Bocas Book Bulletin April 25

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A monthly roundup of news about Caribbean books and writers, presented by the Bocas Lit Fest.

Welcome to the latest installment of the Bocas Book Bulletin, a monthly roundup of Caribbean literary news, curated by the Bocas Lit Fest, Trinidad and Tobago’s annual literary festival, and published in the Sunday Express.

New Releases

The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican memoir of plants and dreams (Hutchinson Heinemann) by Jason Allen-Paisant narrates the author’s personal history with the green landscapes of his homeland Jamaica, enmeshed in the wisdoms of his family’s maternal line. In searching conversations with his valuable confidants, and journeys by vehicle and on foot into some of the most jungled, verdant parts of the parishes he knows best, Allen-Paisant works through myth, memory, and map-making as crucial parts of his narrative. The stark, often confronting differences between the Jamaican and British landscapes are explored with poetic conviction.

Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Penguin Random House) by Tao Leigh Goffe explores the malign influence of European-driven colonization on the Caribbean, and its direct effects on our present climate catastrophe. Combining history with reportage, Dark Laboratory maps the origins of this predatory extraction to Columbus’ 1492 advent to Guanahaní in the Bahamas, which he labelled San Salvador. Acts of fiscal profiteering, at the risk of Black and Brown bodies, are explored throughout the text, which culminates in a radical vision for people of the global majority.

I Sing to the Greenhearts (Seren Books) by Maggie Harris presents poems of place, inflected by the complex passages of history. Steeped in experience, full of speakers who remain undaunted despite time’s ravages, the collection travels from Guyana to Wales, gathering potent symbolisms of our natural and man-made worlds as they journey. Attuned to the pressures of environmental devastation, wary of the spectres raised by insalubrious social media use, I Sing to the Greenhearts explores pathways towards a deeply thinking, feeling planet – one in which we aren’t victims to our fears or flickering computer screens.

A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl (Zibby Books) by Nanda Reddy straddles Miami and Guyana in a plotline that exhumes the ghosts of the past, revealing how they impact the protagonist attempting to secure a safer future. Maya, living a comfortable existence in Atlanta, Georgia, is confronted with the self she used to be, when a letter from Guyana arrives for her— addressed to a name she no longer carries. Confronting layered issues of migration and trauma, A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl positions its central character as a redemptive force.

He Burns by the River (Augustine Books) by Khalia Moreau is a young adult folkloric adventure set in Trinidad’s 1960s, retelling the Biblical tale of Cain and Abel through two youths coming of age in a fraught time. The bond between Roran and his older, fair-skinned brother Danny are beset by ambition and colourism: this sibling struggle becomes even more complicated when Danny falls ill to a mysterious malady. The villagers of Sapo, where both boys live, call it Obeah: can Roran reveal what lies beneath their fearful whispers? Moreau’s postcolonial characters are lifelike, confidently-hewn.