Caribbean Beat — March/April 2018 (#150)

Bookshelf
The Tower of the Antilles, by Achy Obejas (Akashic Books, 150 pp, ISBN 9781617755392)
For every Cuban passport stamped,
every long-desired visa claimed that
takes Cubans away from their tierra
natal, how many Cubas exist in the
imagination, in the psychogeography
of limbo? The short stories in Achy
Obejas’s newest collection thread a
clear and bittersweet needlework of
longing, exile, erotic need, and chaos
between Cubans living at home and
those who strike out, with desperation
and pragmatism, to America.
Many of these stories are
navigated by the needs of the
human body: shelter, food, sex. In
“Kimberle”, two women steer the
tense, desire-laced uncertainty
between them by sharing a series of
lovers, each more improbable and
exciting than the next. “The Cola of
Oblivion” marks the sharp difference
between those who have fled Cuba,
and those who have remained; a “visitor” is reminded that
her mother “never sent a single vitamin . . . not a single can
of meat or iPod, not a single anything.”
Obejas reveals with equal intensity
the desires of the human spirit,
cataloguing the results that spiral
from losing security, sanctuary,
and sight of oneself. “The Sound
Catalogue” witnesses an immigrant’s
gradual, terrifying loss of hearing,
set against the fading ricochet of
her life’s most valuable sounds: gunshots,
the roar of frenzied mobs in
revolt, the Cuban national anthem.
Cuba exists in these pages as a
living, organic entity: vibrant and
sinewy even in the memories of the
citizens who have left it. Obejas
reminds her readers that Cuba is
no single destination, and that
the Cuban imagination is a dense,
intricately networked map unto
itself. These stories come to life in
explorations of sleepy-eyed boys
with concupiscent superpowers, of
large brown women building towers of boats in the Antilles.
“Is there any real chance you can leave a place?” these
stories ask. The answers are multiple and mysterious.
The Dear Remote Nearness of You, by
Danielle Legros Georges (Barrow Street Press, 62
pp, ISBN 9780989329699)
In her second collection of
poems, Haiti-born, US-based
Danielle Legros Georges gives
us access to worlds that are
both submerged and emerging.
Whether her poems’ speakers
contemplate centenarian eels,
or seek to shift the rubble left
by Haiti’s devastating 2010
earthquake, The Dear Remote
Nearness of You takes careful
account of the cost of survival.
The atmospheric quality of
these poems is dense with attention to the sounds of
an inhabitable life: the shock of a shouted racial slur,
the high-pitched screech of children, the very sound of
the earth splitting. The unsettling intimacies Georges
reveals encompass our human relationships with animals,
alongside our human understanding of ourselves. Haiti’s
own mirrored conversations with itself, through generations
of privation and exquisite natural beauty, are the
centrepiece of this book’s success.
Kingston Buttercup, by Ann-Margaret Lim
(Peepal Tree Press, 72 pp, ISBN 9781845233303)
“I remember a barrel / with
the biggest doll I’d ever seen.
/ I remember nights without
a mother.” Ann-Margaret
Lim’s second collection of
poems teems with the typically
unsaid, releasing domestic,
maternal, and historic memory
from the unlatched suitcases
of generational secrecy and
shame. In her narrator’s eyes,
Jamaica is a crossroads of
extreme violence and ecstatic
joys, which she offers to her readers in images of
doppelgänger girls lining the obituaries, big-bottom
Julie mangoes, men who lavish kicks and kisses on their
firstborns, and poet Mervyn Morris “bringing life from
the depths of souls / to his class, which was never /
contained on the Mona campus.” Kingston Buttercup is
a worthy successor to Lim’s debut collection, The Festival
of Wild Orchid: flowers intertwine their symbolisms at
the heart of both books, wafting multiple meanings of
strength, deadliness, and comfort.
30 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM