General Issue
General Issue
I write this introduction with a heavy heart. Beyond the troubling aspects of the political landscape, we continue to lose beloved members of our Caribbean literary community. Velma Pollard (who died on 1 February, aged eighty-seven) was an esteemed Jamaican writer of poetry and prose; a linguist, teacher, and scholar; and an unfailingly energetic participant in the Caribbean literary and intellectual community. Her work was influential across multiple modes, including the novella Karl (which won the Casa de las Américas prize in 1992), the mixed-genre prose collection Considering Woman (1989), and the sociolinguistic study Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari (1994). The Haitian novelist, poet, and artist Frankétienne died on 20 February at the age of eighty-eight. He was the author of dozens of texts in Kréyol and French and the creator of thousands of paintings; he often integrated his textual and visual practices within the same work. Described by the New York Times as the “father of Haitian letters,” Frankétienne was also the recipient of numerous awards and was recognized by UNESCO as an Artist for Peace in 2023.
Even closer (too close) to home, it is with deep sorrow that I mark the passing on 11 February of sx salon’s creative editor, Danielle Legros Georges. Danielle’s work as a poet, translator, editor, and teacher nourished Caribbean and Black diasporic literature and culture—especially that of her beloved Haiti—in ways too numerous to count. Her work earned her many accolades, including the role of Poet Laureate of Boston between 2015 and 2019 and being named a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2024. In 2023 she retired from Lesley University as professor emerita, having taught in and directed their MFA in Creative Writing program. More on Danielle’s life and work can be found on her website; her most recent books are her translation of selected poems by Évelyne Trouillot, Marie-Célie Agnant, and Maggy de Coster, titled Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets (2024), and her poetry collection Three Leaves, Three Roots: Poems on the Haiti-Congo Story (2025). Tributes and in-memoriam essays have poured in from across the many literary and cultural communities of which Danielle was a part; examples can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
Danielle joined the sx salon team in February 2022. In the three years that followed, she proved a generous, astute, and innovative curator of our Poetry & Prose section, cultivating the work of emerging and established authors alike to bring our readers the best of new Caribbean writing. sx salon 44, a special issue on francophone Caribbean literature, was—as all our issues are—a collaboration among the three members of the editorial team, but Danielle’s knowledge and judgement were especially influential in shaping the final product. The virtual pages of sx salon have been enriched in so many ways by Danielle’s contributions, to the benefit and enjoyment of our readers. For myself, I will say that I feel immeasurably lucky to have known and worked alongside her, and that I miss her keenly. My condolences, and those of the entire Small Axe community, go out to her family and loved ones.
In the discussion section of this general issue, we feature two essays that brilliantly articulate the personal with the political. First, Amandla Thomas-Johnson offers a poetic and urgently critical reflection on his family’s multigenerational history in Union Island (part of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines), in light of the destruction wrought there by Hurricane Beryl in July 2024.1 Interweaving ancestral stories with memories of his own visits, Thomas-Johnson conveys the richness and complexity of what it means to be deeply rooted in a Caribbean place, especially as that place becomes ever more devastatingly vulnerable to a climate catastrophe for which the region bears very little responsibility. While not offering an optimistic view of the prospects for reparative justice, he ends the essay by foregrounding the cultural practices and adaptive capacity of Caribbean peoples and holding out hope for the development of “a renewed political consciousness” that might enable us to meet the moment.
The second essay in the discussion section, by Stéphane Martelly, strenuously critiques what the author compellingly argues are deformations of important texts and tenets of Caribbean (especially francophone Caribbean) anticolonial thought. Drawing on the author’s own experience, commitments, and intellectual formation—“I speak from Haiti,” Martelly says—the essay calls for urgent re-examination of the uses to which the Black intellectual tradition has been and is currently being put, from careless misappropriation through cynical weaponization against the very communities whose freedom and well-being are that tradition’s primary aims.
Our reviews section considers Oneka LaBennett’s monograph on gendered labor and the workings of global capital in Guyana, reviewed by Sasha Ann Panaram, followed by Oriana Mejías Martínez’s review of two monographs on the theme of migration in Caribbean literature, authored by Anthea Morrison and by Marisel C. Moreno. The final review, by Maddi Chan and Linzey Corridon, surveys Cambridge University Press’s three-volume Caribbean Literature in Transition project. The issue is rounded out by Letitia Marie Pratt’s poetry and short stories by José Darío Martínez Milantchi (presented here in both Spanish and English) and by Alicia Valasse-Polius.
Enjoy, stay well, and let us know what you think: rlm@smallaxe.net.
Rachel L. Mordecai
Table of Contents
Reviews
“Sweeping Guyana into the Global Frame”—Sasha Ann Panaram
Review of Oneka LaBennett, Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond (New York: New York University Press, 2024)
“Intersecting Pan-Caribbean Crossings”—Oriana Mejías Martínez
Review of Anthea Morrison, New Crossings: Caribbean Migration Narratives (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 2019); and Marisel C. Moreno, Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022)
“‘The Seed of Possible Future(s)’ in Our Ongoing Past: Critical Transformations and Transitions in Caribbean Literature”—Maddi Chan and Linzey Corridon
Review of Caribbean Literature in Transition, 3 volumes, various editors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Discussion
“Union Island after Beryl”—Amandla Thomas-Johnson
“Uses and Misconceptions of Caribbean Thought: Imagining a Future beyond the Perils of Lethal Readings and Identifications”—Stéphane Martelly
Poetry & Prose
Poems—Letitia Marie Pratt
“Condición incesante / Constant Condition”—short story—José Darío Martínez Milantchi
“Plenty Fuss”—short story—Alicia Valasse-Polius
[1] Beryl was the earliest-forming Category 5 hurricane on record.