Fire Rush
by Jacqueline Crooks (Jonathan Cape, 352 pp, ISBN 9781787333635)
Yamaye knows the dance floor is a dangerous place to lose your mind. Her hometown, Tombstone Estate, holds no allure for her or her clubgoing friends Rumer and Asase, who all need to feel more of themselves than life in 1970s West London allows them. Divided between respectability politics and the call of her subterranean desires, Yamaye chooses rhythm: what will she do when those dub beats skitter out of her control? Triangulating London, Bristol, and Jamaica through the seventies and eighties, Fire Rush is a percussive, sonorous infusion of history and culture, set to music that chants down Babylon in anthemic glory. Shortlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Jamaican-born, British-based Crooks’ debut novel insists on impenetrable sound as its through-line. Amid riots and post-Windrush instability, lyrics and syncopation wind up the prose — turning it sweeter, sharper.
Blackgirl on Mars
by Lesley-Ann Brown (Repeater, 300 pp, ISBN 9781914420283)
No Black woman is asked to be a seer without sacrifice. For Brown, navigating the brutal morass of a United States in which Black men’s bodies are proven disposable, home felt further away than ever before. Then as a longtime resident of the archly titled “progressive Europe”, how would Brown confront a necessary return to Trinidad & Tobago for her grandmother’s funerary rites? Building on the authentic strengths of her creative non-fiction debut, Decolonial Daughter, the memoirist invites an equal tonal indomitability into her second book, while never short-changing herself or her readers on stunningly vulnerable scenes. These potent revelations — of thwarted domestic havens and ayahuasca-fuelled clarities — have both deep personal significance and profound universal resonance. To live both globally and with mindfulness: this is what Blackgirl on Mars radically achieves.
A Sun to be Sewn
by Jean D’Amérique (Other Press, 160 pp, ISBN 9781635422825)
What dreams might possibly fill the pages of a violence-saturated diary? Don’t let the slight dimensions of A Sun to be Sewn, translated from the French by Thierry Kehou, deceive you. Here, the reading is as lyrical as it is devastating. Not a poetic word of D’Amérique’s depiction of Haitian slum life is wasted. His narrative centres a young girl of unstable parentage in the cheerless custody of a prostitute mother and a manipulative ersatz father figure. Conjuring streets where bullets are easier to procure than books is a central mission of the novel, written with prose that glitters in its depictions of squalor, criminality, and assault. Implosive in its refusal to turn away from these horrors, the novel foregrounds poetry’s imperatives as transformative: our 12-year-old protagonist channels each atrocity she witnesses through metaphor’s incontestable lens.
Writing Gender into the Caribbean: Selected Essays 1988 to 2020
by Patricia Mohammed (Hansib, 720 pp, ISBN 9781912662333)
Four decades of gender studies in the Anglophone Caribbean necessarily reflect a non-linear, composite trajectory. These essays chronicle and celebrate the diversity of sources in which their theories are rooted. Drawing on a lifetime of pedagogy, feminist praxis, cultural pioneering, and community creating and sustaining, Mohammed’s Writing Gender into the Caribbean is a formidable reckoning of a text. Spanning generations, examining movements, explicating rituals, surmounting easy biases, this academic work is both societal blueprint and an archive of the region’s gender policies and practices, presented by one of its most significant theorists. Indo-Caribbean feminisms; the fracturing masculinities of award-winning cinema; sexual persuasions in Trinidadian calypsos of the 1920s and 30s … to map the frontiers of these essays is to be amazed at the interdisciplinary terrain they claim.
