This month’s reading picks from the Caribbean, with reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan of The Grand Paloma Resort by Cleyvis Natera; The Evolution of Sokah: The Lord Shorty Testimony by Rudolph Ottley; Algarabía by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera; and The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive by Marcia Douglas
The Grand Paloma Resort
by Cleyvis Natera (Ballantine Books, 352 pp, ISBN 9780593873267)
How many Cuba Libres, slivers of mahi-mahi, and clandestine, fulfilled taboos can fend off a Category Five hurricane? The answer, as the monied elite who vacation at The Grand Paloma Resort swiftly learn, is zero. As a natural disaster bears down on an exclusive hyper-wellness tourist haven in the Dominican Republic, Natera takes us not into nail-biting existentialisms from the mega-hotel’s billionaires — but through the secrets of the staff keeping Grand Paloma afloat. Sisters Laura and Elena, separated by a decade of responsibilities and refuges, simultaneously battle each other and their consciences to fight for freedom both from the storm, and its scorching aftermath. If you’re packing this one as your “easy beach read”, beware — or better yet, be excited. This sensitive sophomore novel will have your heart racing, your empathy barometer rising, and your attention galvanised.
The Evolution of Sokah: The Lord Shorty Testimony
by Rudolph Ottley (Chunce & Chin, 117 pp, ISBN 9789769555494)
The spirit — the abiding soul — of the music that makes Trinidad & Tobago’s Carnival took its primordial breath in the work of the late virtuoso, Ras Shorty I. Born Garfield Blackman, the maestro’s incarnations as “Lord Shorty” and “Love Man” were meaningful signposts on his becoming Ras Shorty I, whose lyrics and performances lilted with devotional transcendence. Rudolph Ottley’s book functions winningly with bifold purpose: as an affecting tribute to this T&T pioneer, and as an archival repository of print media, interviews, reviews, lyrics, concert posters, and reflections spanning decades. Ottley’s generosity strikes its own moving chord: the interpretation of Ras Shorty I’s most personal intimacies is handled with an attentiveness to the subject’s untrammelled legacy. Some 25 years after this icon’s death, The Evolution of Sokah is a blueprint, not of cold citation, but of living song.
Algarabía
by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera (Graywolf Press, 448 pp, ISBN 9781644453513)
“Strangers, today I sing a new song: / the canto of unwavering tenderness / in the face of our extermination.” So heralds this epic poem in the voice of a trans sojourner — one brutalised from his birth into misgendering and institutionalisation. “The Song of Cenex, Natural Son of the Isle Alarabíyya” is the book’s subtitle: truly, every paean of resistance, remembrance, and remapping is chorded into these verses. Roque Raquel Salas Rivera gives us a reverse hymnal in Algarabía, a hero’s journey that both courts and subverts the call of the Muse: a manifestation of transness in a versioning of Puerto Rico at once mythopoetic and starkly real. The pleasure in this bilingual reading is political and necessary. The places Cenex will lead you, reader, as he retrospectively guides you through the canto of his life, will reveal universes.
The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive
by Marcia Douglas (New Directions Publishing, 224 pp, ISBN 9780811231176)
Dazzling in its defiance of what the Caribbean novel “should be”, The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive is munificent and expansive in its approach — arcing narratively over past, present, and future in cosmic wonder. The “arkive” teems, discarding linearity in its curations. Zora Neale Hurston’s lost Kodak camera is unearthed by a runaway girl, Laverne, in 1937. Horses, trussed and transported on Spanish slave ships, “remembering the hull and howl of Africans on the Atlantic, could not be tamed”. The gateway to a Rasta’s dreamworld, guarded by three gravitationally-opposed dreadlocks, opens for an undocumented Jamaican seamstress pursuing the Grand Canyon in all its limitlessness. In these repositories and others, Douglas infuses every riddim, reverberation, and pulse of this work with music, magic, long-time knowing, and ancient power. Untether yourself herein.