Caribbean Beat — 25th Anniversary Edition — March/April 2017 (#144)

Bookshelf
Canouan Suite and Other Pieces, by Philip Nanton (Papillote Press, 75 pp, ISBN 9780993108679)
Paintings can sometimes speak words; poems will occasionally offer vistas. These
aren’t contradictions, but conclusions that St Vincent-born, Barbados-based Philip
Nanton’s new hybrid art-verse book, Canouan Suite and Other Pieces, attempts
to make plain. Nanton offers poems — some rollicking, others contemplative
— alongside visual pieces from artists who are either Caribbean, or closely
affiliated with Caribbean spaces. These poems immerse themselves playfully and
poignantly in cricket, neo-colonisation, and the bewildering, bodacious beauty
of Barbados itself.
What strikes the reader reassuringly is how firmly in the local soil these poems
are grown. In “Night Cricket at Carlton Club, Barbados”, “bats are twirled; leather
hits wood; runs, like souls, are sometimes saved. People erupt from their seats,
shout, sit down, mutter. Glove knocks glove.” Nanton compels his audience with
images plucked straight from the greenery, chaos, and market-stalls of Caribbean
living, whether he turns his attention to a topsy-turvy police station or a troupe
of outlandishly named minibuses.
In “Canouan Suite”, for which the book is named, the poet trains a sharply
critical eye on the clutches of foreign investment in a small-island community. A
chorus of voices populates the poem, from the bone-weary hotel worker to the
cavalier, dispassionate outsider who calls the island “a pocket-handkerchief of a
place.” The poem is a powerful admonition that lets its own characters speak; it
highlights Nanton’s lyrical virtuosity without dampening his message.
Canouan Suite and Other Pieces warns against the real dangers in calling any
place, Caribbean or otherwise, a “paradise.” Despite this grave counsel, the book
opens itself to wonder at every turn, proving that when easy labels are discarded,
the deepest cistern of an island’s heart spills over.
The Yard, by Aliyyah Eniath (Speaking Tiger
Books, 272 pp, ISBN 9789385755088)
If the closeness of one
nuclear family stirs up
confusion in the domestic
cauldron of everyday living,
how much worse is it when
your neighbours on all sides
are your blood relations,
too? In Aliyyah Eniath’s
fiction debut, the intricacies
and entanglements of
“compound life” — many
families in one unsegregated
dwelling expanse — are
scrutinised through the
crosshairs of love, duty, and religious devotion. Orphaned
Behrooz and privileged Maya form a bond reminiscent of
literature’s finest and most thwarted of beloveds. The
Yard lifts a veil on Indo-Muslim Trinidad: its customs,
ceremonies, and concerns are sensitively penned and
elegantly conveyed. Written with the joviality of a
comedy of errors, yet underpinned by wry commentary
on society’s need for speculation, this first novel shines
with promise.
The Taxidermist’s Cut, by Rajiv Mohabir (Four
Way Books, 112 pp, ISBN 9781935536727)
In one of the poems of this first
collection, a speaker confesses:
“I admit failure to a friend: I
have never spelled love with
another in the tangle of my
own limbs.” Rajiv Mohabir, who
traces his immediate ancestry to
Guyana, writes with boundless
appetite about the new New
World of Indo-Caribbean
identities. These poems do
not claim fearlessness: they
siphon audacious admissions
and erotic offerings from the very maw of fear itself.
Contending with anti-queer, anti-immigrant, antibrown
judgements, they explode into bhajans and bass
rhymes of verse. The speakers in them are often restless,
distanced from their natal beginnings and curious about
their shifting postal addresses. It is this curiosity, this
desire to claim names from the erasure and indemnity of
East Indian indentureship in the West Indies, which gives
this extraordinary debut its wings.
28 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM