Caribbean Literature via A Different Book List

Lively Caribbean Literature on Canadian Bookshelves via A Different Book List


By William Doyle-Marshall
Book your imagination and cruise the Caribbean with award winning authors. This was the advice of A Different Book List proprietors marking the start of literary events for the month of December.
Making use of modern technology with some challenge the duo of Ita Sadu and Miguel San Vincente linked readers and persons interested in Caribbean literature with authors in the United Kingdom, Australia and Barbados as well as literary creators based in Ontario.
What an evening it was as the Bathurst Street book store was transformed into a cosy theatre. Patrons were served with glasses of hot apple cider and slices of cake. No doubt enticement for braving the threatening but somewhat mild winter Saturday night (December 3) to be part of the historic experience.
Jamaica’s Olive Senior charmed the gathering with a smooth reading from “Dancing Lessons”, her first novel published by Thomas Allen. She tells a story about Gertrude a woman who lives in a seniors residence. Senior aptly captures her life there as well as that of living apart from her children.
“This book Dancing Lessons” is my first novel but it is my 13th book, Senior informed the gathering. She resisted writing a novel because of her love for the short form. What she finds interesting however, is peoples’ reaction to the book. “Everybody believes everything in this book is autobiographical. It is not. There is nothing autobiographical in this book. Somebody asked me the other night even if I had drug dealers in my family. But what I am really trying to capture in all my fiction is a slice of Jamaican life. So everybody is in it because that is how we live on a daily basis. You are interacting with all kinds of people,” the author explained.
After attempting unsuccessfully to find her daughter who had been living with a white American family and bring her back home Gertrude found herself returning to the taxi driver who had taken her on the unsuccessful trip from the bus station downtown Kingston to somewhere in the boondocks.
Rabindranath Maharaj of Trinidad and Tobago literally tickled the ribs of the fun loving audience with his reading from “The Amazing Absorbing Boy” published by Random House. Certainly his ability to capture moments in the lives of people in the community, especially Aunty Umbrella provided much fodder for humour.
It centered around the migration of a Trinidadian man from Mayaro and his son Samuel who are subsequently joined by the man’s sister in their Regent Park home, downtown Toronto. “If my father was upset about my aunt’s visit to Canada I think the place had the opposite effect on her,” Samuel speculates.
Speaking proudly of a change in attitude the boy reports that Aunty Umbrella had stopped peppering him with questions. Even her voice seemed to soften from its flat, criticizing scratch bottle tone, he explains.
“She brought a broad straw hat and one evening I noticed a brand new red umbrella parked next to the couch. I started to get used to her and to tell the truth I really enjoyed all the cakes and pies and cookies she baked. In Trinidad she would mention bake sales at the church but I always felt that was a Presbyterian thing. Now she bakes every single day, experimenting with the recipes she got from the newspaper - fish, chicken, egg plant, sweet potato, apple, pear, everything landed in the oven,” Samuel illustrates.
Aunty Umbrella’s fascination with television certainly amazed Samuel. “While the food was baking she would sit before the television and switch from channel to channel. I thought she might not have approved all the kissing and cursing and the rude boys and girls on television but while she was watching, she would pull the couch until she was just a few inches from the screen. One night she told me ‘look how friendly this politician mister is.’ I noticed a fat smiling man making chopping gestures with his hand as he spoke. It looked as if he was wringing a baby’s neck. Tantie continued ‘and his cheeks so fat and nice; just like a little child’. The politician was saying something about clamping down on immigrants. Tantie said ‘I feel I could reach over and just pinch up his cheeks good and proper.’
Sadu, a storyteller by profession said “The Amazing Absorbing Boy” book made her giggle because Maharaj’s has a knack for capturing the language of Caribbean people. It is a book that she thinks all young people should read.”We also see the eyes of the city in “The Amazing Absorbing Boy” through the eyes of a young immigrant or a young person from the Caribbean into this place and having a commentary on the newness of the space of the nostalgia from back home but also too having a lot of insight into every day living in Toronto.”
Special Skype appearances were made by Tessa McWatt, Jason Phillips and Karen Lord. McWatt originally from Guyana was seen in her bedroom in the United Kingdom reading from “Vital Signs”. Phillips who was born in Grenada introduced the audience to his crazy aunt in “The Ice Factory” from a room in his Australia home. Lord took us into her home Barbados home as she shared a section of “Redemption in Indigo that has already won awards.
Caribbean literature is alive and well. It is certainly growing beyond the boundaries of the native lands of each individual author who creates magic with their words much to the merriment and information of readers, irrespective of where they may call home at the moment.
December 5, 2011