Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of A Return to My Native Land)
Césaire’s masterpiece that reaches the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture. “Aimé Césaire’s masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. The long poem was the beginning of Césaire’s quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. With its emphasis […]
I Am Becoming My Mother
In Lorna Goodison’s poetry collection, she focuses on the “The Mother”, the female element, evoked in her title.
Ancestors
A sweeping historical epic in the vein of Dante or Milton, by the Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite. Brathwaite divides the poem into three sections, “Mother Poem,” “Sun Poem,” and “X/Self,” and then smaller sections containing individual poems.
Myal
What the Twilight Says
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
A fast-moving chronicle covering Lorde’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s.
The Hummingbird Tree
A fictional story of adolescence and growing up in pre-independence Trinidad.
Texaco
Texaco is a 1992 novel by Patrick Chamoiseau, a French author who was born and raised in Martinique. The book was awarded the Prix Goncourt in its year of publication.
Ways of Sunlight
Voyage in the Dark
Escape to Last Man Peak
The Middle Passage
The Loss of El Dorado
No Pain Like This Body
Gardening in the Tropics
Zong!
Summer Lightning and Other Stories
These short stories, told through the eyes of children, remind us that child-like vision expose some of the harsh truths to which systems and society have become blind.
Capitalism and Slavery
Williams’ groundbreaking work, ahead of its time, establishes a direct causal relationship between slavery and the advancement of Industrial Revolution, and by extension global capitalism. This has inspired and been the cornerstone of many further studies on racism, imperialism and post-colonial socio-economics.
Omeros
Omeros is an epic poem, divided into seven “books”, which makes reference to Homer and some of his major characters from the Iliad. Traversing settings, time periods, and voices, the poem beautifully captures the interwoven narratives of history, nature and humanity.The book won the WH Smith Literary Award in 1991, and in 1992, Walcott was […]
A Brighter Sun
The first novel by Selvon, this coming of age story casts the ordinary man in the glow of the extraordinary, by detailing the struggles and aspirations of the working class in a prejudiced society.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Rodney wrote this during his time in Dar es Salaam, during the presidency of Julius Nyerere. He charges Europe with the role of extractor from the African continent, directly responsible therefore, in the past and present, for its stunted development.
Wide Sargasso Sea
Otherness, ostracism, colonial turmoil, race and the often incomprehensible layers of feminism – Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea imagines a trajectory to Bertha, the ‘mad’ wife of Mr. Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre on grounds that go directly to the West Indian heart.
The Lonely Londoners
Selvon paints several pictures of West Indian immigrant life in London in the 1950s through a series of loosely connected vignettes, pitting the desires of the working class for social mobility against self-doubt and disappointment.
A House for Mr. Biswas
A widely-acclaimed novel, this is the story of Mohun Biswas’ dreams, despair and destiny. Time magazine included the novel in its “TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005”, and in 2019, BBC News named it on its list of the “100 Novels that Shaped Our World” Comments: “Not a fan of V.S. Naipaul […]
The Wine of Astonishment
Set in the remote Trinidad village of Bonasse, Lovelace depicts the trials of a Spiritual Baptist community in the wake of the Prohibition Ordinance banning their religious expression, and the tumults of race, power and authority in the colonial context.
Miguel Street
Seventeen short stories, linked by characters who live on Miguel Street in Port of Spain, Trinidad. The New York Times says, “The sketches are written lightly, so that tragedy is understated and comedy is overstated, yet the ring of truth always prevails”.
The Schoolmaster
Lovelace’s second novel paints the bittersweet picture of progress for Cumaca, a rural village in Trinidad.
The Dragon Can’t Dance
A Small Place
A biography that is also an essay critique of Antigua’s political corruption, the chokehold of tourism and the glorifying of its colonial legacy, this creative non-fiction is also a lesson in empathy.
Annie John
A coming of age story with themes that resonate well into adulthood, we find in Kincaid’s main character a portrayal of a young Antiguan woman leaning into adolescence and herself with uncertainty and urgency.