Caribbean Beat — November/December 2019 (#160)

ookshelf Q&A
The Lesson
by Cadwell Turnbull (Blackstone Publishing, 290 pp,
ISBN 9781538584644)
This debut novel set in the US
Virgin Islands is a page-turning
speculative fiction thriller with
an environmental conscience.
In accessible prose, it asks what
happens when co-existence
stops being simply a watchword,
and morphs into a way of life.
Probing the breakdown of interspecies
diplomacies between
the residents of St Thomas
and the Ynaa, Turnbull’s cast
of characters grapples with big
canonical sci-fi considerations
of humanity intersecting with alien life. Proof that extraterrestrial
invasions don’t need to happen in New York,
London, or Paris to be compelling, The Lesson presses a
stethoscope to the heart of global border insecurities, listening
to our (in)human anxieties about sharing our home.
Here’s a tale of first contact that challenges what you think
you know about strength, survival, and staying safe.
Five Midnights
by Ann Dávila Cardinal (Tor Teen, 288 pp, ISBN
9781250296078)
Young adult literature receives a
welcome Puerto Rican addition in
Ann Dávila Cardinal’s debut, which
centres teenage experiences
of Latinidad in bustling barrios
and horror-tinged encounters.
Peppered with Spanglish, pop
culture references, and a strongly
summoned sense of place, Five
Midnights presents a world in
which folkloric hauntings brush
shoulders with crime-and-drug
dangers. “Gringa-Rican” Lupe
Dávila finds San Juan a far cry from her Vermont-residential
life, and her immersion in San Juan’s irrepressible duende
is one of the novel’s principal strengths, forthright in its
exploration of the relationship between the US and Puerto
Rico. One of the secondary characters shines brightest:
Marisol, an independentista with a lot to say about systemic
oppression and the right to self-rule. Her anger at
her displacement, and its roots in a globally underexamined
history, strike the book’s highest and bravest notes.
Reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan, Bookshelf editor
On Being Committed to a Small Place: Local Writings
(TEOR/éTica, 252 pp, ISBN 9789968899406)
collects a series of essays
by Barbadian artist Annalee
Davis. She talks to Shivanee
Ramlochan about the challenges
of building a politically
commited practice in the
contemporary Caribbean.
“Artivism” — the
portmanteau of art and
activism — feels an apt designation for your
practice. At the roots, is all your art political?
I live in a part of the world that is sometimes rendered invisible,
outside tropes of exotica, crime, or ongoing climate disasters.
The inability of most people to see this territory or its artists
holistically, or recognise the multi-dimensionality of places
and people’s capacities and desires, is partly grounded in
extractive economic models foundational to the Caribbean’s
complex colonial histories. Cuban essayist Antonio Benítez-
Rojo refers to this as the long annelid parasites of history that
moved through the bowels of the Caribbean.
Committing one’s life as an artist and cultural activist to
a place often misunderstood or flattened by stereotype is
inherently political, especially in small post-independent
nations still asking if artists are legitimate or valuable citizens.
We are required to employ collective strategies ensuring our
very survival by simultaneously preserving a practice while
expressing our civic responsibility through building community,
and mitigating madness. Shaping our spaces as active
citizens is deeply political.
What is the chief benefit, for you, of marrying
essays and images in this bilingual edition?
Although this publication originates from Costa Rica in
Central America, a mere 1,600 miles from Barbados, our
understanding of each other’s cultural milieu is sorely lacking.
Intervening images among the English and Spanish languages
function as complementary tools revealing mine and the
region’s wider context with that of the readers, and hopefully
this will build affinities. As the first Anglophone writer in
TEOR/éTica’s Local Writings series, this unique opportunity
provided me with a gift to offer intellectual exchange and
kinship through the form of this book.
If all art opens a dialogue, is your ideal coconversationalist
always Caribbean?
I continually pivot on this archipelagic hinge as my work
repeatedly takes me out of the space and simultaneously
brings me back home. As an unrepentant regionalist, however,
the constructive and often urgent exchanges that take place
with my Caribbean kin across this deeply intertwined archipelago
are somehow distinctive and nurture me profoundly.
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
39