message, anyway: he was apparently so furious about the book that Vieux-Chauvet had to flee the country whilst her family bought up and suppressed all remaining copies of the original 1968 edition (it wasn't republished until 2005, long after her death).

The three stories don't form a linked narrative: each has a different location and set of characters, and there isn't even any obvious time-sequence. But they have very strong thematic links: each is about a group of characters literally or metaphorically trapped in a house by the threat of political terror. They draw strongly on mainstream European literary traditions with all the descriptions of bourgeois neighbours spying on each other from behind their shutters and evaluating microscopic differences in social status. (There's also clearly a Chekhov thing going on: in each story the main peripheral character is a doctor, the first story is about three provincial sisters, the second about a family trying to avoid the confiscation of an orchard, ...)

All this comfortable middle-classness is set against a jarringly-different external world, where people are being arbitrarily arrested to be beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted in jail; where the beggars carry guns and spy for the police; where the police or paramilitaries shoot people apparently at random during festivals or on park benches; where a poet is ipso facto a political criminal; and where the reality is always decidedly worse than the nightmare. Emma as directed by Quentin Tarantino.

It's all very strange and quite disturbing, and obviously in many ways specific to the time and place where it was written, especially because of the dominant role of the mulatto landowning class in post-revolutionary Haiti, which led to the obsessive attention to precise degrees of ancestry and shades of skin-colour that Vieux-Chauvet describes. But it's still very much worth reading for what it tells us about the ways in which bullies and sadists get into power by exploiting existing weaknesses in the societies where they find themselves.

Marie Vieux-Chauvet's bio on Île en île: http://ile-en-ile.org/chauvet/

...Meanwhile, in another part of the archipelago altogether, another minor detour from the TBR pile:

De morgen loeit weer aan (1988; The roar of morning, 2015) by Tip Marugg (Curaçao, 1923-2006)

 

Tip Marugg was born on the island of Curaçao and spent most of his life there, working for Shell until his retirement in 1970. It was the experience of editing a staff newsletter there that prompted him decide to start writing seriously. He became a relatively well-known literary figure on the island, albeit with a reputation for reclusiveness, and published three short novels, a poetry collection and an erotic dictionary of Papiamento.

This is a little novel that isn't especially about history or geopolitics or any of the big external topics, and it doesn't really even go in for extended narrative, but has everything to do with the pleasure of finding the right words and images to communicate the way the author experiences the world. De morgen loeit weer aan appeared more than twenty years after Marugg's previous novel, and by all accounts it would have been even longer if a friend hadn't taken the initiative of stealing the manuscript and taking it off to be typed against his will. It's a largely autobiographical account of a reclusive elderly man living alone with his four dogs in a quiet corner of the island. He spends a lot of time sitting on his stoep enjoying the sounds and smells of the tropical night in the company of "Dutch and Scottish barley products". Using closely-observed descriptions of real experiences (mostly from childhood) and a couple of allegorical dream sequences as illustrations, he tells us about the rewards of looking in detail at the world of nature, and through that leads us into a discussion of death and evil as he sees them from an atheist/humanist perspective.

Whilst it's not exactly a cheerful book, I found myself drawn in by Marugg's very particular narrative voice, with its odd mixture of ironic detachment and close involvement with the subject in hand. I'm glad I read it, and I think it is likely to be a book I come back to in the future.

All Decent Animals by Oonya Kempadoo (from Guyana)

The book centers around a Ata, an artist who has returned to Trinidad to live (she is not from Trinidad but has considers 'Caribbean' to be her nationality). She has worked with Carnival costume designers and is now starting an office job. The book focuses most on her, I'd say, but the always-third-person narration floats around between her and her group of friends representing a wide variety of people, backgrounds, classes and views. The book takes place mostly just before, during, and after Carnival. Some reviewers have said it felt like she tried to cram every aspect of Trinidad into a relatively short book, but I felt like that worked because of being set around Carnival.

As the focus of the narration changes so does the language, going from no Creole slang/dialect to using a fair bit (most of it totally understandable to the outsider). Having the mix change really works, though had me wishing over and over there were an audio edition (it would be an excellent audiobook, with a good reader, of course). I'm really curious about the simultaneous usage of youall and allyou and why one is chosen over another at any given time since externally they mean the same thing (for the corollaries in my part of Appalachia and the upper Ohio River valley I'd be tempted to say that 'allyou' is more personal and 'youall' more general).

The biggest plot part of the book is one of Ata's group, an architect and gay man, Fraser, having a serious medical collapse which turns out to be due to AIDS, which has already seriously damaged his kidneys. The rush to help him, but also judgement of his choices and difficult decisions, is a key part of the book, with Ata seemingly taking on more of his care than anyone else. His sickness sets some cracks running through their group.

It is a busy book, a full book, and a swift book. Towards the end there are some things that I don't really get, one of which seemed totally unnecessary and goes unresolved, but otherwise I think it's a pretty solid novel with beautiful writing. The hills are almost a character themselves, which, being a West Virginia girl, I appreciated and related to. There aren't any reviews here on LT but the top four or five reviews on Goodreads give you a good sense of it, I think. Ended up being a 3 1/2 star read for me.

>66 mabith:
Carnival season here seems to be warming up...



This year Shrove Tuesday/Mardi gras falls on the 9th of February, so we have about a week left to hop on a plane or dig out some Caribbean Carnival-related literature.

- The Dragon Can't Dance by Earl Lovelace looks like a good choice for Trinidad
- After the dance is Edwidge Danticat's analysis of Haitian carnival
- mabith already mentioned All decent animals by Oonya Kempadoo
- Virago fans will definitely want to look out for Sequins for a ragged hem, Amryl Johnson's non-fiction book about returning to Trinidad for the first time since childhood and being plunged straight into Carnival fever (I bought this book many years ago after taking part in a very interesting poetry workshop with the author)
- tagmashing "Trinidad, carnival" brings up Miguel Street, an early V.S. Naipaul novel I don't know much about
- Bacchanal: The Carnival Culture of Trinidad by Peter Mason looks like a useful non-fiction study of carnival culture; another might be Errol Hill's Trinidad carnival

I really don't know why I didn't read this 25 years ago - my shelves are positively groaning with gay men's memoirs from that period, and it was obviously a book that made quite a splash at the time, even being made into a film. I don't think I was consciously trying to preserve my illusions about Cuba as the socialist paradise...
After finishing the book yesterday, I also watched the documentary Conducta impropria (Nestor Almendros, 1984) to which Arenas and many of the people he mentions in his book contributed (it's readily available in various blurry VHS-transfers on YouTube).

Antes que anochezca (1992; Before night falls, 1993) by Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba, US, 1943-1990)


This autobiography, which Arenas dictated in between bouts of AIDS-related illness in the final months of his life, is clearly intended as a final settling of accounts with Fidel Castro and his supporters. There's a lot of itemising of the crimes, injustices and humiliations he and his friends have suffered at the hands of the regime, and plenty of naming of names of those who have collaborated with State Security. But it's not the Cuban Gulag Archipelago: its real purpose is not so much to accuse as to mock. Arenas is telling Castro, in front of anyone who will listen, that the glorious socialist revolution was a ridiculous piece of self-deception, that the state's attempts to suppress intellectual dissent have only strengthened the voices of critics, and that hundreds of thousands of Cuban men (including many soldiers, policemen and members of the government) have been having gloriously enjoyable sex with each other all the time without the state's attempt to lock up all the homosexuals having the slightest impact. So there!

Obviously, this also means that you have to be a little careful not to take everything Arenas says as a literal representation of the facts. He will have stayed close enough to the truth to be sure that what he said could not be dismissed out of hand, but he's a novelist, writing to obtain a particular effect, and it would be very surprising if he didn't select and exaggerate on occasion to maximise the impact of what he is saying.

The story opens with an idyllic description of childhood in rural Cuba before the days of Batista or Castro - it's a positive Garden of Eden, in which the young Reinaldo and his childhood friends indulge in every possible form of precocious sexual experimentation with each other and with the local flora and fauna, and Reinaldo tramps around the woods declaiming long epic poems he has composed.

The fun stops with adolescence: Batista comes to power and the family move to a dull provincial town. Teenage Reinaldo runs away to join the revolution against Batista, but he doesn't see any action: the guerillas are as short of weapons as they are of razors, whilst Batista doesn't trust his own troops, so the two armies successfully try to avoid each other until Batista's unexpected flight leaves the way open for Castro to seize power. (Arenas cattily suggests that most of Castro's "20 000 martyrs", if they ever existed, must have been the victims of denunciations and summary executions by their own comrades.)

Reinaldo is frustrated to have come out of the revolution without the requisite beard (he's only 16), but it does give him the chance to escape from the provinces and, after a spell as bookkeeper on a collective farm, study in Havana, where he is soon integrated into the literary world, with a job first at the National Library and the at the Writers' Union. He gives us very affectionate accounts of his two main mentors, Virgilio Piñera and José Lezama Lima, whilst sticking the knife into one or two other great writers. In particular, he disapproves of Alejo Carpentier, who twice tried to block Arenas from being given a literary prize, and Gabriel García Márquez, whom he dismisses as a political opportunist and hanger-on of Castro.

Arenas goes to great lengths to tell us about his sexual adventures in Havana in the sixties, the time when Castro was making the first big purges, and tens of thousands of - presumed - gay men were being shipped off to cut cane in the UMAP labour camps. As he describes it, the police persecution only made the sex more exciting, and there was a never-ending supply of gorgeous "real men" - students, conscripts, married men - out on the beaches and in the bushes looking for sex with locas. The sexual roles (but curiously, not the sexual acts: who penetrates whom is apparently negotiable) are completely defined by Cuba's macho culture - Arenas clearly finds the idea of two locas getting together boring, if not repulsive, and sees the creation of a closed "gay community" as a serious downside to post-Stonewall culture in the US. (In fact, those attitudes not that different from what you hear from British and American gay men who were around in the 50s and 60s, so maybe Arenas is making too much of the specifically Cuban cultural values there.)

At the same time, life is getting less comfortable for Arenas. Many friends and colleagues are being arrested, some, like Heberto Padilla, being forced to make humiliating public confessions and retractions of their former work. Arenas is unable to publish his work in Cuba, and has great difficulties keeping his manuscripts out of the hands of the police and smuggling them to friends abroad. Eventually, in 1974, he is arrested - ostensibly for a sexual offence but really to put pressure on him to retract his "counter-revolutionary" ideas. He manages to escape from the police station where he is being held and is on the run for about a month, making a couple of attempts to flee the country (another opportunity for him to ridicule the inefficiency of Castro's State Security service...), but eventually he's recaptured and spends a couple of years in captivity, much of it in terrible conditions in the El Morro fort in Havana harbour.

Once out of prison, there's another semi-comic interlude as he manages to survive in Havana for a number of years, despite having no legal means of getting either work or accommodation. Through an absurd combination of circumstances, he finds himself selling an entire abandoned convent on the black market, a brick at a time. He finally manages to get out of Cuba on the Mariel "sealift" in 1980 - again, he attributes this to the inefficiency of State Security, as only "delinquents" are supposed to be allowed to leave, intellectuals being explicitly excluded, but the authorities have so thoroughly expunged his status as a writer that there's nothing on his official file to suggest that he is anything other than a common criminal.

Naturally, there are plenty of disappointments waiting for him in the "free world" - including a lot of people who don't want to hear anything negative about Castro, and a publisher who doesn't especially want to pay him any royalties. But, as he puts it, when the communist system kicks you in the arse, you're expected to smile and say "thank you"; when the capitalist system does it, you're at least allowed to cry.

I found this a surprisingly enjoyable read, often very funny, and by no means what you might expect from a "deathbed memoir". Twenty-five years on, a lot of the political content is only of historical interest, bu there are some points that did stick with me, in particular realising how much difference it made to Arenas during his time in prison that there were people outside Cuba who knew about his situation and weren't prepared to let the Cuban government "disappear" him. Obviously we should go on writing those Amnesty International letters!

I read Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory and then Julia Alvarez' How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. I would be curious, now, to read more non-fiction about Haiti and the DR and the relations between them. My thoughts on the books:

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

Danticat is a beautiful writer. I had previously read Brother I'm Dying, which is kind of a memoir, about Danticat's father and uncle. I loved it and gave it five stars. So far I haven't been as enthusiastic about her fiction. Breath, Eyes, Memory is the story of Sophie, her life in Haiti with her aunt and in the US with her mother. There are themes of inter-generational trauma and sexual violence; mental illness; and mother daughter relationships. I felt that these were well portrayed, and very poetic, but the book lacked the emotional immediacy of Danticat's more autobiographical work.

Also, another issue is that for the reader who is not very familiar with Haitian society, it is hard to know what parts of the novel described trauma specific to Sophie and to her family, and which parts were reflecting Haitian society as a whole. Danticat has an afterword that clarified this, but before I got to the afterward, I was a bit perplexed.

How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents by Julia Alvarez

I read somewhere on the internet that Alvarez' mother and sisters were angry with her after this book was published, and didn't speak to her for some time. I can understand that having a writer in the family could be difficult, and this book might feel like airing one's dirty laundry in public. Even though it's fictional, I think large parts are autobiographical. It's the story of four sisters from a well-to-to Dominican family who immigrate, with their parents, to the US to escape Trujillo's dictatorship. The story is told in reverse chronological order. Short chapters give snapshots of the various sisters, as well as their parents, as they adjust to the US, and learn to navigate their lives as immigrants. There are plenty of dramas-- marriage, divorce, mental illness.

I liked all of the sisters, and the parents, too. Although they all had short-comings, they were also lively, interesting, and good-hearted. The book was fun to read. I liked learning more about the DR and especially enjoyed the chapters there.

In keeping with the time of year (cf. >67 thorold:) I read two rather different non-fiction books by émigrées about returning to the Caribbean to experience Carnival:

After the dance : a walk through carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (2002) by Edwidge Danticat (1969 - , Haiti, US)
Sequins for a ragged hem (1988) by Amryl Johnson (1944-2001, Trinidad, UK) (re-read, previously read ca. 1990)

    

There are a surprising number of parallels between these two books: both women left the Caribbean in their childhood, both are returning as adult visitors some twenty years later (Danticat in 2001, Johnson in 1983), both find themselves plunged into the pre-Carnival atmosphere as soon as they arrive, both have to deal with the complexities of being outsiders who still have all sorts of emotional and family links with the places where they were born.

But the resulting books are quite different. Although Danticat starts off by telling us that she is looking forward to the experience because she was never allowed to participate in Carnival as a child, After the dance turns out to be a relatively cool, objective account, which might easily have been written for the Haitian tourist board or for an in-flight magazine. It is much more a book about what you might experience in Haiti, if you took the opportunity to spend some of your dollars there, than a book about what Danticat experienced. She keeps herself well out of sight, and the book is a mess of quotations from all conceivable sources: every fact or opinion, however banal, has to be supported by some sort of authority. Competent, but not what you would call great travel-writing. Obviously, it's a minor work written to order and we shouldn't judge her by it, but I was hoping for something a little more interesting.

Sequins, in complete contrast, is a book that's often almost painfully subjective. Johnson was a poet in the first place, and this book is a poet's reaction to revisiting the Caribbean. The Carnival in Trinidad occupies the first quarter of the book, the rest is an account of a six-month trip visiting various other islands (Tobago, Grenada, Barbados, Dominica, St Lucia, Guadeloupe). Everything is in a rather diffuse stream-of-consciousness style, so that it isn't always very easy to work out where we are, but that doesn't really matter. Johnson is much more interested in telling us about people and subjective experiences than about "sights" and "culture". Most of the time that works well, she does a very good job of conveying the experience of being a tourist in a place to which you feel you ought to belong, and in giving us some insight into what it must look like from the point of view of the people who live there. A point that really struck me was her observation that at home in the UK she's accustomed to people perceiving her in the first place as a black woman; in the Caribbean the first thing people notice about her (from her speech, the way she interacts, the way she dresses) is that she is an outsider, someone who lives in a wealthier country. Language differences keep coming up: even in Trinidad she has a hard time getting the modulations of speech quite right when she's shopping in the markets. In Guadeloupe she finds that people react to her in a way she doesn't really want, because she learnt French in Paris and can't understand the inter-island patois.

An aspect of the book that I felt didn't work quite so well was the way she used her worries about the practicalities of travelling as a surrogate to express her deeper discomfort about the problems she was having connecting with the people she met. There are long passages about rickety aircraft and uncomfortable sea passages, and a panic in the last chapters about whether a letter will arrive in time, that felt rather overwrought in context, even though I knew why they were there (and I've had enough travel panics myself...).

But the Carnival levels all boundaries: for the space of a couple of chapters there are steel bands playing "Matilda" non-stop, and she is free to enjoy the spectacle and then tear most of her clothes off and dance in the streets all night without worrying about anything. Not something you can really imagine Danticat doing...

PS: Seeing them side-by-side, I'm struck by the similarity of the colours in the cover art. Probably a coincidence. I read the Danticat as an e-book, so it's difficult to get a closer look, Virago's cover art for the Johnson is a batik credited to Marina Elphick.

...and another one from Guadeloupe I polished off over the weekend:

Traversée de la mangrove (1989, Crossing the mangrove 1995) by Maryse Condé (1937 - , Guadeloupe, France, US, etc.)

  

Maryse Condé is one of the big names of Caribbean literature: she's published a string of very successful novels, and is unusually well-known in the English-speaking world for someone who writes in French. It probably helps that she has lived and taught in the US and is married to her English translator! She's also taught in several African countries.

Traversée de la mangrove borrows the classic literary conceit of the "mysterious stranger": an outsider arrives in a small, closed community and inadvertently releases all the tensions that have been smouldering in the place. In this case, it's a village called Rivière au Sel, hidden in dense forests on the slopes of Guadeloupe's volcano, La Grande Soufrière, and the story opens with the unexplained death of Francis Sancher, who had come to live in the village a few years earlier, no-one being quite sure where from. During an overnight wake, a succession of local people reflect on Sancher and the way he has affected their lives, and in the process tell us a great deal about how life in the village works, and how it is affected by class, gender and ethnicity.

Of course, Condé doesn't leave this literary convention in its standard form: she makes it clear that we are in the 1980s, and the village, remote as it is, does not exist in isolation. Everyone there has connections to the outside that define their lives in some way. They have come from somewhere else, they have been away to work or study and returned, they have close family in metropolitan France or abroad, they do business with the outside world, they have brought in a partner from elsewhere, etc. There is no such thing as an isolated village, and possibly there never was. Guadeloupe is now part of the EU, there are resentments against immigrants from poorer countries like Haiti and Dominica, Loulou who runs a horticulture business in the village dreams of selling his flowers to the Queen of England...

The portraits of the villagers don't in the end tell us a great deal about Sancher: we get a lot of snippets about him, but they don't add up to a simple closed narrative about him. It is the villagers themselves who turn out to be at the centre, and Condé has a lot of fun telling us about them in a whole series of different styles, sometimes funny, sometimes very moving, but always packed with fascinating detail. Towards the end, we get a chapter about the local intellectual, a young man (inevitably!) called Lucien, in which Condé neatly demolishes most of our preconceptions about "the Caribbean novel" and manages to poke fun at quite a few well-known figures, including herself.

CUBA

The Chase by Alejo Carpentier



I'm glad I've read multiple books by Carpentier before I read this one because it's not one of my favorites, even though, according to the introduction writer, it was Sartre's favorite. It is the intense, claustrophobic, difficult to read story of a man fleeing from initially mysterious assassins. It is all of the above partly because the sections, three to ten pages long, are written without any paragraphing. The introduction writer also makes the point that Carpentier himself likened the structure of the novel to a work of music, with themes developed and intertwined.

The story begins in a concert hall in Havana where the Eroica Symphony of Beethoven is being played. At the last minute, a badly dressed man (emphatically not dressed like the other concert-goers) rushes in, throws some money at the ticket-seller (who has a minor role in the book) and hurries to his seat, where he undergoes pangs of anxiety. Gradually, the reader learns what brought him to this point, through flashbacks that are difficult to figure out. Basically, he was a student radical who was arrested and tortured; under torture, he gave up his fellow radicals and their plots, and now some anonymous radicals are out to kill him. He hides for a while in the apartment of an old black woman, who was his wet nurse, until she dies, and then enlists the help of a prostitute with whom he apparently has a relationship. Ultimately, of course, he is killed. Carpentier's writing is lush and atmospheric, creating vivid portraits of the sights, sounds, and smells of Havana in the 40s(?), including various groups of people and groups.

I was prompted to read this by After the dance - Danticat talks about it as the book that put Jacmel on the map for non-Haitians, and after reading it, it's pretty obvious why she had such a hard time writing something worthwhile about the Carnival in Jacmel.

(This book has been translated into a number of other languages, but I couldn't find any trace of an English version on Worldcat.)

Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (1988) by René Depestre (1926 - , Haiti, France, Cuba, Chile, Cuba, France, etc.)

 

René Depestre, rather like Alejo Carpentier, is a writer with one foot in Francophone culture and the other in Latin America/Cuba, but he writes in French. He grew up in Haiti and was educated there and in France, but he has also spent a lot of his life in Spanish-speaking countries, especially in Cuba, where he was a close associate of Fidel Castro and held various important cultural posts until he fell out of favour in the late seventies. He later worked for UNESCO in Paris. He first encountered Carpentier at a lecture he gave during his visit to Haiti in 1943 (when Depestre was still in his teens), and he has obviously been strongly influenced by Carpentier's ideas about magic and collective belief.

Hadriana dans tous mes rêves is essentially the story of a beautiful young woman who collapses on her wedding day in Jacmel in 1938, is buried, and then goes missing from the cemetery. And we all know what it means when a Haitian corpse goes missing...

The highlight of the book is of course the description of the Jacmel carnival, intended as a celebration of the wedding of the most popular young people in town but in the event a gloriously extravagant voudou wake around Hadriana's open coffin. Depestre is particularly interested in how the participants' perception of events is influenced by their belief in the supernatural, so we get this twice in subtly different forms, once from Patrick's impressionable point of view and once from Hadriana's more detached perspective. Either way, it's quite a party, and Depestre pulls out all the stops to give us the kind of extravagant description that wouldn't be out of place in a novel written in the 20s or 30s. Everything is very heavily eroticised, at times to an extent verging on the pornographic. Depestre is obviously making a point about the way sexual fantasies reinforce and encourage collective beliefs, but he's also clearly taking advantage of his privileged position as author to indulge his own sexual fantasies. This may be a book about an independent-minded young woman triumphing over a macho culture, but it doesn't really seem to qualify as a feminist work.

There's some amazing writing here, and it's definitely an interesting and enjoyable book to read, but I did end up with an uncomfortable feeling that Depestre was cheating a bit: we get both an entertaining, erotically-charged zombie story and a Marxist, postcolonial account of how voudou beliefs fit into the dominant ideology, but he plays the postmodern joker and refuses to commit to either of those ways of reading the book.

René Depestre on Ile-en-Ile: http://ile-en-ile.org/depestre/

Small footnote to >73 thorold:

This may be old hat to you zombie experts, but I was a bit surprised to find that zombies - according to Depestre, at least - have not really died, but have been put into a comatose state indistinguishable from death by means of a special poison, and are then reanimated (minus their "Bon petit ange", the part of their soul that contains the personality and free will) by a sorcerer administering the antidote after they've been buried and exhumed. We live and learn!

>74 thorold: Really? I had no idea. But of course I am no zombie expert. I don't think I even saw Night of the Living Dead. I do remember an old twenties or thirties movie I saw once on late night TV. Mostly I remember the music, which was Hollywood's idea of African rhythms at the time I guess, very catchy. Oops, sorry, was that off topic?

>74 thorold: I was reading Matthew Lewis this weekend, and he recounts that in the hinterlands of Jamaica, the poison and the antidote were both sold by medicine men. These people would have demonstrated the efficacy of the medicine by secretly poisoning someone and then publicly reviving them. However, when they sold them to the general populace, according to Lewis, they did not always provide the correct antidote.

>71 thorold: Crossing the Mangrove sounds very interesting.

The House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferre (Puerto Rico)

This was a really interesting novel, with a fairly original format. Isabel is writing the story of her and her husband Quintin's families and their histories in Puerto Rico. Every few chapters her tale is interrupted by her husband's narration when he finds and reads various parts of her work, refutes parts of it, and writes notes in the margins. There are also chapters set in the present where Isabel talks directly about Quintin's reading her manuscript.

I definitely made liberal use of the family tree in the front of the book, but even with a few moments of confusion, it was a very interesting, enjoyable read. It deals with a lot of different issues in a personal, family way (Puerto Rican nationalism vs statehood, colonial legacy,

Reviewing it I feel like I should be raving about what a good read it was, but it's a quiet, subdued read in many ways. It is about the storytelling and the characters more than beautiful language. Definitely one I haven't stopped thinking about since I finished it.

>76 SassyLassy: Interesting. And I realise I completely forgot about Lewis when I was writing about literary figures with connections to slave income in >2 thorold:. Didn't he actually own slaves himself?

Lewis had two large plantations in Jamaica at a time between the banning of purchasing slaves and the actual abolition of slaves. In his Journal of a West India Proprietor he wrote about his two trips to his Jamaica plantations. He didn't like the idea of slavery, was criticized by some of his fellow plantation owners for being too lenient, but did not seem to be able to imagine what else to do to run his enterprises. This was a time of economic crisis for the plantations, as if a slave died or became free, the owner was unable to replace the labour, due to the ban on the market. Many plantations actually went bankrupt or were abandoned due to this lack of labour. There were itinerant labour gangs, but they mostly did the hardest manual labour that was of a more seasonal nature. I just finished the book on the weekend, and hope to get a review in here later this week.

A re-read of a book I first (and possibly also most recently!) read in my teens, not all that long after it appeared, one of the books I mentioned above under "External views" >3 thorold::

The comedians (1966) by Graham Greene (UK, 1904-1991)

 

To avoid any misunderstandings: I'm not trying to claim Greene as a Caribbean writer. He was one of the most prominent British novelists of the mid-20th century, known for novels involving high moral choices for shady expat characters living in countries where poverty, war and corruption have upset normal values (the critics used to joke about a generic third-world dystopia called "Greeneland"). Roman Catholicism is one of his big themes; like Gabriel García Márquez, he also had a bit of a weakness for dictators, and associated with quite a few of them at various times in his life, including Castro and Torrijos. According to Wikipedia, he once won second prize for an entry anonymously submitted to a Graham Greene parody competition.

The Comedians is Greene's 1966 novel set in Haiti under François ("Papa Doc") Duvalier. A small group of classic Greene characters meet on a ship from the US to Haiti: Brown (the narrator) and Jones quickly recognise each other as cynical chancers who survive by trading on their dubious claim to belong to the English "officer class": Brown owns a tourist hotel in Port-au-Prince, where the tourist-trade has died thanks to the political conditions (it was based on the famous Hotel Oloffson, where Greene stayed), whilst Jones hints at military connections. Mr and Mrs Smith are naive American Liberals - veterans of the Civil Rights movement who see Haiti as the ideal place to promote vegetarianism and pacifism among the noble citizens of the free black republic (Brown rather cruelly points out to them that most of the population of Haiti is too poor to eat meat).

Greene had been the victim of a phone-book libel scam for one of his previous novels, so he made a point of choosing the most common names he could think of for this one, but the anonymity is not just superficial: neither Brown nor Jones has any real evidence of the existence of his British father, and their mothers are both adventurers without any known background.

Confronted by the brutal lawlessness of Haiti (personified by the evil Captain Concasseur) the Smiths get into a macabre political confrontation in which the body of a former minister is seized by the Tontons Macoute during his funeral, whilst Brown, despite his cynicism, finds himself having to assist members of an anti-Duvalier partisan group and having to rescue Jones when his attempt to con the government out of a few millions goes wrong. And Jones, as we have already heard in the opening chapter, achieves a noble death despite himself.

It struck me, re-reading this after reading a string of books by Caribbean writers, how different and more restricted Greene's external view is. He exposes the fear, poverty and brutality, of course, but he doesn't put it into any specifically Haitian historical context: he seems to regard it as the sort of thing that happens naturally if you let people mismanage their own affairs. His only real political point is that the US has to take its share of the blame for not intervening to limit Duvalier's excesses. It could almost be Kipling and the "white man's burden". And a lot of the book is dedicated to establishing the course of Brown's sexual relationship with a married woman that doesn't really seem to do anything except confirm his moral emptiness and bring in a bit of sex-interest. There are nuances, of course: black Haitians appear not just as caricature villains but also as sympathetic minor characters (a communist doctor, a barman crippled by the Tontons Macoute, ...). But ultimately, this is a book about dodgy expat Brits against an exotic background. Greene was certainly a great writer, but I don't think the book really lived up to my memories of reading it forty years ago.

Rereads are always so interesting for the different views we have both of the matter under consideration and of ourselves.

I haven't read The Comedians, but your review made me wonder if you saw an development of Greene's anti (American) imperial thoughts from The Quiet American.

>82 SassyLassy:
What strikes me now is how few questions I asked back then about when and in which order those books were written and what was going on in the world at the time.

From the little I remember about TQA, that was about Americans intervening when they shouldn't have, whilst this is about a situation where Greene sees intervention by the US against Duvalier as the only hope for the Haitian people. (Which is presumably why Cuba is loudly not mentioned throughout the book...?)

As I said in >47 thorold:, Jacques Stephen Alexis gets a favourable mention in Texaco, and I ordered a couple of his books out of curiosity. Here's the first:

Compère Général Soleil (1955; General Sun, my brother, 1999 in the CARAF series) by Jacques Stephen Alexis (Haiti, France, 1922-1961)

  

Jacques Stephen Alexis could very well have been a model for the idealistic but doomed young partisans in The Comedians - son of a distinguished Haitian historian and diplomat, he was involved in Communist politics from an early age, spending time in prison and in exile and publishing poems and political tracts in between completing his medical studies in Port-au-Prince and Paris (he worked in a big Paris hospital as a neurologist). In the fifties he spoke at major writers' congresses in France and the Soviet Union and met leaders including Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Castro in an attempt to build up an international coalition against Duvalier. In 1961 he and four friends went missing after making a clandestine crossing from Cuba to Haiti: they are believed to have been tortured and killed by the Tontons Macoute.

Compère Général Soleil was Jacques Stephen Alexis's first novel, written between 1951 and 1955, and is set in Haiti and the Dominican Republic ca. 1935-1937, during the presidency of Sténio Vincent.

When we meet our ironically-named hero Hilarius Hilarion, he is down in the depths of despair with no resource left to him except to steal. But he has the good fortune to make friends with a communist political prisoner in jail, and with his help meets the communist junior doctor Jean-Michel (presumably an idealised portrait of the author as a working-class hero) who cures his epilepsy, gets him a job, recruits him to evening-classes in Haitian history, and helps him to set up home with the lovely Claire-Heureuse. The two of them work hard to better themselves, but naturally, this good fortune can't last. When we discover at the beginning of Part III that Hilarion and Claire-Heureuse have been forced to emigrate to cut cane in Trujillo's Dominican Republic, we have a pretty good idea of how it's all going to end.

So, it's outwardly a classic working-class tragedy, like hundreds of other socialist propaganda novels written between the 1860s and the 1960s. But there's a bit more to it than that. For a start, Alexis clearly knows what he's talking about. Hilarion and Claire-Heureuse are not (quite) abstract political types, they are complex individuals with a particular background and cultural identity, full of details that could only come from Alexis's first-hand experience. Haiti itself, with all its historical and natural idiosyncrasies, also seems to be treated as an independent character in the story. We frequently get long chunks of free-verse or prose-poetry in the best Aimé Césaire tradition apostrophising the city, the river, the Haitian landscape, etc. And sometimes the story jumps unpredictably away from the central characters for a chapter to highlight some other social problem Alexis wants to draw to our attention.

It frequently skates on the verge of being naive and/or bombastic (it would make a great opera!), but I think Alexis gets away with it most of the time, thanks to a powerful mix of obvious honesty and (concealed) technical skill. Oddly enough it reminded me quite strongly of Berlin Alexanderplatz, even though that is a much less explicitly political novel. I think the similarity must be in the humanity with which Alexis treats his suffering hero.

Overall, I don't think this is a "this-book-will-change-your-life" novel, but it is definitely one that will teach you something about what life looks like at the bottom of the heap.

Jacques Stephen Alexis's bio on Île en île: http://ile-en-ile.org/alexis_jacques-stephen/

(Re the spelling of his name: his Paris publishers call him "Jacques Stephen Alexis", Wikipedia call him "Jacques Stéphen Alexis" and Île en île has "Jacques-Stephen Alexis". I don't suppose it matters terribly which one we use...)

In a free state: A novel with two supporting narratives, by V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad and Tobago)

Interestingly (at least to me), there are two versions of this book: the original one, with several stories combined, the longest one taking place in Africa, and a later version with only the part about Africa. The author explains in the introduction that his editor wanted to edit the book to keep only the part about Africa when he originally wrote the book, but that he refused. 30 years later, he felt that his editor was right and created the second version, which is the one I read.

I felt a bit lost during this book, not really understanding the innuendos in the character's conversations and their changes of mood, but I really liked this book. Towards the end one part caused me actual anguish, which says something about the quality of the writing I guess.

I highly recommend this book, though it is a bit of cheating maybe with respect to this trimester's theme: though the author is from the Carribeans, the book takes place in Africa.

>85 chlorine:
It's years since I read it. The story about the Indian servant working for a diplomatic family in Washington DC was the part that struck me most at the time, but that's presumably one of the parts that was cut out in your edition?

>86 thorold:: Yes, the only story that remains is the two british people in Africa travelling back to their compound in the South at a time of oppression between ethnic groups.

Maybe one day I'll read the original book, from what you say and what I've read I think I would be interested in the missing narratives. Not this trimester though!

HAITI

Massacre River by René Philoctète



Darryl's (kidzdoc) stunning review of this novel led me to buy it, and there is little I can add to his review which appears on the book page, so I'll just give a few of my impressions of it.

Mainly what struck me is the combination of poetic language with horrific atrocity. In 1937, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo, set his soldiers to massacre the Haitians living in the country, especially those along the long border (Haiti is the smaller, western part of Hispaniola; the DR is the larger, eastern section). (Haiti is also much poorer than the Dominican Republic, so Haitians go there in search of largely menial work, then as now.) Trujillo was largely motivated by racism, given his belief that Haitians are blacker than Dominicans) and he was obsessed, as Philoctète describes, with a passion for whiteness. The story focuses on a husband and wife, he a Dominican, she a Haitian, living in a Dominican border town, and the reader learns of their meeting and falling in love and their continuing (and erotic) love for each other.

The story opens with a mysterious black bird of prey continuously circling over the border town, as rumors of the massacre to come also circulate. Pedro, the husband, sets off early in the morning for his job in a sugar factory, but is disturbed by the soldiers he sees along the way and takes a bus/taxi (with a mind of its own, literally) seemingly on an endless journey home. (Magical realism plays a big role in this novel.) Radio broadcasts on the bus detail the number of Haitians killed in various towns -- they are killed by machetes cutting their heads off. What Pedro finds when he finally gets back is that the heads have lives of their own, including that of his wife, Adèle, and are going around the border town talking and trying to reunite with their bodies. Another aspect of this novel is that soldiers test whether someone is Haitian or Dominican by having them try to say the Spanish word for parsley, perejil, which Haitians mangle; the book is filled with Dominicans trying to teach Haitians how to say the word correctly because the people in the border area get along with each other. In fact, Philoctète called his novel Le peuple des terres mêlées or "The people of the mixed lands;" in her note on the translation, the translator explains that she felt the title worked in French but not in English and she called the book after the river that partly separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic.

What I will remember most from this novel is Philoctète's poetic language and his love of listing things, as if the sheer reality of trees, market goods, or people could overcome the horror.

>88 rebeccanyc:
Sounds like another one I'm going to have to add to my TBR list!
The Parsley Massacre comes into Compère Général Soleil as well, but I think Alexis got a bit out of his depth in that part of the book. Maybe it's easier to write about such big catastrophes when a little more time has elapsed.

>89 thorold:
...or not: looks as though it's another of those weird French books that has disappeared off the radar in the original language whilst you can find it everywhere in English, Spanish, Portuguese, or whatever. Same story as An African in Greenland, which I ended up having to read in English. :-(

>89 thorold: The translator mentions Jacques Stephen Alexis in her last endnote.

>90 thorold: And in her note on the translation, she mentions that through a Haitian she met in the US she discovered a very old copy of Massacre River and that the Haitian publisher of it had gone out of business.

>90 thorold: Wow, the French version is not even mentioned on Amazon. My local library doesn't have a single book by René Philoctète, and neither do the municipal libraries in Paris.

>92 FlorenceArt:
There's a copy in the Bibliothéque Nationale, so it does actually exist: http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb35569782f

But I couldn't find any secondhand copies anywhere. Harmattan, which should be the place for non-metropolitan French books, doesn't seem to have heard of Philoctète at all, and elsewhere I was offered all sorts of nice editions of Greek drama!

>91 rebeccanyc: >92 FlorenceArt: >93 thorold: Because they've published his poetry, I e-mailed Actes Sud about Philoctète a couple of years ago to enquire about the possibility of a new edition of Le Peuple des terres mêlées (Massacre River). I never got an answered from them, which annoyed me immensely. I also nearly got a second-hand copy from an online bookshop, but they cancelled my order.

I'm hoping that it will eventually be republished. Certainly, L'Africain du Groënland was, last year, in nice, cheap paperback form. Interest was rekindled thanks to the English translation, as Tété-Michel Kpomassie wrote in his new introduction.

>94 Dilara86: I think the only French edition is the very old Haitian edition referenced in >91 rebeccanyc:. I'm not at home, but when I am I can look to see what the translator said about it. I know she had to go to the author's son to get permission to translate it (or New Directions had to, to get permission to publish it).

>94 Dilara86: I see I must have ordered the translation of An African in Greenland a matter of weeks before the new French edition came out. So annoying! It clearly pays to be patient and set a watch list somewhere.

>95 rebeccanyc: Yes, the only French language edition of his works that was not Haitian is the poetry collection by Éditions de minuit. What a shame.

At least I know about L'Africain du Groenland now, and it's available as an ebook!

Sometimes you can get French editions on the Canadian amazon French option. I looked up René Philoctète and his name autofilled the search line, but I found an odd array in French, English and Spanish, plus the above mentioned Greek drama. There was a book of his poetry in French.

JAMAICA

Not a Jamaican author, but a first hand account of one kind of life on the island in the early nineteenth century.



Journal of a West India Proprietor: Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica by Matthew Lewis
first published 1834

Like so many well off young Englishmen of his time, Matthew Lewis led a comfortable life without any real occupation on income from his father's business. True, he had been an MP and was a popular playwright, but until this time of this journal, his entire adult life had been dominated by one thing. When Lewis was nineteen, he had published The Monk, a book that was a scandalous sensation, one that earned him the sobriquet "Monk" Lewis.

However, it is one thing to live the easy life and another to see how the wealth that supports it is generated. In 1812, when Lewis was thirty-six years old, his father died. Lewis inherited a considerable fortune, much of it based on revenue from two sugar plantations in Jamaica. He decided to travel to Jamaica to visit these plantations. At that time, the British West Indies in general were crucial to the British economy, constituting one third of the North Atlantic Triangle. Despite their economic importance though, few Europeans wanted to live there, defeated as they so often were by climate and disease.

On his initial voyage, it took almost two months to sail to Jamaica. Lewis was desperately sea sick. As a way to try to distract himself, he wrote the long poem The Isle of Devils, not transcribed into his diary until the journey home. This poem starts with a quotation from The Tempest. Lewis takes the play one step further. In his poem, a beautiful young woman is shipwrecked on the isle from which none return. There she is guarded by a fiend, who manages to do what Caliban could not. Two children are born: one an abomination, the other a finely formed babe. The poem progresses from there. In her introduction to the Journal, Judith Terry suggests this poem arose from Lewis's deep seated fears of both the sea and the African origins of his slaves. Despite his often overwrought imagination, he was not an adventurous soul, and this voyage for him seemed perilous.

Like most Europeans, Lewis knew nothing of the actual operation of a slave based enterprise. Emancipation was twenty years in the future and did not seem like an entirely sure prospect. Trading in slaves had been abolished in 1811, but ownership was still legal. It is exceedingly difficult from a twenty-first century perspective to write of a slave owner in a positive way. Looked at by his contemporaries though, Lewis was considered a good slave owner, perhaps even an indulgent one.

This idea of indulgence arose from Lewis granting more days off than required by law, from his toleration of other religions than Christianity on his estates, and from his ban of corporal punishment for all but the most egregious offences. His writing however indicates a practical motivation for all this. Lewis had written "Every man of humanity must wish that slavery, even in its best and most mitigated form, had never found a legal sanction". Yet the thinking and imagination of his time seemed unable to come up with a different system and Lewis was stymied. With the trade in slaves abolished, there was no way for Lewis to augment his work force other than with children born on his estate.

Lewis writes at length of infant and childhood mortality, writing sympathetically of the mothers who saw their children die. He went so far as to establish a separate hospital on one of his estate for maternity cases, and gave nursing mothers at least a year off. Yet at the same time, in his writing about this, the reader gets the feeling that Lewis viewed his slaves more as units of production than as people. Unfortunately, increasing the number of these units was the only way to keep the estates going.

The two estates were at opposite ends of the island. Lewis visited both on each trip and writes entertainingly of the difficulties of travel. He is cautious in writing about the colonial administration and society. Instead, he writes of everyday life: folklore, the food, household administration, the production of sugar, rum and molasses. All of these details combine to make this journal into a travelogue as well. This too helps to develop Lewis's perspective, one where stories of slaves and stories of travel have equal weight.

However, the descriptions of the ocean voyages do bring home just how dangerous travel was in those times. On the first return voyage home, the course was set to avoid pirates lurking in the area. The vessel was blown off course, into the pirate routes, but although a corsair was sighted, there were no encounters with it. On the second voyage to Jamaica, it took from November 5 to December 7, 1817, just to sail from London out into the Atlantic at Plymouth, due to gales.

The journal ends on May 2, 1818, two days before Lewis left Jamaica to return home a second time. This final entry is strange reading, for the reader knows what Lewis could not; he would fall ill with yellow fever and die at sea two weeks later. The final entry shows a man at ease with himself, one who had managed to overcome his fears. The last sentence is I only wish, that in my future dealings with white persons, whether in Jamaica or out of it, I could but meet with half so such gratitude, affection, and good will."

__________________________
Lewis does not write of his life between voyages, but in the Chronology, Terry says he wrote a codicil to his will, witnessed by Byron, Shelley and Polidori, which was designed to protect his slaves after his death.

>99 SassyLassy: Thanks - interesting!

It made me wonder about why there are so many English writers from around that time who had links with slavery. I suppose the answer might simply be that investing in overseas plantations was concentrated in the same segment of society where people were most likely to become writers: the families who had made money but hadn't quite managed to establish themselves in the fossilised aristocracy. They would be the young people who grew up in London or other big towns with enough cash to support them, but didn't have estates to inherit or an admission ticket to law, church or army, e.g. because they were of the wrong religion.

Interesting thought about those writers, and a connection I hadn't thought of. As a child, as I envied them their independent means, I had always wondered... where did that money come from? Now I will look for it more actively.

One thing that did surprise me was to read that West Indian imports to England in the 1770s were worth three times those of East Indian imports. In the introduction, Judith Terry says "Those who needed to make or mend their fortunes went to the West Indies." This was certainly the case in Lewis's family, which seems to have picked up on the plantation idea early. His father and maternal grandfather were both born in Jamaica, on adjacent properties. His father was sent to school in England and never went back, preferring to live the life of a senior civil servant in London (Deputy Secretary of War) on the revenues of the estates. That allowed young Matthew to attend Westminster School and Oxford, and make it to a seat in the Commons, which he held only briefly. I think I saw a suggestion that it was a rotten borough, but I can't find the reference any more.

I read and enjoyed The Monk without having any idea of the man who wrote it or his source of income. Very interesting story and review.

Poetry time again!

The Arrivants: a new world trilogy (1967-1969; single-volume edition 1973) by Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1930 - , Barbados, UK, Ghana, Kenya, US, etc.)

  

Brathwaite grew up in Barbados, where he won a scholarship to study at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Since then he has taught history and literature at a string of universities in Africa, the Caribbean, the UK and the US. He was a founder-member of the Caribbean Artists Movement CAM, which helped many Caribbean writers to get their work published. His book History of the voice (which I quoted in one of the posts up at the top of this thread), where he introduces and explores the idea of "nation language", is the standard work on literary language in the anglophone Caribbean. And he's not at all bad as a poet...

Brathwaite's trilogy The Arrivants was something of a breakthrough work for him and for Caribbean poetry in English when it appeared in the late sixties. Unlike Walcott's long poem Omeros, this is a sequence of linked poems, rather than a single continuous narrative. Brathwaite makes extensive use of the poet's freedom to be in more than one place or time at once, and there is only very limited use of named characters. The first part Rights of Passage deals with the slave trade and the modern African diaspora, Masks takes the poet - physically and spiritually - back to Africa, whilst Islands looks at life and landscape in the Caribbean.

Book-length poems often seem rather intimidating, and it doesn't necessarily help when you know that Brathwaite cites the Beats, the Harlem Renaissance, Miles Davis and Aimé Césaire as major influences. You come to this book expecting rant, sprawl, and unintelligible Africanisms, but what you actually find is a remarkably well-disciplined bit of poetic engineering. There are apostrophes to African gods, to James Baldwin and Jean-Paul Sartre, there are episodes of calypso, limbo and cricket, there's even the occasional bit of good-old-fashioned Pastoral, but it's always there for a good reason and as you read, you can see the pieces of the puzzle clicking into place around you and building up a complicated multidimensional picture of the world that slavery has made.

This is very oral poetry, which you should probably try to imagine being performed in a pub in Brixton or a basement in Greenwich Village. Brathwaite makes use of a very wide range of language registers, from formal academic English right through to patois, creole, black American English, and fragments of African languages. He provides a short glossary of the most important African terms, but most of the time you're on your own (but with enough clues in the context not to lose track completely). Masks is the most difficult part from this point of view, as you need to have at least a general idea about African religious beliefs and the way they are reflected in Caribbean traditions to make sense of what Brathwaite is trying to say. The endnote is quite helpful for this. Rights of Passage and Islands are both much more accessible.

One thing in particular you need to come to terms with is Brathwaite's habit of writing long passages in very short (one or two stress) lines. This might look like sixties affectation on the cold page, but it makes complete sense when you realise how it's meant to be read with a strong drumbeat rhythm behind it. It's really useful to listen to a recording of Brathwaite reading it (there are some on Poetry Archive).

Rant? You want rant? Well, there is a bit, but it's very cool, organised rant:

So went the black
hatted zoot-
suited watch-
chained dream
of the Panama boys
and the hoods
from Chicago.

Yeah man!
the real ne-
gro, man, real
cool.

Broad back
big you know what
black sperm spews
negritude.

I read 200 pages into Bewolkt bestaan by the Dutch author Cola Debrot, but cannot finish reading the book before going back to Beijing, tomorrow.

I will re-read and finish reading it some other time.

Finished Amour, Colère et Folie (Love, Anger and Madness) by Marie Vieux-Chauvet.

I don't have much to add to thorold's review above.

This is three independant stories, all happening in Haiti during a time of dictatorship.

I thought the first story was the best written one. It was really interesting to read about this time and place, although someone more familiar with the history of the place would probably benefit more from it than I did. I was in particular quite astonished by the racism among Haitians, based on the amount of black or white "blood", which has already been mentioned above.

The momentum seems to be running out of this thread a little bit (this might be the moment to step over to the Q2 thread on Writers at Risk, curated by FlorenceArt). But I still have a few Caribbean books on the TBR shelf, and managed to use a lazy Sunday to knock off at least one of them:

The dragon can't dance (1979) by Earl Lovelace (Trinidad & Tobago, 1935 - )

 

Compared to most of the writers mentioned here so far, Earl Lovelace is something of a stay-at-home: he's never lived outside Trinidad & Tobago apart from the inevitable short periods for visiting professorships at various US universities. He's not the most productive novelist (averaging just over a book a decade over the last 50 years) but he's collected a lot of praise and a clutch of literary awards, and has been active in other areas, notably as an academic at the University of the West Indies and as a dramatist. His most recent novel is Is just a movie (2011). Before starting out as a novelist, he was a journalist and a forest ranger.

The dragon can't dance is set in Calvary Hill, a shantytown on the edge of Port of Spain, and it deals in a (surprisingly) humorous and lively way with the classic postcolonial dilemma of balancing the need to resist and the need to assimilate the metropolitan culture and better oneself. In a Prologue, Lovelace reminds us that slaves had had to resort to "asserting their humanness in the most wonderful acts of sabotage they could imagine and perform, making a religion of laziness and neglect and stupidity and waste: singing hosannahs for flood and hurricane and earthquake..." In the postmodern world, the men of Calvary Hill are still trapped in this tradition: they have merely advanced to hanging about on street corners looking threatening, or engaging in pointless traditional battles with men from other steel band clubs in other parts of the city. Meanwhile, their women either become prostitutes or look for menial employment.

The book follows a small group of characters who all have some dim idea of breaking out of this cycle, mostly frustrated by circumstances. Aldrick, the central character, is a man who has somehow managed to survive without doing anything in his life (he seems to have been trained as a signwriter at some point) except during the pre-carnival season, when he fabricates a new and spectacular dragon costume for himself each year. His dragon is meant to be a genuinely frightening one, and for the two days of the carnival, he becomes the dragon, rattling his chains, breathing fire, and rebelling against - whatever it is he is rebelling against. He sacrifices his chance of getting together with the girl he loves because he knows that it would mean changing his life, and that would take him into a realm he doesn't want to start thinking about, in fact doesn't even have the equipment to.

It is only after he gets drawn into an episode of totally pointless, unplanned rebellion and spends a few years in the prison library that he's able to clarify his thoughts and get an inkling of how to get beyond "rebelling against": we don't learn what he does with that knowledge, but the end of the book leaves us with the feeling that from now on he's going to be trying to take purposive, united action for change.

As you might expect from a book that has glowing references from CLR James on both the front and the back cover (Faber paperback edition), this is good old-fashioned postcolonial Marxism, but very down-to-earth Marxism, with a lot of jokes and put-downs and a total absence of theory. And it manages to convey a great sense of the language and culture of Trinidad. Definitely worth a look.

(BTW: this book has one of the most tediously overdone Wikipedia pages I've ever seen. Someone dumped their undigested notes for a high-school essay, by the look of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragon_Can%27t_Dance )

I've just finished The Bridge of Beyond, a very solid read.

>56 SassyLassy:'s review in 56 is much better than anything I'll come up with.

sorry to be late to the game.

has anyone yet mentioned G. Cabrera Infante ?

I am just finishing a novella, I Heard Her Sing, that is in the collection
Masterworks of Latin American short fiction : eight novellas.

Infante writes brilliantly about the nightlife of pre-revolutionary Havana. This particular story follows the escapades of a photographer as he romps amidst the denizens and cafe's of late night Havana. The characters described, the sexual encounters are written in an amazing unique language. He is quite humorous and well known for his use of puns.

One can see the influence of music in his work, his words create a rich rhythm that allow the reader to speed through some rather long paragraphs.

After reading this novella ran out to the Strand Book Store and found a copy of his magnum, Infante's Inferno.

see an in depth interview with Infante:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3079/the-art-of-fiction-no-75-guillermo...

>108 berthirsch: I have Three Trapped Tigers by him on the TBR, and I was thinking of reading it for this theme read, but it's such a tome I passed on it. Thanks for the link to the interview.

>109 rebeccanyc: Not only is Three Trapped Tigers long, it is also sometimes compared to Joyce's Ulysses and is not an easy read.

>109 rebeccanyc: and 110

that is why this novella is so good- it is a fabulous tasting to get the feel of Infante.

I highly recommend it and do not think you will be disappointed.

I found this book at the New York Public Library.

more on Cabrera Infante and Julio Cortazar (an Argentine) who is also part of this novella collection.

Cabrera's parents supposedly started the Communist Party in Cuba and he was part of the initial Revolutionary Castro regime but fell out over his writing. He states his work was so popular because it was pornography although it is so much more, I believe this is just his self-deprecating humor.

the Paris Review interview is worth reading.

I think this Cortazar piece (The Pursuers) is a great introduction to his work. I have been aware of Hopscotch for decades but never made the jump. I was quite pleased to find a piece that was more easily digested.

I felt fortunate to be reading Infante as Obama landed in Cuba- this was purely accidental. It was cool, too, that Obama mentioned both Borges and Cortazar at his Buenos Aires press conference- btw- his pronunciation was impeccable and I now know how to properly pronounce Cortazar.

Without any particular plan, I came to a book that fits very nicely into both this Caribbean thread and my more recent plunge into French crime fiction…

Solibo Magnifique (1988, Solibo magnificent) by Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique, 1953- )

Solibo was written a couple of years before Texaco, and also engages with the tension between “French” and “Creole” ways of looking at the world. Chamoiseau uses a parody of one of the most notoriously linear and logical narrative forms, the detective story, as a deliberately incongruous vehicle for an investigation into the role of a traditional storyteller and his increasingly tenuous place in the modern world. Solibo has died - inexplicably - in mid-sentence during a late night storytelling session under a tamarind tree in Fort de France, and a couple of local policemen are trying to find out who killed him, by the usual techniques of sifting physical evidence and collecting witness statements.

Needless to say, they get nowhere, and the neat narrative of the investigation refuses to advance in the approved linear fashion. Random accidents distract the cops from what they are supposed to be doing, whilst looping Creole recursions and excursions keep diverting us away from the matter in hand so that we can learn why a character has a particular name, or what they had for dinner and how it was cooked.

As in Texaco, the chief joy of this book is in the way Chamoiseau’s playful language allows us to feel that we have been given access to the richness of Creole culture. This sometimes sits a little uncomfortably with the rather heavy-handed satire of the police investigation, which keeps on drifting into grand guignol violence, however much the detective tries to pursue a calm, reasonable approach. So a slighter and less satisfying book than Texaco, but still very interesting.

>110 ELiz_M: Thanks for the warning!

>111 berthirsch: You convinced me! I just ordered it from ABE Books.

>112 berthirsch: I'm a sort-of Cortazar fan. I admired more than I liked Hopscotch and The Winners, but I loved Autonauts of the Cosmoroute which he wrote with his wife, Carol Dunlop.

>114 rebeccanyc:
the Alvaro Mutis piece is also quite good.

thorold's review in (43) above got me reading this wonderful book in a superb translation:

MARTINIQUE



Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau translated from the French and Creole by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov

Written history gives us ages, demarcation points, like the Romanov Empire or the Industrial Revolution, capitalized to enforce just how important such people and developments are. But what of all the people and events whose history never sees the light of day, is lost along with the people whose oral record it was?

Marie-Sophie Labourieux believed in stories, believed in places, believed in her people. Constantly changing, constantly evolving, their origins were in danger of being lost to memory. A people who had descended from African slaves and French colonists, and from all those who came later to their island, a people who had fled the plantations and the masters only to be swallowed by the sugar refineries and City, had little chance of an official history. Even had such a thing existed, it could never capture the sounds, the smells, the tastes and colours of her world. Marie-Sophie set out to do this.

Thirty-five years earlier, Marie-Sophie had left City (Fort de France) and gone around the harbour to the land of the Texaco company. Here she set up her solitary hut, living alone until gradually a whole community of squatters grew up around her. Such places are never left in peace though. The oil people left, City noticed the wonderful vistas and needed more space. A connecting highway, the Pénétrante, was built. Now urban renewal threatened to destroy her community, the "insalubrious" Texaco.

By now, Marie-Sophie was regarded as a matadora, a woman of knowledge, worthy of respect. She was selected to entertain the first urban planner to assay her Texaco over glasses of rum in her hut. In her words

The angel of destruction had come that morning to familiarize himself with the setting for his future exploits.

-- But what's the use of visiting something you're going to raze?

He hadn't known what to answer and had concentrated on emptying his glass. So I took a real deep breath: I suddenly understood that it was I, around this table with this poor old rum, with my word for my only weapon, who had to wage --- at my age --- the decisive battle for Texaco's survival.

-- Little fellow, permit me to tell you Texaco's story...

Slowly she wove for him the stories of her island and her people. More slowly, she filled notebook after notebook with them. From City, the place where she was born, there was Adélina, or was it Sophélise, one of two sisters who left this world so late that no one knew who she might be; their mother Théresa-Marie-Rose, who carried baskets of oranges and volumes of Montaigne across to the guards at the asylum where her husband, the man who had introduced Marie-Sophie to literature, but went mad and ate his library when war was declared, was incarcerated. From this family she had the books that followed her always.

Some Montaigne of course, whom I feel I can still hear murmuring in his freezing castle; Alice, Lewis Carroll's, wandering from wonder to wonder as in a true Creole tale; Monsieur de La Fontaine's fables, where writing looks easy; and, of course, some Rabelais... I like to read my Rabelais, I don't understand much, but his bizarre language reminds me of my dear Esternome's strange sentences stuck between his desire to speak good French and his hill Creole -- a singular quality that I was never able to capture in my notebooks.

From Texaco there was Nelta, the man she loved, whose goal was partir as soon as he had enough money, a goal they both tacitly acknowledged; partir, a French word to take him to France. There was Iréné the shark catcher with whom she would live out her days; Marie-Clémence, whose tongue was "televised news", "dispensing just enough bitterness to make life passionate"; Julot the Mangy, the Boss, afraid only of his dead mother's return to earth; the raids by police trying to flatten the community and the raids by foreign sailors trying to flatten the women.

Marie-Sophie told it all with the immediacy and yet also the mythic quality only an oral culture can convey. Marie-Sophie herself recognized the loss that the writing of history imposes on its material, a loss framed by the very language that seeks to preserve.

The feeling of death became even more present when I began to write about myself, and about Texaco. It was like petrifying the tatters of my flesh. I was emptying my memory into immobile notebooks without having brought back the quivering of the living life which at each moment modifies what's just happened. Texaco was dying in my notebooks though it wasn't finished. And I myself was dying there though I felt the person I was now... still elaborating. ...

Is there such a thing as writing informed by the word, and by the silences, and which remains a living thing, moving in a circle and wandering all the time, ceaselessly irrigating with life the things written before, and which reinvents the circle each time like a spiral which at any moment is in the future, ahead, each loop modifying the other, nonstop, without losing a unity difficult to put into words?

If there is, Marie-Sophie and Patrick Chamoiseau have captured it.

_________________

Edited to replace image which had turned into a question mark

I know it's the last day of the quarter but I'm still reading Reasons of State and will post a review here when I finish it.

I just finished a book today too and have to post. I hope this thread keeps going as some of the others have.

>116 SassyLassy: Great review! - it's good to know that Texaco still works well in translation.

>119 thorold: Thanks and thanks for introducing this writer.

I was amazed at how well this worked in translation. One of the translators is a franco-Haitian and did an undergraduate thesis by translating Solibo Magnifique, and later spent time with Chamoiseau. She speaks in the Afterword of the dichotomy between mulatto French and creole French, the one a sterile language used for economic and social advancement, the other the "organic opposite". She says Chamoiseau's objection to mulatto French as the vehicle of his island is its denial of Creole identity. She says of the multiple languages represented in the original that the translator faces,

So with an English bursting at a few seams, but English nonetheless, our text tries to remain faithful to Chamoiseau's , to the rapport between Martinican Creole and French in a Creole text with a French matrix.

Reading it in translation as I did, I never felt the translator's hand, which is what any author would wish for in a translator.

Many thanks to thorold and rebeccanyc for this great quarter to start 2016.

I see there are at least two more reviews to come, with luck many more.

I for one know I will continue reading from this part of the world.

I finished A Brief History of Seven Killings; which did not work that well for me. It's well-written, but I think the gang activity, misogyny (by the characters, not the author) and endless violence were just too much for me.

Reasons of State by Alejo Carpentier



This is the story of a dictator. The Head of State (we are never given his name) of an unnamed and imaginary Central American or South American nation is a Francophile, and the novel opens in his first person musings on awakening in Paris (this reader didn't realize it was in Paris until later in the book), quickly switches to the third person, and only reverts to the first person at the very end. Throughout, Carpentier's prose is dense, filled with images, and overloaded with lists of everything under the sun (an example, later).

While in Paris, the Head of State receives a telegram that a general has revolted against his rule, and he obviously needs to get back to his country, traveling through New York (which he compares, unfavorably, to Paris). He brutally quells that general's revolt, and eventually returns to Paris where he hangs out with the aristocrats and the Distinguished Academician. He is there when World War I breaks out and returns to his country, Throughout the war, the Head of State's country thrives, its banana and other fruit plantations flourishing and its mines booming (many of the plantations and mines are US-owned). But then, the war is over, and the economy falls apart. The Head of State gets the idea of building a Capitol building and he succeeds, but nothing can stop the forces determined to overturn him (a bomb goes off in his bathroom). The forces against him are multiple, including a provincial politician and someone known as The Student. The Head of State responds with terror, with the army killing professors, students, and a lot of other people. Eventually the US Marines arrive; the "Yankees" have switched their support from the Head of State to the provincial politician, and the Head of State has to flee to Paris, where none of his former friends will have anything to do with him because the press has reported on his massacres. Much more happens in this novel, but I can't tell everything.

Carpentier, as he mostly always does, digresses, into music (he was also a musicologist), art, architecture, and a lot more. As I noted above, the book is full of lists, often several per page, as seen in this example:

"That fire must not of course damage the frescoes of the Pantheon, the pink stone of the Place des Vosges, the windows of Notre-Dame, nor yet the chastity belts of the Abbaye de Cluny, the wax figures and illusions in the Musée Grévin, or the leafy chestnut trees of the avenue where the Comtesse de Noailles lived (although she was one of those who were cutting him) and still less the Trocadero, where as soon as the war was over our Mummy (now being fetched from Gothenburg by the Cholo Mendoza) would be displayed in a glass case."

The story of the Head of State is compelling, although he doesn't get his just desserts but dies, as so many dictators did, in Paris (or the south of France where several notorious 20th century dictators had villas). But Carpentier's style is the main reason I enjoyed this book, his digressions, his lists, and his glorious images.

A little bit late, but actually finished during the quarter - cross posted from my Club Read thread:



The Buccaneers of America by Exquemelin translated from the Dutch by Alexis Brown
first published as De Americansche Zee-Roovers in 1678

The Buccaneers of America was an international best seller in its day, translated into German, Spanish, English and French within a decade of its initial publication. It was no wonder the book achieved such popularity, for the buccaneers had been the scourge of the Caribbean throughout the century. Now someone who had actually lived and sailed with them, who had been present when Captain Morgan sacked Panama, had written an account of their lives.

Exquemelin starts his narrative with a transatlantic crossing in May 1666. At that time he was with the French West India Company. Although heavily armed, the ship sailed in convoy with seven other company ships, twenty vessels bound for Newfoundland, and a few Dutch trading ships; a convoy whose size showed the perils the English frigates along the French coast were capable of inflicting.

His ship arrived safely in Tortuga, off the northern coast of Hispaniola, but here he and his fellow crew members were in for a shock. The French West India Company on the island was unable to pay its debts, so everything was sold, including the indentured servants, of whom Exquemelin was one. Falling into ill health due to the treatment he received from his new master, he was then sold again to a surgeon, who set him free after a year, allowing him credit to pay for his freedom after his release. The use of Europeans as indentured labour was common at the time. Exquemelin never says what his trade was, but it is believed he was a barber surgeon, and so would not have been fit for the field work his first new master demanded. Owning nothing by the time of his release, Exquemelin joined the buccaneers, with whom he stayed until 1674.

Whatever his background was, he had a keen eye for observing both the natural world and the world of men. He wrote in straightforward detail of plants and animals encountered in the Americas, comparing them to those with which his European readers would be familiar. Hunting and agricultural practises are described, along with the preparation of the food produced. Exquemelin viewed these two occupations as distinct communities and described the structure of each. He had little good to say of the large French estates and the planters who ran them, giving examples of their extreme cruelty to their workers.

The third community on Hispaniola was the buccaneers. These outcasts owed no national allegiance, sailing rather under their own captains. Their ranks were made up of former servants like Exquemelin, sailors who had jumped ship, army deserters, former prisoners, some indigenous people and some seeking adventure. According to Exquemelin, careful preparations were made in advance of each expedition. Ships and canoes were readied, locations were scouted, food was prepared and laid by. The buccaneers voted on their cruising lanes, and on the method of distribution of any spoils. This division included compensation for severe injuries and loss of limbs.

Prizes for buccaneers could be rich indeed, but the risks were extreme. The Caribbean was a free for all, with the Netherlands, France, England and Spain all competing for wealth and territories. Exquemelin cites specific examples of international manoeuvring, but it is left to Jack Beeching in his Introduction to give the background.

Spain by this time was in economic decline, with no industries to create new wealth, forced to buy goods on the international market. This hadn't been a problem given the huge amounts of gold it had been able to extract from its American colonies, but as colonies were lost, destroyed, or plundered, and as convoys returning to Spain were mercilessly robbed, this became more difficult. France, England and the Netherlands were seizing each others' vessels and territories, and issuing letters of marque to privateers to do it for them when political conditions prevented them from acting openly. The buccaneers played no small role in these assaults, with the Frenchman l'Olonnais (Jean-David Nau) and the Welshman Henry Morgan being the best known. Exquemelin sailed in Morgan's fleet and detailed these escapades, appearing to admire Morgan's organization, if not his extreme tactics.

While he doesn't recount his life after buccaneering, Exquemelin made it back to Europe and qualified as a surgeon in Amsterdam. There is evidence he later returned to the Americas as his name appears in association with the raid on Cartagena in 1697 by French privateers, but he didn't write about it.

As Exquemelin's book on the buccaneers was translated into different languages, each nationality saw fit to edit and add or subtract to suit its own particular bias. Exquemelin's original writing, the basis of this translation, is very even toned, very matter of fact, even when describing the worst outrages. It is like reading Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, lots of terrible things happen and are narrated in the most mundane fashion. It was enough though, especially the section on Captain Morgan, to make his work the basis for centuries of pirate fiction. It is worthwhile for that alone.

Dany Laferrière, a Haitian who lives mostly in Quebec, is the latest member of the Académie française. I had never heard of him I think, but after reading this interview in Le Monde (in French), I want to read his books.

80. Here Comes the Sun is a powerful novel. I will never think of tourism in the same way again. I've never been to Jamaica, but it sounds like paradise -- and perhaps it is to tourists and to the rich. Dennis-Benn tells the story of the lives of people who tell trinkets -- and themselves -- to the tourists. Margot, the protagonist, works in a hotel and prostitutes herself so she can pay her sister's school fees. Her hopes for a better life lie with her sister Thandi.

The people who work in the hotels go home at night "to their shabby neighborhoods, away from the fantasy they help create about a country where are are as important as washed-up seaweed."

But this complex novel is not just about class; Dennis-Benn also takes on gender and sexuality and race. Thandi spends her money on products to lighten her skin so that she will be accepted by others in the private school she attends. And if the poor are treated like dirt, women are the ones who really suffer. Husbands and fathers leave, forcing the women to support the families. There is no solidarity among the women, however. Verdene, a lesbian, is brutalized by her neighbors, scapegoated because they can't do anything to fight the hotel owners who deny them access to running water, electricity, or the country's beautiful beaches. The owners gobble up land for hotels and evict the people living there.

This isn't a polemic though. Dennis-Benn breathes life into Margot, Thandi and Dolores, and makes up want to see them triumph.

One challenge reading this was the patois. Most of the characters speak in it; I'd like to listen to this. Sometimes just seeing the words on the page made it hard to read.

Overall, though, a very accomplished first novel.

crossposted from my Club Read Thread
Although the title of this book is consistent from the original Spanish to the French translation, the title in English is quite different. It refers to a painting which appears in one house early in the book, is referred to again on occasion and then turns up in the end in a completely different place. To me it makes more sense as a title than the original, although the original can be seen to have a certain irony.



Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier translated from La Siècle des Lumières, the original translation into French, by John Sturrock 1963
- originally published as El siglo de las luces in 1962

The terrible years of the French Revolution and its aftermath were not just a European cataclysm. They were endured by people wherever French rule was supreme. One such area was the Caribbean, at that time a cauldron of competing forces: France, England, Holland, Portugal, Spain, all fought for supremacy in the region, and all had to fight the pirates. Each country controlled at least one island, some had carved out colonies on the northern mainland of South America. Not only were the colonies pawns in this competition for global power, they were also sources of valuable commercial goods for their European masters. Slaves from Africa were the labour force on these overseas estates. The Catholic Church was there too, trying to harvest souls.

What use would the Europeans in such a world have for the ideals of "liberté, egalité et fraternité" or for the thoughts expressed in the Declaration for the Rights of Man and of the Citizen? Carlos and Sophia, brother and sister, and their cousin Esteban had conventional colonial lives. They were wealthy orphans on the verge of adulthood, living together in an old Havana mansion, little thinking of the outside world. Into this comfortable haven came Victor Hugues, a mason, Jacobin and French agitator. Here was someone and something new and exciting for the trio, who readily slipped into believing in that better world, without quite knowing how it was to be achieved.

Victor and Esteban wound up in France, somewhat estranged as Victor climbed the ever shifting world of revolutionary administration. Eventually Esteban, a Spanish national, had to flee France winding up in Guadaloupe, an English colony at the time. Victor too soon found himself in Guadaloupe as Commissar, sent by the Directorate to retake it from England. On board his ship was a guillotine, the first in the New World. So began a reign of terror, giving Hugues the sobriquet of the Robespierre of Guadaloupe.

The character of Hugues is taken from history. Carpentier uses him to vividly reconstruct the Caribbean world of the time. When the revolution in France abolished slavery in its colonies, Victor carried out the order. When slavery was reestablished under Buonaparte, Victor, now in Cayenne as Governor of French Guiana, carried out that order too, rounding up freed slaves and reestablishing a market. The plight of the oppressed, slave or free, is a dominant theme in this book.

Carpentier uses Hugues's relationship with Esteban and Sofia to give a gripping account of Hugues himself, a character type encountered all too often in history. His writing is at times reminiscent of Zola, with the detailed descriptions that manage to move the plot forward rather than impede it. Writing of an autumn hurricane:

A vast noise enveloped and encircled the house, and the different tunes made by the roof, the window blinds and the skylights combined in a watery concert: solid water and broken water, water spattering, tumbling from a height, spouting from a gargoyle, being sucked into the mouth of a gutter. A respite ensued, but more oppressive, more heavily charged with silence than the early part of the night. And then came the second downpour --...

Carpentier the philosopher can't resist a big "what if?" in Explosion in a Cathedral. In a seeming digression with overtones of magical realism, Carpentier speculates on the timing of a journey of centuries, from the source of the Mother River to the Empire of the North, the Land-in-Waiting:

And then one night, as will always be remembered, a blazing shape crossed the sky with a mighty hiss, indicating the direction which men had established long before as leading to the Empire of the North. Then, divided into hundreds of fighting squadrons, the horde set out, and penetrated into foreign lands. All the males of other races were ruthlessly exterminated, and the women kept for the propagation of the conquering race. Thus there came to be two languages: that of the women, the language of the kitchen and childbirth, and that of the men, the language of warriors, to know which was held to be a supreme privilege.

And then, just when the migrants reached the place where "The fresh water pushes so that the other shall not enter, the salt water so that the other shall not escape", they encountered that other huge migratory invasion: that of the European. "Two irreconcilable historical periods confronted one another in this struggle where no truce was possible. Totemic Man was opposed to Theological Man."

Carpentier was the second ever winner of the Miguel de Cervantes prize, given for the author's overall body of work in the Spanish language. However, writing was not his only artistic medium. He was a renowned musicologist. Although his best known novel in that field would be The Lost Steps, music and poetry make frequent appearances in this book, and can be found in the rhythms of his prose.

The Swiss born Carpentier grew up in Havana, developing a real interest in all aspects of Afro-Cuban culture. He was a supporter of revolutionary ideals, which sent him into self imposed exile to France in the '30s and Venezuela after WWII. However, with the rise of Castro, he was able to return to Cuba where he was rewarded with a diplomatic posting to Paris. He died in Paris in 1980 and is buried in Havana.