Della Manley: A Thousand Fireflies
The colour of her voice is Blue Mountain coffee with a good dash of evap. Della Manley’s music is a vapour released by the cauldron which...
Caribbean Bookshelf (September/October 1998)
TRAVEL Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among The Converted Peoples V. S. Naipaul (Random House 1998: ISBN 0-375-50118-5) One gets used to...
The Fire This Time
Si ou gen youn sous k ap ba-w dlo, ou pa koupe pye-bwa kot. “If you have a stream that gives you water,” runs the Haitian proverb,...
Caribbean Bookshelf (November/December 1998)
POETRY Leaving the Dark Cecil Gray (Lilibel Publications, 1998; ISBN 0-9681745-1-5) This collection of poems by Cecil Gray, his third, is a...
The Birth of Negritude
When does a piece of writing become a classic? Perhaps never more definitively so than when it appears on Oxford University’s syllabus....
Bookshelf (March/April 1999)
FICTION The Migration Of Ghosts Pauline Melville (Bloomsbury 1998; ISBN 0-7475-3675-9) Here, already on her third book, is a fresh and...
Sam Selvon: Words of Welcome
London in the post-war 1940s was a far cry from the “cool Britannia” of half a century later. Rationing was still in force, choking...
Turnin Han: Marcia Douglas’ Madam Fate
I was born in England to Jamaican immigrants. It was cold that night; my mother groaned and sighed; I tasted her pain and all the...
