This month’s recommended reading from the Caribbean, with a review of The Ferguson Report by Shivani Ramlochan; An Erasure by Nicole Seely; Naniki by Oona Kempadoo; Black Light Void: Dark Visions of the Caribbean edited by Marcia Pearce; and The Hurricane Book: A Lyrical History by Claudia Acevedo Quiñones.
Ferguson Report: Expunged
Nicole Seely (Knopf, 144 pages, ISBN 9780593535998)
Winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Poetry Prize; The Ferguson Report “A Warrant of Editing Under Fire” is a book written in the wake of the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown (an unarmed man) in Ferguson, Missouri, by the US Virgin Islands-born Sealy, who expunged the official Department of Justice report released after the murder. The poet reproduces what is written there by quoting poems from the text, full of rage, and at the same time staring at the uneasy silence that often accompanies such manmade horror. He solicits further testimony from the original documents already investigating the atrocities, The Ferguson Report The work is a mass of precision and destructiveness, evoking centuries of horse neighing, black hands raised in protest and defense, and the image of a deer whose skin is hardened by running hard under pressure.To say that this poetry project is visionary feels obvious, intuitive.
What?
Oonya Kempadu (Rare Machines, 200 pages, ISBN 9781459751491)
Written in kaleidoscopic, undulating prose, What? is a novel of spiritual exploration that follows twin spirits Amana and Skelele on their island-hopping journey through a Caribbean sea hit by climate catastrophe. Kempadu, whose parents are Guyanese, imbues myth with magical realism and portrays growing up in compelling ecofiction, creating a genre mosaic that resonates at its own radical frequency. As the pair traverses time and space, they encounter signposts of the shattered Anthropocene, but also antidotes to the wounds of such environments. Afro-indigenous history is integral to this shape-shifting story that connects all living souls in the tale with a kind of bold, glimmer of hope. What? “How can we remain on this wounded planet?” it asks, the novel responding that our shared salvation lies in love, waiting to be realized.
Blacklight Void: Dark Visions of the Caribbean
Editor: Marcia Pierce (Hansib Publishing, 108 pages, ISBN 9781739321109)
“In the void of black light, you will find yourself,” declares cultural studies scholar and curator Marcia Pierce in the final paragraph of the introduction to this sombre, epic, imaginative anthology. Black Light Void is interdisciplinary, bringing together six Trinidad and Tobago-born writers – Kevin Jared Hosin, Barbara Jenkins, Sharon Miller, Amilcar Sanatan, Portia Subran and Elizabeth Walcott Hackshaw – to respond to the paintings of contemporary Caribbean artist Edward Bowen. From parasitic rafflesia to sexual crimes committed under the constraints of decorum, the results certainly evoke the darkness intended by Pierce’s introduction. In dialogue with Bowen’s large-scale, abstract compositions, the Trinidad and Tobago sextet delves deeper than the darkness one is apt to imagine. This is the strength of this anthology, its willingness: we do not only fear the darkness within, but embrace the abyss it evokes.
The Hurricane Book: A Narrative History
Claudia Acevedo Quiñones (Rose Metal Press, 160 pages, ISBN 9781941628317)
Puerto Rican Claudia Acevedo Quiñones’ debut novel traces six hurricanes that passed through the island between 1928 and 2017, drawing on a vortex of lyric poetry, anecdote and reportage writing in the epicenter of creative nonfiction. Hurricane Book The book is both a family tree and a map, a scrapbook of collected memories, domestic recollections, and unearthed secrets, lending a rich and remarkable patina to a society-wide cartography dominated by American superstructural neglect and environmental crisis. As an autobiography surrounded by poetry and possibilities not necessarily bound to the fundamentally verifiable, it is a work that confronts its author’s unreliability rather than escaping it. Archives, too, are as fickle as storms and as difficult to faithfully map out as the path of a devastating storm. This hybrid ode to ancestry, sanctuary, and crisis ripples with the unmistakable rhythm of the ocean that surrounds us all.
