This month’s recommended reads from the Caribbean, with Shivani Ramlochan’s reviews of Son of Grace by Vaneisa Baksh, A Stranger in the Citadel by Tobias S. Buckell, You Were Watching from the Sand by Juliana Lamy, and Bath of Herbs by Emily Zobel Marshall.
Child of Grace
Vaneetha Baksh (Fairfield Books, 348 pages, ISBN 9781915237309)
Sports lovers across the Caribbean know that our legends have long been built on the cricket pitch. In her biography of Sir Frank Worrell, former Jamaican senator and the first black cricketer to manage the West Indies team full-time, Vaneisa Bakhsh celebrates the Barbadian-born politician and sportsman’s extraordinary talents but does not conspire against his follies. Bakhsh’s writing focuses on Worrell’s conduct at the wicket and between his various other professions. A fierce denier of rugged individualism, Worrell frequently and tirelessly focused on community solidarity through the old gentleman’s game of rounders. Few historians could be more insightful in revealing and reminding us of this than Bakhsh. The story values Worrell’s voice and adheres closely to his vision and his own exacting standards. Child of Grace It stuns us with its relentless portrayal of a true icon.
Stranger in the Citadel
Tobias S. Buckell (Tachyon Publishing, 256 pages, ISBN 9781616963989)
What happens when a librarian armed with books finds himself attacked head on by a cultural revolution? In this new work of speculative fiction, Caribbean-born, Grenada-raised Tobias S. Buckle examines rebellions at the crossroads of post-apocalyptic upheaval and justice through the regenerative act of reading. The novel’s protagonist, Nineta warrior Lilith, has unshakable certainty about the walled world that surrounds her. Lilith’s awakening is an eruption of shock, exploration, and danger. Buckle plots it all with an obsessive, propulsive energy, reminding us of the nature of knowledge-based stakes. After all, a world stripped of learning becomes cruel in its own right. From this perspective, Stranger in the Citadel There are ripples of warnings we need to heed, and protective spells that remind us of our own indelible capacity to learn.
You were watching from the sand
Juliana Lamy (Red Hem Press, 176 pages, ISBN 9781636281056)
Shortlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction, Haitian author Juliana Lamy’s debut collection of short stories is electric and full of unbridled urgency. In these fictions, characters navigate their queerness, temporal dislocations, and familial fissures, often shocking as they draw and then tear apart maps of violence. Facing the breakdown of domestic violence in her own home, one narrator declares, “My daughter is not made of hard, clanging material that catches the wrong light. I cannot and will not hit her more gently.” You were watching from the sand: Each, however small, is a reverberating voice, a disturbance in the ocean of complacency. At the heart of these stories is an unenviable amount of risk.
Herbal bath
Emily Zobel Marshall (Peepal Tree Press, 72 pages, ISBN 9781845235574)
Tenderness and grace, underpinned by steely conviction, are structured, patterned and frequent in Emily Zobel Marshall’s first collection of poetry. Her Martinique-British identity allows her to be both vulnerable and attached in the chorus of experiences that abound here: meditations on sensuality, immersion in the irrepressible natural splendor of Snowdonia in North Wales, and the death of a mother transforming the inner structures of a daughter’s relationships. Herbal bath ” is a declaration for the abundant living and the revered dead, a confident affirmation of the vast beauty, the free-heartedness of the world that holds us. Leaves of spreading wisdom and boundless gratitude guide the realm of poetry, which moves from the wide-eyed, exploring enthusiasm of children at play to the keen passion and fear of a mother. The abiding emotion that drives these poems is a lush, self-sustaining wonder.”
