Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

Anton Nimblett, Sections of an Orange (Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2009); 150 pages; ISBN 978-1845230746 (paper).

The fleshy, ribbed sections of an orange, one which leaves traces of its essence in the corners of your nails, along the side of your arm lifted to that first trembling sensation on your tongue, is the corporeal map upon which Trinidadian (à la Brooklyn, New York) writer Anton Nimblett elicits his eleven short stories. Readers are invited to the process, from peel to final seed, as they venture through the textured and nuanced imaginings of Nimblett’s diasporic narratives of the Trinidadian immigrant between the United States and home. This collection is a broad example of one of the freshest Caribbean voices to have emerged in the twenty-first century. Nimblett, at ease with his superb writing voice, pays homage to writers such as M. Nourbese Phillip, Dionne Brand, and Elizabeth Nunez by refusing to give way to the hand that insists on silencing things that should never be spoken in the cultural parlance of a respectable Caribbean sensibility. His contemporaries have bravely broached the topics of incest, rape, child abuse, and unspoken love and sexual desire; so too does Nimblett in his stellar renderings of men loving men and women loving men. This collection is a testimony to the spirit of the Caribbean diaspora, to those who, in their trials of loving, learning, and migrating, manifest dreams and lay down their suffering at the feet of new identities.

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