<\/span><\/p>\n In the introduction to this anthology of Caribbean writers, editor Cyril Dabydeen explains the title. \u201cBeyond Sangre Grande\u201d refers to V.S. Naipaul\u2019s assertion that the \u201ccreative writer, if he is to be worth anything, must extend himself beyond provincialism, go beyond being just a \u2018village writer\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of the 43 writers (both men and women) in this collection have certainly gone beyond the village as they live outside of the Caribbean (several in Canada), and the subjects tackled are universal: family, love, discrimination, poverty, and home. Dabydeen must have had his work cut out for him as the wealth of material presented tends to over small snippets from each writer. Poets are often represented by one or two poems, while story writers have one story.<\/p>\n The arrangement of the selections is alphabetical by author\u2019s last name, and Dabydeen includes mini-bios of the writers. The dates of publication would have been a helpful addition, and because some writers did not want their ages known, birthdates are also not included. Many of the names are familiar: Nalo Hopkinson, Derek Walcott, Austin Clarke, Claire Harris, Olive Senior, and Sam Selvon, for example, are well known, and their selections are excellent. Hopkinson\u2019s story \u201cA Young Candy Daughter\u201d shows her interest on speculative fiction as the main character makes magic with the brass pot of a Salvation Army Santa Claus. Olive Senior\u2019s story \u201cThe Two Grandmothers\u201d captures the voice of a girl being tugged between two sides of her family. The prose runs on pell-mell as if the girl is speaking or writing to her mother and explaining her changing relationships with her grandmothers. It\u2019s a gripping look at the pressures on a girl growing up and how she tries to negotiate them.<\/p>\n Reviewing books means I get to read writers I may not easily come across, and this collection offers several authors I will look up. Horace I. Goddard has an intriguing story called In the Light of Darkness,\u201d in which the main character, Wilbur, is a self-described \u201cgay hairstylist\u201d with a gambling problem. At the casino he hears a man make a horrible comment about homosexuals. Goddard links the discrimination against gays to Wilbur\u2019s gambling. He cannot control either, but he \u201cfelt secure\u201d with the slot machines.<\/p>\n The poetry is this volume is equally arresting. Peter Jailall\u2019s \u201cMy Agie\u2019s Hands\u201d pays respect to a grandmother\u2019s hard-working hands: \u201cThose loving fingers \/ Bathed in coconut oil \/ Helping each other, \/ Moving like a team \/ Of dedicated doctors.\u201d Often the selections pay tribute to women who raise families alone or with minimal help. And many emotions are explored. Mark McWatt\u2019s two love poems are beautiful. In one, the speaker concludes by saying, \u201cKnow that the gift of your heart, made \/ with such easy grace, far outranks \/ the paper love of poets such as I . . . \/ I think longingly of fire, while you just light it: \/ those who live their love don\u2019t have to write it.\u201d<\/p>\n This volume is packed with gems, and it\u2019s guaranteed that readers will find more than one piece that burrows into their mind and stays there. Sweetheart Jamaican-born Alecia McKenzie won the regional Commonwealth Writers\u2019 Prize for Best First Book with her debut collection of short stories, Satellite City<\/em>. Her first novel, Sweetheart<\/em>, works as a series of linked stories to draw a picture of Dulci, aka Cinea Verse, aka Sweetheart, a gifted artist who leaves Jamaica for New York.<\/p>\n The novel opens with the words of Dulci\u2019s best friend, Cheryl, who has been tasked with job of taking half of Dulci\u2019s ashes to scatter in New York. McKenzie uses the second person perspective wonderfully: the novel is comprised of twelve chapters with various characters who address Dulci directly and in doing so create a fuller picture than Cheryl could on her own. Cheryl\u2019s voice is the main one, but the addition of other voices creates the rich complexity of Dulci\u2014and of other characters, including Cheryl. The various narratives reveal all the characters, including dark secrets about some of them.<\/p>\n Dulci is an engaging character as seen through the eyes of her friends, family, and acquaintances. Never content with the conventional, Dulci gets kicked out of home by her father when an affair she is having with her boss ends in an attack by the man\u2019s wife. Dulci moves into Cheryl\u2019s dorm room and spends her time painting. Even though the novel functions as an elegy for Dulci, McKenzie manages to use humour from the first pages. When Cheryl is in the Jamaica airport, she drops the urn holding Dulci\u2019s ashes and ends up scooping as much as she can into a makeshift container. As she says, \u201cI wonder what the customs people are going to make of this Red Stripe Beer bottle now?\u201d The combination of tragedy and comedy makes the characters seem life-like; they have all kinds of experiences, both good and bad, and usually try to adopt a positive outlook. They work hard, in some cases just to survive, but in others to climb up in the world. Before the affair, Dulci has already antagonized her father by being useless in school, particularly math. She just doesn\u2019t care about it.<\/p>\n The friendship between Cheryl and Dulci is explored with sensitivity, and it\u2019s easy to see why the two became friends and stay friends even though they live far apart. Cheryl makes a point of visiting Dulci in New York as Dulci refuses to go back to Jamaica, still smarting from her father\u2019s treatment. The two women help each other through relationships, and these are not without complications. One of the most moving chapters is Chapter Four, from the perspective of Dakota Beckett, the wife of the man Dulci has the affair with. No matter how angry people get with Dulci, especially Dakota and Dulci\u2019s father, McKenzie shows everyone\u2019s humanity. Mistakes are made, and that is simply human.<\/p>\n The centre of Sweetheart <\/em>is a dead woman, but McKenzie has infused this lovely novel with such life and such passion that death recedes into the background and overall, the novel is a dazzling celebration of human connection.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Night Street Night Street<\/em> by Australian Kristel Thornell has already won a clutch of prizes including The Australian<\/em>\/Vogel Literary Award from its 2010 publication. Goose Lane Editions now makes it available in a Canadian edition. The novel is a fictional account of the life of Clarice Beckett (1887-1935), a Melbourne artist.<\/p>\n Thornell was captivated by Beckett\u2019s work when she saw it in the Art Gallery of South Australia. Beckett is known for her landscapes, and Thornell takes the work to help her fashion a life for Beckett, one that is invented. As Thornell says in the Author\u2019s Note, \u201cI attempted to \u2018look\u2019 at Beckett as she might have looked at a landscape, squinting to soften edges and reach beyond detail in the search for patterns of light and shade.\u201d<\/p>\n Beckett\u2019s work was unseen for a long time, but she is now revered as one of the great Australian modernists, and Thornell uses the experimentation expressed in the paintings and spills it over into the imagined life of the artist. To that end Thornell makes Clarice Beckett and utterly driven woman who eschewed a conventional life of marriage and children and devoted herself to art. She did not, however, reject love and sex, and her love affairs are supposed to show her individuality and independence as both men were married.<\/p>\n The romances are the least interesting aspects of the novel and tend to lead to self-reflexive melodramatic dialogue, such as \u201cI love you so much I hate you.\u201d When Thornell sticks to art or description of landscape, she is on firm ground. When she switches to emotions other than the love of art, things get a bit sticky. For example, when a girl Clarice barely knows is murdered, Clarice ponders her death and connects it to her brother\u2019s suicide: \u201cShe saw that Jean\u2019s death and Paul\u2019s were connected. They were the same, because one death is really all deaths\u2014is<\/em> Death.\u201d Clarice is given to pronouncements about a variety of subjects, and her attitudes are not endearing.<\/p>\n But making her endearing is clearly not Thornell\u2019s purpose. The author is trying to lay bare what makes this fictional artist tick at a time when women were supposed to follow a prescribed path. The most arresting parts of the novel have to do with Clarice\u2019s insistence on developing her own artistic way, to the extent of building a portable painting box to wheel her materials outside and paint away from the disapproving glare of her father. Thornell also excels at showing how diminishing family fortunes affect Clarice\u2019s life.<\/p>\n Night Street<\/em> does a luminous job of showing how important the ocean is to Clarice, and how much her life is shaped by her commitment to painting even to the extent of jeopardizing her health. The cover of the book features a detail from Wet Evening<\/em> by the historical Claris Beckett, and it is a tempting tease, prompting a desire to see more of Clarice Beckett\u2019s work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fiction and Poetry Reviews Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today by Cyril Dabydeen, edited, Toronto, ON: Tsar, 2011 226 pp. $28:95 In the introduction to this anthology of Caribbean writers, editor Cyril Dabydeen explains the title. \u201cBeyond Sangre Grande\u201d refers to V.S. Naipaul\u2019s assertion that the \u201ccreative writer, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":748,"parent":93,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-102","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":671,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/102\/revisions\/671"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/93"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBeyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today
\n<\/em>by Cyril Dabydeen, edited,
\nToronto, ON: Tsar, 2011
\n226 pp. $28:95
\n <\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Alecia McKenzie,
\nLondon, UK: Peepal Tree, 2011
\n134 pp. $16:95
\n <\/p>\n
\n<\/em>by Kristel Thornell
\nFredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2012
\n239 pp. $19:95
\n <\/p>\n