Zibby Mag

By Donna Hemans

In the week after wrapping up edits on my third novel, The House of Plain Truth—coming from Zibby Books this fall—I was filled with a kind of angst that I suppose most writers feel when they finish a long project. I feared it wasn’t good enough, that I hadn’t achieved what I set out to do. Mostly, I asked: Was it Caribbean enough? Underneath that question lay another: What does it mean to be Caribbean?

There is a certain difficulty in defining Caribbean identity across the region’s diverse countries, languages, dialects, culture, religions, and philosophies. While each country has its own culture, there is a certain familiarity in the experiences, language, and concerns in literature from Trinidad and Barbados—islands that are closer to South America than my own island, Jamaica.

To explore the many ways we experience Caribbean identity, I set out to read across the Caribbean, hopping from island to island on a year-long literary journey. Over the next 12 months, I’ll write about the books, starting in the southernmost countries—Guyana, Trinidad, Curaçao, Grenada, and Barbados—with stops at each of the 13 sovereign countries, as well as the territories in between.

Guyana: Children of Paradise by Fred D’Aguiar

Based loosely on the 1978 mass murder-suicide of members of a commune in Jonestown, Guyana, D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise follows Joyce and her daughter, Trina, who attempt to escape from the commune built in Guyana’s jungle. Trina is injured by a gorilla that the commune’s charismatic leader has caged on the compound. She faints, which presents an opportunity for the commune’s leader to stage her resurrection and solidify his hold on the members. The commune is far from a utopia: Armed guards violently keep the members in check; the children are underfed and overworked; and tribal leaders from nearby communities and family members stateside have launched complaints about the commune. With scrutiny ramping up, the commune members begin to rehearse the mass suicide, pushing Joyce and Trina to attempt their escape. While the fate of the Jonestown members is well-known, D’Aguiar’s retelling offers hope for the children.

Trinidad: The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini

Told in Trinidadian Creole, Lisa Allen-Agostini’s The Bread the Devil Knead follows Alethea Lopez, a store manager in Port of Spain, who has just celebrated her fortieth birthday. While at work, Alethea witnesses a woman gunned down by a jealous partner. Alethea, herself a victim of domestic violence, visualizes her possible fate and looks back on her childhood and her family to understand how she has become a woman who stays with her abuser. Allen-Agostini captures the voice of Trinidad, the lyricism in the dialect, and the difficult job of surviving sexual violence.

Trinidad: Golden Child by Claire Adam

“Paul has played his part” is perhaps the most haunting line in Claire Adam’s Golden Child, a novel about betrayal, aspiration, and the choices a parent must make. When Clyde Deyalsingh’s twin boys are small, the family quickly understands that one boy is different from the other. Peter is academically gifted and widely expected to win Trinidad’s highest academic scholarship and a place at an American Ivy League university; Paul is academically challenged and throughout his childhood hears threats that his parents will commit him to a psychiatric hospital. When the boys are thirteen, Paul disappears, setting off a search that exposes the criminal underbelly of Trinidad, greed, and the value of one boy’s life. Aspiration is thematically significant to the Caribbean story and Golden Child brilliantly captures both sides of the desire to get ahead.

Curaçao: Double Play by Frank Martinus Arion

In Double Play—translated from Dutch—four men gather on a Sunday for their weekly domino game. Their friendship, however, is marred by rivalry and their individual preoccupations—wealth, various extramarital affairs, and the development of Curaçao, which is primarily run by foreigners. One Sunday they gather for a marathon domino game that leads to murder and a suicide. Double Play captures the mindset of men of a certain time and the effects of colonialism, both on individuals and on the country’s development.

Grenada: The Bone Readers by Jacob Ross

Ross’s crime thriller is set on the Caribbean island of Camaho, and is the first book in a crime fiction series Ross is writing. Michael Digson, who goes by the name Digger, is recruited to join a group of plainclothes police officers. Digger’s first goal is to uncover who was responsible for ordering police to shoot a group of demonstrators, which lead to his mother’s death. He is also pulled in to solve a cold case—the disappearance of a young man—that haunts his boss. With his partner, Digger is drawn into the inner circle of a religious group and traverses various communities to uncover the island’s secrets. Bone Readers builds a strong sense of place and introduces readers to the criminal underbelly of the island as well as the difficulties women endure in private and in public.

Barbados: The Island of Forgetting by Jasmine Sealy

Set in Barbados, The Island of Forgetting follows four generations of a family from 1962 to present day. When we meet Iapetus in 1962, he is going mad after seeing his mother and brother, Cronus, kill his father. Cronus raises Iapetus’ son, Atlas, who has a chance to leave Barbados to further his studies abroad. When Cronus dies, that opportunity falls through and Atlas remains in Barbados as an employee at the family hotel his cousin now runs. Atlas raises his daughter, Calypso, at the hotel, and she also misses her first opportunity to leave Barbados on scholarship when she falls for a real estate developer visiting the island. Calypso’s son, however, leaves Barbados but quickly returns when he finds a less than hospitable life in Canada. The Island of Forgetting covers a lot of ground—racism, classicism, thwarted dreams, mental illness, and tourism’s impact on land development.

Barbados: More by Austin Clarke

Austin Clarke’s More explores immigrant life in Canada. Idora migrates from Barbados through a program for domestic workers. Thirty years later, she is working as a maid at a local university. Both of the men in her life, her son and husband, are a disappointment. Her husband moved to America, leaving Idora to raise their son, BJ, alone. As a young adult, BJ turns to a life of crime, which weighs heavily on Idora. In vivid detail, Clarke describes the sometimes bleak life of the Caribbean immigrants and the new cultural landscape the immigrants traverse.

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Donna Hemans is the author River Woman, Tea by the Sea, and The House of Plain Truth (forthcoming from Zibby Books in 2023). In 2015, she won the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature for the unpublished manuscript of Tea by the Sea and was named co-winner of the 2003-4 Towson University Prize for Literature for River Woman. Donna’s short fiction and essays have appeared in Slice, Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, The Rumpus, Crab Orchard Review, among others. Donna lives in Maryland and is the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers based in Washington, D.C.