Welcome to sx salon’s first issue of 2012. As we have in past issues, here we offer you a variety of writings: reviews, interviews, poetry, and prose. Our discussion in this issue is perhaps even more varied than usual, bringing together a collection of pieces that consider the in-betweenity of Haitian identity. Of course, the mention of Haiti since 12 January 2010 is often, if not always, associated with the devastation of the earthquake, and our first two pieces address the then/now split created by that tectonic shift. First, Martin Munro discusses the first post-earthquake Haitian novel and includes a short interview with its author, Marvin Victor. The interview is also available in the original French. In the second discussion piece, Colin Dayan writes evocatively of the impossibility of return as she navigates between the shadows of remembered geographies (her mother’s and her own) and the new landscape of Haiti in the summer of 2011. Our second two pieces in this issue’s discussion explore the complexity of Haitian identity beyond the earthquake. In our third piece, Edwidge Danticat, with her characteristic lyricism, considers the “fellow urban nomads, reciters, and ambient voyagers” she encounters in the liminal world of cab rides, perhaps the most paradigmatic in-between space. Our fourth discussion piece is a short story from Roxane Gay exploring how personal trauma can shift identity as completely as national events. The title of Gay’s story, “What After Looks Like,” could perhaps be the title of the entire discussion.

In our interview section of this issue we publish part 2 of an interview with Caryl Phillips, along with the first of a series of interviews with female scholars of Caribbean literature. The series, conducted by Sheryl Gifford, will consist of four interviews exploring the contributions of these scholars to work on Caribbean writers, particularly Caribbean women writers.

We also have a mix of reviews in this issue, with essays on Rahul Bhattacharya’s The Sly Company of People Who Care, Colin Grant’s The Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh, and Wailer, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World, and Louis Parascondola’s recent edited collection of Eric Walrond’s later writings. In Prose and Poetry we have new poems from Cynthia James, Nicholas Alexander, and Soyini Forde, as well as a stirring preview of Diana McCaulay’s upcoming novel, Huracan, in the excerpt “Zachary’s Arrival, Part I.”

This issue marks our shift to quarterly publication, so our next issue will be in May. We hope you enjoy sx salon 8 (table of contents below).

Kelly Baker Josephs

sx salon, issue 8 (February 2012)

Reviews

The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya—Charles V. Carnegie
In Search of Asylum: The Later Writings of Eric Walrond, edited by Louis Parascondola—James Davis
Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara—Marcela Echeverri
The Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh, and Wailer by Colin Grant—Anthony Bogues

Discussion – Haiti: Living In-Between

Living Nowhere, Writing Disaster: Marvin Victor and Corps mêlés—Martin Munro
In Haiti, August 2011—Colin Dayan
One Heart—Edwidge Danticat
What After Looks Like—Roxane Gay

Poetry

Cynthia James
Nicholas Alexander
Soyini Forde

Prose

 Zachary’s Arrival, Part I— Diana McCaulay

Interviews

“Other Ways of Being”: A Conversation with Evelyn O’Callaghan—Sheryl Gifford
“The Narrative Is Not Written in Stone”: A Conversation with Caryl Phillips, Part II—Bastian Balthazar Becker

Marvin Victor and Corps mêlés

Martin Munro

The writing of disaster seems an apposite term to apply to post-earthquake Haitian writing. The phrase recalls the title of Maurice Blanchot’s 1980 work L’Ecriture du désastre, which has been used by certain critics to refer to Haitian literature, both before and after the earthquake.[1] There is to some extent a critical expectation that the “writing of disaster” should bear in formal terms the physical and stylistic marks of catastrophe: prose will be “fractured” or “fragmented,” or will otherwise show signs of rupture and violence. Short fiction may be a genre particularly suited to or representative of this fractured style: the sharp blasts of narrative from many different voices in, for instance, Edwidge Danticat’s edited collection Haiti Noir are suggestive of the difficulty of conceptualizing longer fiction at such a short remove from the earthquake.[2] Also, with such a collection and with other post-earthquake edited volumes one senses that no single person can own the event or its memory, and that it is something to be shared and pieced together collectively.[3] It could moreover be said that the short fiction mode has been the dominant genre in recent and contemporary Haitian fiction. Lyonel Trouillot writes short novels that could be categorized as long novellas, while Dany Laferrière’s books are made up of episodic, fragmented narratives, and Danticat, Yanick Lahens, Evelyne Trouillot, and Gary Victor are accomplished short story writers. Given the critical expectation for fragmented style and the apparent aptness of shorter fiction to the “writing of disaster,” one might have thought that the great novels of the earthquake, those written on an epic, expansive scale, would take time to compose, and that they would not begin to appear for years or decades to come. Read the rest of this entry »

Colin Dayan

Everyone gets a piece of it. Haiti has always been there for the taking: a place to disappear into, to find what you have lost, or to make yourself new. And now that the country is in pieces, with hundreds of thousands still displaced and starving, with rubble everywhere, the taking—the turning of godforsaken remnants into ill-gotten wealth—has never been so exuberant or so blatant.

I returned to Haiti a year and a half after the earthquake. It was my mother’s Haiti that I carried with me when I returned. I had to keep it in mind, since everything she knew has been destroyed. The neighborhoods of Bois Verna and Turgeau, where she was born and raised, are in ruins. Nothing remains of her school Sacré Coeur. Walking slowly into my past, I go into the bathroom near the boarding gate in Miami. I look in the mirror and see my mother in her best, most exquisite days, though I am heavier since I do not refuse to eat as often as she did. But the stiff elegance and tense look are hers, even though with me there is always the stray hair, the unfinished face—no lipstick, no eye-shadow—and a walk that tells a story, always, no matter how many years have passed, of insecurity and fear. Read the rest of this entry »

Edwidge Danticat

I always talk to cab drivers, in part because my father was one. If they are black and from the Caribbean, I survey their ID cards and mull over their French-sounding names before cautiously asking, “Haitian?”

Mostly there’s no need to ask. Haitian cab drivers often have their radios tuned to Haitian music, religious, or political programs, if a Creole CD is not playing.

Sometimes the driver turns around to have a look at me before continuing the conversation.

“You Haitian, too?” he asks, for mostly they are men.

“Obviously,” I reply. “Ou tou wè sa.” Read the rest of this entry »

(Fiction)

Roxane Gay

Every morning, my parents eat breakfast together. It is the way of their marriage. They have Nadine, one of their maids, prepare them avoine or fruit salad or bagels or scrambled eggs. They drink tea and coffee and talk about what they have planned for the day: meetings, shopping, dinner, a party. The morning after my kidnappers freed me, Michael and I sat with my parents for breakfast. The tension between my father and my husband lingered thickly. I could not bring myself to look at my father. I knew too much about the kind of man he was. I wore layers and layers of clothing so I could hide in plain sight. They could see me but they could not see me. My mother looked me up and down and arched an eyebrow. She spread marmalade over her fresh bread and made a small noise under her breath. She said, “It is good to have you home.” “Damn right it is,” Michael said. My mother did not ask any questions. She knew I wouldn’t say anything to her or my father about what happened. The women in my family are all the same in the stupidest ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction and Table of Contents

Read the rest of this entry »

On the Necessity of Academic Reviewing

Raphael Dalleo

Let me begin by celebrating the fact proven by the present company involved in this discussion: a vibrant culture of reviewing Caribbean literature exists. In the past decade, Caribbean Review of Books has developed as the unparalleled little magazine of Caribbean literature, whether in its paper or electronic iteration, joining Callaloo as a great place to find first-rate reviews. Internet publishing has become an especially fruitful site for book reviewing, whether in blogs like Signifying Guyana or here in sx Salon. Online venues have therefore become wonderful resources for reviews of new Caribbean novels, poetry, and other creative writing. The reviewing of Caribbean literary and cultural studies scholarship, however, remains more piecemeal. I became review editor of Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal earlier this year, and have from that position had a chance to consider what academic reviewing can learn from the reviewing culture surrounding creative work. There are obvious structural obstacles to academic reviewing, which I’ll discuss below. But despite these obstacles, I want to make a case that the reviewing of scholarly work is an important activity that all of us in the field have an investment in fostering. Literary and cultural criticism is written as part of a conversation: when we research and write, we build on prior arguments, anticipate objections, align ourselves with certain predecessors, quarrel with one another. We write with the hope that our work will contribute to the conversations that have built our field, and will spark further debate and discussion to keep the field lively and dynamic. Scholarly journals can learn from more popular publications and blogs how to take advantage of the wide audience offered by Internet publishing to continue to build a transnational cyberspace in which Caribbean scholarly work will be discussed and disseminated. Read the rest of this entry »

Charmaine Valere

I heard of it, as I hear of most new book releases these days, through the Twitter grapevine. Someone tweeted that it was up for a major literary prize, and I immediately tuned in. I later learned that the author was not born in the Caribbean, but that the matter of her book and her heritage were based in the Caribbean. I bought it, read it, and wasn’t impressed (I was actually annoyed with it), but its historical subject matter was of definite interest. So I blogged about it while I was still annoyed, and of course wrote many things I wish I hadn’t, though they were honestly how I felt about the book at the time . . . and subsequently. Should I have waited and written something more cool headed and less harsh? Did I do the writer (a woman . . . working in a male-dominated space) and her book a disservice by voicing my opinion so strongly so publicly and so negatively? Do I, as a supporter of Caribbean books and Caribbean writers, have a duty to be nice always (and only) when I write about Caribbean books and authors? And who is reading this stuff anyway? These are some of the questions I have struggled with since I began blogging about books about four years ago. They are questions I continue to struggle with each time I work on a review. Read the rest of this entry »

Douglas Field

Critics, the old saying goes, are like mangoes: they are bitter when young and they sweeten as they mature. In 1947 the twenty three-year-old James Baldwin had yet to mature as a writer. He cut his teeth on a number of publications associated with the New York Intellectuals, recalling in the introduction to The Price of the Ticket how Saul “Sol” Levitas of the New Leader, Randall Jarell of the Nation, and Elliot Cohen and Robert Warshow of Commentary, “were all very important” to his life: “It is not too much to say that they helped to save my life.”[1] For a young African American with no formal education after the age of seventeen, these editors, Baldwin suggests, saved or at least ignited his life as a writer. Read the rest of this entry »

Nicholas Laughlin

The Caribbean Review of Books began and continues with this main purpose: to attempt an ongoing critical survey of contemporary Caribbean literature. We publish essays on writing and interviews with writers. Occasionally we publish new poems and fiction. In the seven and a half years since the CRB was revived,[1] we’ve sought gradually to expand the field of our attention to include contemporary Caribbean art, film, and music: literature is never insulated from other creative forms. But, as the name of the magazine suggests, at the heart of the CRB’s matter are book reviews.

Why? I assume most readers of sx salon will agree that book reviewing is a useful and helpful activity. In the most practical and immediate way, book reviews are a key component of the economy of literature: reviews spread knowledge of new books to their potential readers. Yet, even for the most avid readers among us, there are limits to money and time. Books are relatively expensive; we live only so long. So reviews can and ought to help us decide which books to spend our dollars and our hours on. Read the rest of this entry »