This month’s reading picks from the Caribbean, with reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan of The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh by Ingrid Persaud; Let Me Liberate You by Andie Davis; Bad Seed by Gabriel Carle, translated by Heather Houde; and School of Instructions by Ishion Hutchinson
The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh
by Ingrid Persaud (Faber & Faber, 544 pp, ISBN 9780571386499)
If a gangster is only as good as the fellow gunslingers in his posse, what of the leading ladies who inhabit, inform, and shape his inner life? It’s a probing and provocative question Trinidad & Tobago-born Ingrid Persaud seeks to answer in her sophomore novel, The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh. Taking the real-life charismatic career criminal who terrorised Trinidad from the late 1940s to mid-1950s, Persaud sets her sights on four women whose fates were dangerously, dramatically intertwined with Boysie’s. Jealousy, scheming, and no small amount of bacchanal inform the dynamics shared among this lively quartet: Popo, Mana Lala, Doris, Rosie. They love him, they hate him, they hate to love him — in the author’s crackling and vibrant use of Trinidadian English Creole, this story of obsession, rage, and more than a handful of bullets zips along to its rambunctious end.
Let Me Liberate You
by Andie Davis (Little A, 268 pp, ISBN 9781662515644)
What happens when home — the island haven you run to after an identity crisis — becomes as fraught with complicated politics as the diaspora you fled? In Montserrat-born Andie Davis’ debut novel, protagonist Sabre Cumberbatch hearkens to Barbados, despairing of a capitalist art scene abroad in which she’s found fame but scant genuine recognition. Swiftly, Sabre learns that Barbados is no uncomplex monolith, as the class disparities she encounters launch an island-wide campaign for social justice. Piquant in tone, this novel earns immediate storytelling comparisons to Mackenzie’s One Year of Ugly and Mc Ivor’s The God of Good Looks, while revealing Barbadian sociocultural realities embedded in the very limestone of the land. Sabre’s flaws and foibles feel consummately human, and the reader will root for her as she works to locate her true ties to a place as beautiful as it is bounteously difficult to simplify.
Bad Seed
by Gabriel Carle, translated by Heather Houde (The Feminist Press, 120 pp, ISBN 9781558613201)
“A cure doesn’t interest me because I tested positive at 20 and I already know I won’t find love — the only cure I need, the only reason to want to go on living.” The non-heteronormative Puerto Rican youth who populate, with seething anxiety, Gabriel Carle’s short stories in Bad Seed aren’t interested in your readerly approbation. Othered and maligned by those purporting to care for them, they roam, sprawl, and frolic as far as is gaily possible in bathhouses, bathroom stalls, and mall parking lots. Translated from Spanish, these are implosive fictions — their narrative fists up against gentrification and queer hatred. In “Devilwork”, pornographies intersect and clash against unutterable solitudes. The chief character of “Helium” sees love rise and fall, inflate and collapse, to rhythms of Valentine’s Day celebrations in their fissuring home life.
School of Instructions
by Ishion Hutchinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 112 pp, ISBN 9780374610272)
Shortlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Poetry Prize, this book-length poem guides its reader through a non-linear timeline, in which a boy’s youth in rural 1990s Jamaica is woven through experiences of the British West Indies Regiment in the First World War. A finalist for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize, School of Instructions increases the frequencies of polyphonic density Hutchinson’s readers have come to expect and crave from his works. In the tongue of defiant Godspeed, the Jamaican youth, entire seas of history and survival swell. In the trenches of the regiment, mud acquires a million states of dispossession and banal cruelty. “Look for me in the whirlwind!” cries Godspeed, fleeing from an oppressor. He crucibles himself to a multisensory survival, in which every part of the being endures — despite institutional provocations, despite colonial supervillain harms.