This month’s reading picks from the Caribbean, with reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan 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
Son of Grace
by Vaneisa Baksh (Fairfield Books, 348 pp, ISBN 9781915237309)
Sports stalwarts across the Caribbean know our legends have long been forged on the cricket pitch. In her biography of Sir Frank Worrell, former Senator of Jamaica and the first Black cricketer to helm the West Indies team for a permanent season, Vaneisa Baksh spares no praise yet constructs no follies for the Barbados-born statesman and sportsman extraordinaire. Baksh’s prose pays attention to Worrell’s comportment between wickets and various other walks of life. A fierce denier of rank individualism, Worrell’s focus lay frequently and vigorously in regional unity through the erstwhile game of gentleman’s rounders. There might be no more perspicacious a chronicler than Baksh to both reveal and remind us of this, in a narrative that privileges Worrell’s voice, cleaving to his vision and held to his own exacting standards. Son of Grace hits us for six, unsparing in its delivery of a true icon’s technicolour portrait.
A Stranger in the Citadel
by Tobias S Buckell (Tachyon Publications, 256 pp, ISBN 9781616963989)
What happens when librarians, armed with books, stand in the direct crosshairs of a cultural revolution? Caribbean-born, Grenada-raised Tobias S Buckell contemplates, in this new speculative fiction offering, the uprisings that reside at the crossroads of post-apocalyptic mayhem and righteous justice through reclamatory acts of reading. The novel’s protagonist, warrior Lilith of Ninetha, carries an unshakeable series of certainties about the walled world around her. Lilith’s awakening is an eruption of shocks, quests, and dangers. Buckell plots it all with compulsive and propulsive energy, reminding us of the nature of these knowledge-based stakes. After all, a world stripped bare of learning becomes a brutality unto itself. In this light, A Stranger in the Citadel ripples with warnings we would do well to heed, and protection spells reminding us of our own inextinguishable capacity to learn.
You Were Watching from the Sand
by Juliana Lamy (Red Hen Press, 176 pp, ISBN 9781636281056)
Shortlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (Fiction), Haitian Juliana Lamy’s debut collection of short stories crackles with an electric and uncontainable urgency. In these fictions, characters navigate their queerness, their states of temporal dislocation and domestic fracture, often shocking in the maps they make and then rend asunder, concerning violence. One narrator, confronting the disruption of domestic abuse in her own family, avows, “My daughter is not made up of hard, clanking things that catch the light wrong. I cannot beat her softer and I will not try.” An irresistible promise follows the central and peripheral speakers of You Were Watching from the Sand: each, no matter how seemingly miniscule, is a voice that resounds, that troubles the waters of complacency. These stories contain such enviable risk at their cores.
Bath of Herbs
by Emily Zobel Marshall (Peepal Tree Press, 72 pp, ISBN 9781845235574)
Gentleness and grace, girded by convictions of steel, structure and pattern their frequencies throughout the poems of Emily Zobel Marshall’s first collection. Of Martiniquan and British heritage, her identities are allowed both vulnerability and insistence in the chorus of experiences that abound herein: meditations on sensuality; immersions in the unbridled natural splendour of Snowdonia in North Wales; the loss of a mother that transforms the interior architecture of a daughter’s dealings. Bath of Herbs is a manifesto for the abundantly alive and the honoured dead, affirmative in its convictions about the vast beauty, the untrammeled heart of the world that cradles us. Unfurling sagacity and fronds of limitless appreciation guide the registers of the poems, which move from wide-eyed exploratory zeal of children at play to a mothering worker’s fine-toothed passions and fears. The abiding emotion fuelling these poems is a verdant and self-sustaining wonder.