Caribbean Beat — November/December 2021 (#167)

bookshelf
This month’s reading picks from the Caribbean
Reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan, Bookshelf editor
This One Sky Day
by Leone Ross (Faber
& Faber, 385 pp, ISBN
9780571358014)
In Popisho, the fictional
setting of Leone Ross’s
lavish, sprawling novel, every
citizen has a “cors,” a unique
gift of magical, otherworldly
ability: the power to heal,
to prophesy, to intuit the
pain or deception of others.
Set in this Caribbean-esque
archipelago over the course
of twenty-four hours,
This One Sky Day asks the
reader questions steeped
in coconut milk, saffron,
and star anise, as nourishing
and palate-pleasing as the
best cook food. What do
we do with our own “cors”
during our time on earth?
Are we bettered or bested
by ungovernable love? It’s
impossible to approach the
kaleidoscopic orbit of the
book with anything like stoicism:
expect to be wooed
by lyrical prose, spellbound
by seemingly incalculable
events, swept up into the
exploits of elemental lovers
striving to be their best,
most unfettered selves. In a
word, Ross’s fictional fare is
an opus, demanding satiation.
Can You Sign My
Tentacle?
by Brandon O’Brien (Interstellar
Flight Press, 82 pp,
ISBN 9781953736048)
This debut poetry chapbook
is tired of old tropes. Can
You Sign My Tentacle? animates
our anthropocene’s
Black joy and resistance
against the ghoulish spectres
of racism: a slew of
institutional evils is called to
account, dragged into the
light of confessional verse.
In poems as suited to page
interpretation as oral performance,
Brandon O’Brien
populates each realm of the
work’s imagined or real multiverse
with brave vulnerability:
in “the lagahoo speaks
for itself”, our title character
angrily declaims, “I know the
scent of every dead girl’s
close male relatives / I could
sense the sour of trigger
fingers / in the alleys at the
edges of hotspots.” As with
the best speculative writing,
the convergence of the
worlds we imagine and the
world we inhabit becomes
preternaturally real, borders
of certainty and illusion
blending to create space:
and this realm, the poems
say, belongs to Blackness.
Testimonies on the
History of Jamaica,
Volume 1
by Zakiya McKenzie (Rough
Trade Books, 45 pp, ISBN
9781914236051)
Zakiya McKenzie’s revisionist
pamphlet is the very
definition of “small axe chop
down big tree.” In less than
fifty spare pages, McKenzie
contains the violent racism
of slaveowner and lord of the
plantocracy Edward Long’s
1774 polemic The History
of Jamaica. Interweaving
historical accounts with
creative conjuring, the
author-researcher presents
us with three testimonies
speaking to their own,
particular Jamaican truths.
In the voices of Izolo,
Wande Sheba, and Tansy,
we encounter Jamaican
history through the minds
and hearts of those whose
immediate stories register
most dimly and scantly in
official archives: the Black
enslaved and subjugated.
Each telling indicts oppressors
with scathing certainty,
but perhaps even more
majestically than this, makes
room for the full expression
of personhood denied the
incarcerated African woman
and man.
Dominoes at the
Crossroads
by Kaie Kellough (Véhicule
Press, 180 pp, ISBN
9781550655315)
As open to risk as it is to
interrogation, Kaie Kellough’s
collection of braided short
stories summons an alternate
Caribbean-Canadian
present and future, one in
which the lives and expectations
of the Black Caribbean
diaspora’s citizens gleam
with further realised possibilities.
The musicality of
narrative winds and weaves
through almost all these
stories: gig-players, buskers,
and traffic-consigned
listeners each feel the pulse
of melody, its historicity and
specific yearning, pulling on
their lives with insistence
and fervour. “Kaie,” the
author, is also a character
presented in this assemblage.
It’s a stylistic choice
that might jar in other
settings, but Dominoes
at the Crossroads wields
this experimentation well,
scratching at the surface
of what we consider to be
origin stories, asking: how
can we make more of the
tales we’ve been told, the
tales we wish to tell?
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