Alexander Street: Literature, Drama, and Performing Arts

Pork-Knockers

"Black Midas" (1958, Secker and Warburg) by Guyana-born author Jan Carew is, as the author's preface states, "the story of Shark, a black boy from a small village in British Guiana, who runs away with his friend Santos to join the "pork knockers", the men who work in the diamond mines deep in the up-country jungles.  There he grows to manhood, makes a fortune, comes near to losing it when Santos steals his hoard of diamonds, then return to Georgetown to live alife of wild extravagance."

This is a very valuable early account/depiction of the post-colonial trend of resource plundering and not-so-freed nation impoverishment.  Guyana is one of the hemisphere's poorest nations and one of the more desperate economic prisoners of IMF debt.  This novel personalizes this atrocity and presages the deepening trends to come.

A Caribbean Odyssey: Welcome Aboard Derek Walcott

A-toss the seas of post-colonialism, the Nobel Prize Winner’s epic Omeros (1990) island-hops in quest of a foothold in the slippery present as the meaning and relevance of the past become more slippery. Walcott’s alternately lush then bare-boned language is well-suited to evoking both the epic and basic human qualities of locals, islanders, yokels, modern-day Achilles and Hector, and a Helen most resembling the shifting, surrounding seas. All the while, old battles never seem far away;

 

Now, whenever his mind drifted in detachment

like catatonic noon on the Caribbean Sea,

Plunkett recited every billet, regiment,

 

of the battle’s numerological poetry;

he learnt eighty ships of the line, he knew the drift

of the channel that day, and when the trade wind caught

 

the British topsails, and a deep-draught sigh would lift

his memory clear….

 

nor easily evaded. Come and join the quest.

 

A Different Side of the Caribbean

When you think Caribbean Literature, a writer of east Indian ethnicity does not seem to fit.  But Ismith Khan was an author that was able to blend those two ideas.

Although he was born in Trinidad, Khan was descended from the Pathan people.  The Panthan were originally from India, but left for other parts of the world because of their resistance to colonialism.  He attended school in the United States, earning his BA from New School University in New York City and his MA from Johns Hopkins University.  After graduating, he worked primarily as a professor at various schools of higher education including, New School University, University of California at Berkley, University of California at San Diego, and Medgar Evers College.

Two of Khans works are in our Caribbean Literature database.  Jumbie Bird is a semi-autobiographical exploration of forced immigration and the identity crisis that plagued Khan's family. The book takes place over three generations: grandfather, Kale Khan, his son Rahim, and his grandson Jamini.  The other work is a collection of short stories A Day in the Country and Other Stories. These stories explore ideas about the father/son relationship and childhood.

Khan's work centers around his experiences in Trinidad.  According to Contemporary Authors, Khan's grandfather, Kale Khan, was a heavy influence.  The author was also known for reproducing the Trinidadian dialect accurately in print form.  His fiction often explores ideas of identity and people's attempts to find their place in the world.  He died in Brooklyn, NY in 2002.

Andrew Salkey and Anancy

New stories by Andrew Salkey can be read in our database Black Short Fiction.  As part of the wave of black British immigrants, who were writers in the mid-twentieth century, Salkey's work takes on a distinctive character.  The stories focus on the character of Anancy, a spider persona prevalent in Caribbean folklore.  In the author's note in his collection, Anancy's Score, Salkey says:

"Where would Afro-Caribbean folk tales be without  the seminal support of the African Anancy?  Indeed, how could this book ever have been written without it, or without Anancy's historical authority, or without my having tapped Anancy's score in his first home country?

The traditional Anancy is a crisp, cool, calculating spider, a persuasive, inventive, anarchic spider-man.

I have willfully used his name, and even more willfully tried to understand his nature, and remoulded it for my own ends."

These stories can therefore be a wonderful blend of the traditional folktale with a modern outlook.

And if your thinking that perhaps Salkey belongs in our other Caribbean Literature database, don't fret, his novel, Jamaica, is slated to be added soon!

Come Visit Us at CSA

 

Alexander Street Press will be presenting the new Caribbean Literature collection at the Caribbean Studies Association conference in Bahia, Brazil from May 27^th to June 1^st. We invite scholars to come by our booth tand get to know our new literature platform.

Caribbean Literature will present 100,000 pages of fiction and poetry by writers from all countries in the region in their original language.  Our aim is to build this collection to help scholars and students, and your suggestions and comments are welcomed and appreciated.