Caribbean Beat — March/April 2020 (#162)

bookshelf
Everything Inside
by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf, 240 pp, ISBN 9780525521273)
The eight stories that make up Everything Inside are invitational. Haitian-
American Edwidge Danticat wields prose like a full pitcher of water, pouring it
with a measured grace, beckoning everyone to drink, and be well. The fiction
herein is its own diagnosis and medicine, its own indictment and cure: Danticat
never shies away from showing us the ways in which humanity sickens itself, yet
no story here is a suffocating lament or, worse, a tirade from a bestseller’s pulpit.
The church we are taken to in these stories is instructive and everywhere:
on the shore of a coastline strewn with dead and half-living migrant bodies; in
the well-worn booths of a Little Haiti bar where diasporic Haitians drink, sing,
and are betrayed for love; on the sands of a horseshoe-curved beach where a
wedding unfolds and an unnamed country holds its breath against chaos.
Danticat invites us to see our inescapable human ill as bound tightly to our
capacity for pure love. While the author pits morally thorny choices against
masterful interpersonal tenderness in almost each story, this contrast pulses
most strongly in “The Gift”, wherein two embattled former lovers are brought
together amid the aftershocks of extraordinary grief. Anika, the former mistress
of earthquake survivor Tom, admits an initial flood of relief on hearing his
list of beloved dead, the better for him to finally be fully hers. Yet desolation
stalks her all the same, a loss so deep it escapes even the language needed to
define it: “She started sketching million-year-old birds because she couldn’t
imagine how to sketch or paint what she really wanted to, earthquakes.”
It is impossible to leave the universal pews of Everything Inside unaltered.
The world, Danticat shows us, has never needed our attention more.
Sun of Consciousness
by Édouard Glissant, translated by Nathanaël
(Nightboat Books, 112 pp, ISBN 9781937658953)
An originary essay demanding
thoughtfulness across emotional
dimensions, Édouard Glissant’s
Sun of Consciousness
has been translated for the first
time into English. Nathanaël,
in her translator’s notes to
this volume straddling criticism
and poetry, calls the work “a
tender geography.” This gives us
clues to interpreting the text,
published in 1956 as Soleil de
la Conscience, which explores
Martinique-born Glissant’s
yearning curiosity at the complications of his early years
in France. The benefit of this new issuing to Anglophone
readers is rich: in its passionate contemplation, readers
can glean the nascent foundations of Glissant’s scholarship,
of the “tout-monde” philosophy that renders the
entire globe an interlaced series of experiences. Sun of
Consciousness makes an island of every realm, then shows
how, from these territories, we reach towards an understanding
of each other in the living world.
Nomad
by Yvonne Weekes (House of Nehesi Publishers,
80 pp, ISBN 9781733633314)
How to capture the smouldering
heart of an active volcano in
one poem? Montserrat-born,
Barbados-based Yvonne
Weekes shows us, in “Stripped”:
“The Mountain knows that it has
stripped us / pushed us out into
frothy oceans / kept us walking
on rough lands / and into new
dreams.” Weekes, who left the
island of her birth following the
1996 Soufrière Hills Volcano
eruption, does not rid her poems
of the evidence of a Caribbean life marked by natural
rupture. On the contrary, Nomad shares its track-marks of
ash and sulphur with the reader, bearing witness to unfathomable
destruction and rendering it in crisp, dramatic
lines. Using her own life as ready canvas, Weekes’s poems
reverberate with a refugee’s anguish; a survivor’s resolve; a
migrant’s hard-won sense of belonging. The ocean unites
us, these poems proclaim, salt-brined and free.
40 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM