Stephen Narain

Christian Campbell, Running the Dusk (Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2010); 81 pages; ISBN 10-1845231554 (paper).

In an interview with Lisa Allen-Agostini published last year in the Caribbean Review of Books, Trinidadian-Bahamian poet and professor Christian Campbell cites the usual suspects—British Romantics (John Keats), Latin American exiles (Pablo Neruda), West Indian Nobelists (Derek Walcott, “a first love”)—as his literary influences. [1] Then the line breaks and a funny shift happens. In quasi-verse form, Campbell’s taxonomy grows encyclopedic—Jamaican reggae artists (Buju Banton), American jazz divas (Sarah Vaughan), Mexican surrealists (Frida Kahlo), Russian freestylers (Aleksandr Popov), Japanese breastrokers (Kosuke Kitajima)—a lovely crescendo that gives way to the inevitable diminuendo: “All the Africans, Amerindians, East Indians, and others that made me.” One pictures a broad-chested Campbell when he declares, “Whatever else it may mean, I think that [post-postcolonial] may be one way to locate my work generationally. I am very much a post-Independence (and post–Civil Rights baby). What are the tongues for these times?”

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Anantha Sudhakar

Jan Lowe Shinebourne, Chinese Women: A Novel (Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2010); 94 pages; ISBN 978-1845231514 (paper).

Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s fiction is centrally concerned with the racial tension and political conflict that have defined the postwar era of Guyana. Her latest work, Chinese Women, adapts these themes for the twenty-first century by bringing colonial race relations to bear on post-9/11 political culture. Shinebourne’s timely new novel thus offers a unique contribution to both Caribbean literature and the growing field of 9/11 literature.

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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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Caryl McFarlane

Brenda Flanagan, Allah in the Islands (Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2009); 217 pages; ISBN 978-1845231064 (paper).

Allah in the Islands, the second novel by Trinidadian author Brenda Flanagan, continues the story of Rosehill, a community on Santabella Island (seemingly modeled on Trinidad). The lyric prose and skillful characterizations acclaimed in Flanagan’s first novel, You Alone Are Dancing, are harmoniously woven throughout a socially multifarious and politicized context that serves as both the foreground and the backdrop of both stories. Set after the departure of Sonny Allen, the co-protagonist of the first novel, Allah in the Islands assumes the reader’s familiarity with the lush tropical surroundings described in the outset of You Alone Are Dancing. Flanagan begins her second novel by immersing the reader in the first-person narrative reflections of Abdul, right-hand man for Haji, the political personality on whom one of the central storylines of the narrative hinges. Interspersing Abdul’s first-person narratives with chapters narrated by an omniscient voice, Flanagan carries the reader toward the novelistic climax through the accretion of Abdul’s ever-more-revealing chapter inclusions and through the rhythms of the text, established via an engaging demotic, variable chapter lengths, and the novel’s structure. Dividing the novel into three parts, Flanagan crafts each section—“Dry Season,” “Rainy Season,” and “Fire and Water”—to reflect its titular characteristics.

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 Jennifer Marshall

 Geoffrey Philp, Dub Wise (Leeds, UK: Peepal Tree, 2010); 72 pages; ISBN 978-1845231712 (paper)

In his recent collection of poetry, Dub Wise, Geoffrey Philp explores themes of Caribbean identity in a postcolonial framework and the effect of these internal conflicts on communities and family relationships. The work speaks of modern-day environmental, spiritual, and political concerns, and Philp incorporates dimensions of reggae and the Rastafari movement to express stories of history, place, and the human condition.

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