The Caribbean

Introduction

In 2015, Marlon James became the first Jamaican writer to win the Man Booker Prize for his A Brief History of Seven Killings, praised for its intricate storytelling and its representation of place and the island’s politics. Claudia Rankine received international acclaim for her poetry collection, Citizen: An American Lyric, in the form of several prizes, including the Forward Prize for Poetry. André Alexis won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize with his novel, Fifteen Dogs, an allegorical animal tale characterized by its philosophical musings on life.

Two classics of Caribbean literature were reprinted by Peepal Tree Press in 2015. Roger Mais’s Black Lightning, originally published in 1955, is set in a remote Jamaican village and deals with tensions in personal relationships, arising from issues of freedom and control. This classic novel is introduced by Jacqueline Bishop in its Peepal Tree Press’s Caribbean Modern Classic collection reprint. Edgar Mittelholzer’s novel, My Bones and My Flute, one of the most famous ghost stories in Caribbean literature, was originally published in 1955. It has a new introduction by Kenneth Ramchand.

Several established authors published new works in 2015. Slavery and colonialism figure in Caryl Phillips’ rewriting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. His new novel, The Lost Child, set mainly in the twentieth century, deals with issues of identity and alienation. Haitian-American award-winning author Edwidge Danticat has also published a new novel this year. Untwine, aimed at young adults, examines family relationships and memories through the story of twin sisters Giselle and Isabelle Boyer who embark on a journey of self-discovery after Giselle suffers a terrible injury. The novel is written in Danticat’s characteristically lyrical style.

The Pain Tree, Olive Senior’s collection of short stories, was awarded the OCM Bocas Prize. The book was praised by the judges for its wide-ranging scope. Although the main geographical referent is Jamaica and the most identifiable time-span is the twentieth century, the tales in this new book have a universal dimension. Another collection of short stories that was published in 2015 to both public and critical acclaim is Closure, an anthology edited by Jacob Ross, which includes works by both established and debut writers from the Caribbean, including Jacqueline Crooks, Valda Jackson, Fred D’Aguiar, Leone Ross, and Desiree Reynolds. The stories explore the fragmentation of contemporary culture in times of crisis and transformation.

In poetry, several new releases must be noted. The anthology Coming up Hot, published jointly by Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press, gathers the work of emergent Caribbean poets from Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana, and with an introduction by Kwame Dawes, it features contributions from Sassy Ross, Danielle Jennings, and Colin Robinson, among others. Theirs is a generation deeply influenced by Walcott, Carter, and Goodison, but they have also found their own voices. Colin Channer’s debut poetry collection, Providential, was longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize. The poems included in this new book explore personal identity in relation to family, violence, and nation through the figure of a Jamaican policeman.

2015 was a fruitful year for Barbados-born Canadian author Austin Clarke. The winner of Casa de las Américas and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, he published a new poetry collection, In Your Crib, and a memoir, …Membering. His poems explore his personal experience of interviewing some of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement in the second half of the twentieth century — figures who also appear in …Membering, where Clarke reflects on his early life in Barbados and on his experience after he left the island to eventually become one of the most characteristic voices of multicultural writing in Canada.

Cultural clashes, global concerns, migration, politics, and ecology are just some of the many themes explored in the Caribbean fiction and poetry included in this bibliographical entry. Tiphanie Yanique’s collection of poems, Wife, was honoured with the OCM Bocas Prize for poetry while the winner of the Prize’s non-fiction was Jacqueline Bishop’s The Gymnast and Other Positions. Peepal Tree Press published Jan Carew’s autobiography as well as essay collections by Clem Seecharan and Edgar White. In journals, special issues appeared on Aimé Césaire, on Dominican black writers, and on contemporary Caribbean cinema.

In the field of literary criticism, several studies on individual writers appeared in different academic publications. Book chapters dealing with topics such as memory, identity, and sexuality have considered Shani Mootoo’s fiction. Diasporic identity is one of the main concerns in a number of articles on V. S. Naipaul’s work. Derek Walcott, another classical author of Caribbean literature, was the focus of articles and book chapters published in different anthologies throughout 2015. Articles analysing works by Caryl Phillips also occupy an important section within the studies on individual writers. Issues of cosmopolitanism, subjectivity, transcultural adoption, or blackness are also explored in criticism on Phillips’ literary production.

A significant number of studies were published in 2015, highlighting issues of diaspora, race, history, and folklore. Giselle L. Anatol, for instance, revisits these issues in her latest monograph entitled The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora. The shape-shifter of Caribbean folklore, the soucouyant, is explored here and in María Alonso Alonso’s Diasporic Marvellous Realism: History, Identity and Memory in Caribbean Fiction. Both works focus on the depiction of folkloric elements in contemporary Caribbean texts through the prisms of gender and the transnational.

History and diaspora link two of the general studies published this year. Emigration and Caribbean Literature by Malachi McIntosh focuses on the works of authors who migrated to Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. This migrant intellectual community contributed significantly to the development of a distinctive Caribbean voice in host countries such France and the United Kingdom. Caribbean Irish Connections, a collection of essays edited by Alison Donnell, Maria McGarrity, and Evelyn O’Callaghan, explores the centuries-long presence of Irish migrants in the Caribbean and discusses race and class structures during and after the plantation period.

The works of diasporic Caribbean female writers are the focus of Making History Happen: Caribbean Poetry in America. This book engages with issues of identity and language through the works of internationally acclaimed transnational poets such as Lorna Goodison and Claudia Rankine.