By Alya Somar
Throughout Canada, there has been a glittering Caribbean presence in our literary scene for many years. By bringing stories from overseas or cultivating new narratives on local soil, Caribbean literature has proven itself to be a mainstay of the CanLit scene through its unique ability to engage with place and colonial narratives on multiple levels. Through both poetry and fiction, we challenge you to pick up something new this August!
1) West of West Indian by Linzey Corridon (Mawenzi House)
West of West Indian constructs the Queer Caribbean experience as simultaneously individual and collective, embracing the language that continues to unsettle queer life. The collection is, at once, a summons and a love letter to familiar figures like the Bullerman, the Chichiman, the Funny man, and the Anty man. It collects a distinctly queer Vincentian Canadian account of love and autonomy, and while it represents a written journey into queer pain, it is also an exhibition of pleasure flowing through the bodies and minds of its many subjects.
2) Polar Vortex by Shani Mootoo (Book*hug) — Available on Audible
Some secrets never die…
Priya and Alexandra have moved from the city to a picturesque Countryside town. What Alex doesn’t know is that, in moving, Priya is running from her past—from a fraught relationship with an old friend, Prakash, who pursued her for many years, both online and off. Time has passed, however, and Priya, confident that her ties to Prakash have been successfully severed, decides it’s once more safe to establish an online presence. In no time, Prakash finds Priya and contacts her. Impulsively, inexplicably, Priya invites him to visit her and Alex in the country, without ever having come clean with Alex about their relationship—or its tumultuous end. Prakash’s reentry into Priya’s life reveals cracks in her and Alex’s relationship and brings into question Priya’s true intentions.
Are we ever free from our pasts? Can we ever truly know the people we are closest to? Seductive and tension-filled, Polar Vortex is a story of secrets, deceptions, and revenge.
3) Broughtupsy by Christina Cooke (House of Anansi)
Akúa is returning home to Jamaica for the first time in ten years. Her younger brother has died suddenly, and Akúa hopes to reconnect with her estranged older sister, Tamika. Over three fateful weeks, the sisters visit significant places from their childhood where Akúa spreads her brother’s ashes. But time spent with Tamika only seems to make apparent how different they are and how alone Akúa feels.
Then Akúa meets Jayda, a brash stripper who reveals a different side of Kingston. As the two women grow closer, Akúa is forced to confront the difficult reality of being gay in a deeply religious family, and what it means to be a gay woman in Jamaica. Her trip comes to a frenzied and dangerous end, but not without a glimmer of hope of how to be at peace with her sister—and herself.
By turns diasporic family saga, bildungsroman, and terse sexual awakening, Broughtupsy asks: What are we willing to do for family, and what are we willing to do to feel at home?
4) Naniki by Oonya Kempadoo (Dundurn Press)
Through luminescent light, ancestral paths, and a Caribbean spirit-inflected world, Naniki explores the musings and inner workings of the deep blue — the Caribbean Sea — and its shape-shifting sea beings.
As the sea mirrors the light from the blue skies, and its depths are exposed by daggers of sunlight, so too Naniki reveals and honours the Indigenous roots of the Caribbean and its people, whose destiny is tied to the sea, the vessel of collective memory.
Amana and Skelele are made of water and air, their essence intertwined with Taino and African ancestry. They evolved as elemental beings of the Anthropocene, and shape-shifting with their naniki (active spirits) or animal avatars, they begin an archipelagic journey throughout the Caribbean Basin to see the strange future they dreamed of. Until devastation erupts.
Tasked by their elders to go back in time to the source of the First People’s knowledge, they must surmount historical and mythological challenges alike. How can they navigate and overcome these obstacles to regenerate themselves, their love, their islands, and their seas?
