“Where else would you find Trinidadian street food in the same volume as an appraisal of Thom Gunn's poetry, or Dylan Thomas rubbing shoulders with soca?”
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Port Of Spain – Writers from five Caribbean territories have been long-listed for the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, sponsored by One Caribbean Media (OCM).
The OCM Bocas prize, now in its eleventh year, is internationally considered the leading literary award for Caribbean writers.
The Prize recognises books in three genres poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction published by authors of Caribbean birth or citizenship in the preceding year.
Of the nine books long-listed for the 2021 Prize, five are by writers born in Trinidad and Tobago, with the other authors representing Dominica, Guyana, Jamaica, and St Lucia.
New in Paperback: âThinking Inside the Boxâ and âThe Mountains Singâ
By Jennifer Krauss
March 5, 2021
THINKING INSIDE THE BOX: Adventures With Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Canât Live Without Them,
by Adrienne Raphel. (Penguin, 304 pp., $18.) This affectionate analysis of a cultural fixation that in 1924 The Times dismissively compared to âthe temporary madness that made so many people pay enormous prices for mahjong setsâ succeeds â our reviewer, Peter Sagal, argued â because âlike a good crosswordâ it challenges us to âback away from our assumptions,â âthink differentlyâ and âapply ourselves again.â
TYLL,
by Daniel Kehlmann. Translated by Ross Benjamin. (Vintage, 352 pp., $16.95.) Our reviewer, Irina Dumitrescu, called this picaresque fable in which the proverbial trickster Tyll Ulenspiegel tightrope-walks above the brutality of 17th-century Europeâs Thirty Yearsâ War â
studies indentureship and its legacies.
Pillai shares this frustration. So much is tied with indenture but it s largely invisible which is so aggravating, she said in a phone interview.
It s been a century since indenture contracts were abolished in the Caribbean, yet the experiences of the women and men who were exploited through the practice are still seldom told. Credit: University of Pennsylvania
As Indians faced tumultuous political upheaval and famines in the 19th century, the country was ripe for Britain to exploit, according to Pillai. Indentureship was falsely advertised as a way for Indians to see a better life. Contracts were written in English, yet the people signing them had high levels of illiteracy. Women who had been disowned by their families and widows were particularly vulnerable. If your husband had died your life was basically over, even if you were young, said Pillai.
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Forthcoming: “Dreams of Archives Unfolded”
Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing (Bucknell University Press) by Jocelyn Fenton Stitt is forthcoming in June 2021. Françoise Lionnet (author of
Writing Women and Critical Dialogues: Subjectivity, Gender, and Irony) describes: “Introducing an innovative theoretical framing of long-standing critical debates about history, biography, archive, and belonging, this lucid study of Caribbean women’s life-writing points to their remarkable contributions to new modes of knowledge production about the past and its aporias. Stitt’s analyses of the writers’ imaginative formal strategies are a timely and valuable intervention in Caribbean and Gender Studies.”