Bookshelf (April/May 2001)

New and recent books about the Caribbean

  • Botany/Art
  • Economics
  • Environment
  • Memoir
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Pick of the Month- Landscape with Heron: Stories and Remembrances

PICK OF THE MONTH

Landscape with Heron: Stories and Remembrances

Wayne Brown (The Jamaica Observer 2000, 422 pp, ISBN 976-610-354-2)

The beautiful title story of this volume describes a middle-aged man who one night in a museum gallery encounters the woman who will be the love of his life. They exchange only a few words before drifting apart, and never meet again. But the habit of always looking out for her eventually brings an unexpected revelation: “The variegated richness of the world, unsought, came to him. He became enamoured of the vivacity in things.” Wayne Brown might well have been writing in these two sentences a summary of his own literary achievement.

Landscape with Heron, like its predecessor, The Child of the Sea, is a collection of essays and stories originally published as newspaper columns (in Trinidad and Jamaica, between 1989 and 2000). Before he began writing for the press, Wayne Brown had made a name for himself as a poet, and his In Our Time column, now entering its 17th year, clearly belongs to the realm, not of journalism, but of literature. Most of the pieces here are not straight fiction but meditations on love and memory, family and friendship, nature and art, home and exile. What they have in common is a concern — it isn’t unfair to call it a middle-aged concern — with the passing of time and the changing of people and places, with the chance events which, woven together over a lifetime, make the fabric of experience.

Running through the book, occasionally manifesting itself as an interruption of the narrative, is a sort of obsession with Trinidad and Tobago’s UNC government and its policies. Perhaps, on original publication, these comments seemed topical, but in the republished pieces they suggest a bitter resentment at odds with the generosity and grace of the stories.

But Brown’s gaze is otherwise extraordinarily clear, and happily matched by a supple and well-crafted prose. His natural tone tends to the melancholy, though delicately spangled with optimism and a kind of wonder at the world’s succession of minor epiphanies.

POETRY

From Behind the Counter: Poems from a Rural Jamaican experience

Easton Lee, with photographs by Owen Minot (Ian Randle Publishers 1998, 197pp, ISBN 976-8123-87-7)

Easton Lee’s Chinese father and mixed-race mother owned a shop in the village of Wait-a-bit in Jamaica, at a time when rural life revolved around such establishments. The Chinese shopkeeper and his household are much referred to but often peripheral in West Indian literature. This collection of poems presents a rare opportunity to get to know the characters Behind the Counter. Lee’s book is a study in the demystification of poetry. The language (sometimes standard English, sometimes rich and unmistakable Jamaican dialect) and structure are straightforward and unpretentious and well suited to the subject matter — the simple and not-so-simple lives of Jamaica’s rural folk. The character portraits are intimate, generous and loving. There are no generalisations here, but a sense of deep familiarity and an understanding that is intuited rather than studied. The detail is so amply vivid that the handful of photographs by Owen Minot seems almost superfluous. (AL)

FICTION

The Lagahoo’s Apprentice

Rabindranath Maharaj (Toronto 2000, Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 388 pp, ISBN 0-676-97247-0)

In Maharaj’s second novel, Stephen Sagar, now a writer and teacher, lives in Canada with a wife who despises their mutual homeland, Trinidad, and a child who has never seen it. Heedless of the island’s social and political changes, Stephen paints, for himself as much as for his young daughter, a picture of an idealised Trinidad: a tropical paradise “with magical waterfalls and playful creatures”, lost somewhere between tourist brochures and childhood memories. When a local politician invites him to write his biography, Stephen finds himself returning to Trinidad alone, after an absence of 16 years. Like the shape-shifting lagahoo (from the French “loup-garou”, or werewolf) of the title, both Stephen and the island are revealed to the reader in a progression of manifestations, and as with the lagahoo, no one version is truer or more real than the others. Both man and country are faced with the challenge of describing for themselves a future, but both prove reluctant to disengage from the past. (AL)

MEMOIR

Rude Boy: Once Upon a Time in Jamaica

Chris Salewicz (Victor Gollancz 2000, 262 pp, ISBN 0-575-06522-2)

Chris Salewicz, a British music journalist, first visited Jamaica in 1978 on what he calls a “reggae fanatics’ pilgrimage”. The island, he says, “healed and restored” him: “I fell in love”. This sounds like typical tourist fluff, but fortunately Salewicz is no fluffy tourist. In his encounters with musical legends Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, he journeys between the profound spirituality of Rastafarianism and the brutal violence of Trench Town’s “yardies”. These are the opposing extremes which for Salewicz define Jamaica’s contemporary culture; and in looking back to the mediaeval roots of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and to Jamaica’s pirates and Maroons of the 17th and 18th centuries, he attempts to trace their origins. But Rude Boy is foremost a personal memoir. Its central event is a terrifying and violent robbery which Salewicz experienced in 1995, but during which Salewicz felt protected by the spirit of Bob Marley. The incident is unpleasant to read about, but it seems to offer a vivid and pointed summary of same aspects of modern Jamaica. (NL)

ENVIRONMENT

Views from the Ridge: Exploring the Natural History of Trinidad and Tobago

Julian Kenny (Prospect Press 2000, 166pp, ISBN 976-95057-0-6)

Julian Kenny is one of the Caribbean’s best-known environmentalists — he was Professor of Zoology at the Trinidad campus of the University of the West Indies for many years, a tireless advocate of sensible conservation and sustainability, and in recent years he has been raising environmental issues as an independent senator in the Trinidad and Tobago parliament. He is also a tireless field worker, hiker, diver, photographer and general environmental investigator. This book is the fruit of almost half a century of first-hand exploration and research: the text covers the whole spectrum of Trinidad and Tobago natural history (though Kenny is the first to concede that no single volume can do this comprehensively), and is vividly complemented by Kenny’s own photographs. There are other excellent books on specific aspects of the rich Trinidad and Tobago environment, but this is the first to attempt an overview of the whole subject, and as such is a valuable addition to the literature. The book is carefully aimed at the curious general reader and well as the specialist, generally eschewing academic language, and tempts purchasers with full colour and quality design. (CR)

ECONOMICS

Globalisation: A Calculus of Inequality: Perspectives from the South

Ed. Denis Benn and Kenneth Hall (Ian Randle Publishers 2000, 171pp, ISBN 976-637-0192)

Without explicitly explaining their meaning, the papers in this collection use the jargon of present-day economics — terms like “neoclassicism”, “trade liberalisation” and “Keynesian” — to discuss a problem first raised by 18th-century political philosophers: the inherent conflict between liberty and equality. At the national level, governments, with varying degrees of success, weigh the interests of individuals against those of society as a whole. At the global level, there are as yet few institutions to make such considerations, and the lowering of trade barriers and the loosening of capital flows across borders lead some to think that the balance has swung too far in favour of freedom at the expense of equity. For small Caribbean states, there is the additional dimension of disenfranchisement, with leaders perceiving liberalisation as making them more vulnerable and causing them to lose the recently-won control of their destiny. Most of the papers here reflect this view, with calls for a shift in thinking and for global institutions to protect the weak and ensure that globalisation benefits all. That, however, still leaves the fate of small countries in the hands of outsiders. Richard Bernal in his paper promotes a “strategic global repositioning” — structural transformation that minimises the costs of globalisation and takes advantage of its opportunities. That is what all countries, rich or poor, big or small, have to do in these new, uncertain times. (DS)

BOTANY/ART

Cerasee & other Jamaican Flowering Plants

Rhoda Long, Marjorie Humphreys, Helen Hamshire & Rita Landale, ed. (The Mill Press 1999, 102pp, ISBN 976-8168-04-8)

This little hybrid of a book is a puzzle to classify. The chief part of it is a series of 35 delicate watercolours of Jamaican flora, from forest, field and garden, executed over a quarter of a century ago by Rhoda Long. Accompanying these are fragments of verse by well- and not-so-well-known Caribbean writers, and botanical notes compiled by Humphreys and Hamshere. The whole has been edited by Landale, and published under the imprimatur of Jamaica’s Farquharson Institute of Public Affairs. The compilers seem to hope that Cerasee may serve as a field guide, but it isn’t comprehensive enough for that (though goodness knows in the absence of a proper guide to Jamaican wildflowers it is a welcome sight). The watercolours are well-reproduced and the bits of verse pleasant to glance at, but the volume is not lavish enough to be considered a coffee-table book. It is a curiosity, really, but as thoroughly delightful as a curiosity ought to be. Actually, what most intrigues in these pages is the mystery of the artist herself. Long, we are told in a reticent biographical note, was born, lived happily, and died at the age of 61. We are told little more. The origins of her careful botanical sketches and her possible ambitions for them remain a secret. (NL)

Reviews by Anu Lakhan, Nicholas Laughlin, Clive Ramlogan, Damien Smith

Funding provided by the 11th EDF Regional Private Sector Development Programme Direct Support Grants Programme.
The views expressed on this website are those of the the authors and do not reflect those of the Direct Support Grants Programme.

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