Bocas Book Bulletin

The Stranger Who Was Myself (Peepal Tree Press), a frank, witty, questioning memoir by Trinidadian writer Barbara Jenkins, records her childhood and youth in pre-Independence Trinidad, her departure on 31 August, 1962, on a government scholarship, her experience of 1960s Britain as a university student and then young wife and mother — and culminates with her eventual return to Trinidad. This portrait of the young writer is also a portrait of her extended family, the colonial city she grew up in, and its class and ethnic hierarchies. Jenkins’s sense of being perpetually an outsider or “stranger,” even to herself, gives her recollections a unique psychological insight. Her patient, supple prose propels the reader through a narrative that is at once unique but also representative of a generation of Trinidadians negotiating big questions of identity and belonging in the Independence era.

If I Survive You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the debut book of fiction by Jamaican-American Jonathan Escoffery, offers a sequence of linked short stories about a Jamaican family who migrate to Miami in the 1970s, and the consequences over subsequent decades of this uprooting on the protagonist Trelawny. Born in the US, surrounded by but also in some ways excluded from the Jamaican culture of his parents, Trelawny’s story is one of survival through striving to make a home for himself in an often hostile society, with a vivacious attitude to luck and circumstance.

The Dreaming (Peepal Tree Press), the debut book of fiction by Trinidadian Andre Bagoo (author of several books of poems and one of essays), revolves around a group of queer men in contemporary Trinidad, searching variously for love, sex, family, and safety. The comic and the sinister are never far apart in these tales, which hearken back to the close social observation of VS Naipaul but are also unafraid to delve into the shadowy places of loneliness, desire, and heartbreak.

Radical Normalisation (Carcanet Press), the first full-length book of poems by Dominican writer Celia Sorhaindo, ranges in its concerns from family life to mental health, from the after effects of natural disaster — specifically, Hurricane Maria, which devastated Dominica in 2017 – to the place of a writer in a literary tradition, and what poetry can and cannot do to help us navigate personal and collective crises. Inquisitive and restless on the page, Sorhaindo’s distinctively Caribbean voice connects the everyday with the timeless.

Writers of Dominica, 1920–2020 (Emmanuel Publishing House), compiled by Alick Lazare, offers a broad, rich overview of the literature of Dominica over the past century, combining a critical study of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea with selections from 44 other writers of prose and poetry hailing from the Nature Isle — following “the growth of a national literature from the unstable and insecure social conditions during the colonial era to a more secure and confident society that prevailed in the post-independence period.”

The poetry collection Mother Muse by Jamaican Lorna Goodison has been shortlisted for the 2022 Derek Walcott Prize – “offered annually for a book of poetry by a non-US citizen published anywhere in the world”. Now in its third year, the prize comes with a cash award of US$1,000. The winner will be announced on 13 October.

No fewer than seven writers with links to the Caribbean have been named fellows of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), as part of a 2022 cohort of nearly 100. They include Malika Booker, Fred D’Aguiar, Kit de Waal, Ferdinand Dennis, Hannah Lowe, Karen McCarthy Woolf, and Monique Roffey — with roots in Guyana, Grenada, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, and Trinidad and Tobago. Among the additional honorary fellows “who have made a significant contribution to the advancement of literature as publishers, agents, librarians, booksellers or producers” is Polly Patullo, founder of the Dominica-based Papillote Press. And the winner of the RSL’s 2022 Benson Medal, recognising lifetime achievement in literature, is writer and storyteller Sandra Agard, born in Britain to Guyanese parents. Founded in 1820 and based in the UK, the RSL is a charity which works to “reward literary merit and excite literary talent”.