Toppa Top 10: The Best Caribbean Books of 2011

Words by Eddie STATS Houghton, Rishi Bonneville and Erin MacLeod.

This list began life as a sort of fall study list, a hand-picked selection of LargeUp-approved assigned reading comprising 2011 titles from, for and about the Caribbean. Autumn has sailed already but consider these as beach reads for those in situ, airplane reads for those of us who live in the Northern latitudes and need a winter break–and the cheapest Caribbean vacation packages money can buy for those who can’t afford plane tickets. And since Christmas is right around the bend, remember: Nothing stuffs a socking like the written word. Fire ‘pon a kindle!

10. Ian Thomson, The Dead Yard: The Story of Modern Jamaica (nonfiction)

From the north, Jamaica can look like two places. It is a premium destination of choice for sun and music lovers; it is also ground zero for violence associated with the transamerican drug trade. Ian Thomson, whose previous books include Bonjour Blanc on Haiti, and one on Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, turns an unsparing eye on Jamaica. Through his interviews and research, he paints a picture of a society for whom liberation did not come after 300 years of British rule.

9. William Kennedy, Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (fiction)

The noted novelist’s latest book takes his main character Quinn to Cuba and back. As the NYT observes, it is “his his most musical work of fiction: a polyrhythmic contemplation of time and its effects on passion set in three different eras, a jazz piece unafraid to luxuriate in its roots as blues or popular ballad or to spin out into less melodic territory.”

8. Colin Grant, The Natural Mysics: Marley, Tosh, and Wailer (nonfiction)

In this well-researched examination of the roots of roots music, Colin Grant, a British-Caribbean writer, travels to Jamaica to find the early history of the Wailers. Framed as a search for Bunny Wailer, the only living member, Grant meets and uncovers gems along the way, building a framework that begins to explain how such a global cultural force emerged from such a small corner of the receding empire.

7. Alex Von Tunzelmann, Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder & the Cold War in the Caribbean (nonfiction)

Tunzelmann, who has previously tackled the end of the British Raj in India with Indian Summer, examines the cold war in America’s backyard through the interactions of six powerful men, namely US presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, as they engaged with Caribbean independence in the persons of Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo and Papa Doc Duvalier. As the Amazon review says: “The superpowers thought they could use Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic as puppets, but what neither bargained on was that their puppets would come to life.”

6. Monique Roffey, The Woman on a Green Bicycle (fiction)

George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad on the last ship bringing English expatriates to the changing island. This novel (titled The White Woman on the Green Bicycle in some editions) follows their relationship over decades as George falls in love with the island, and Sabine is overwhelmed by everything: the climate, the history, the smallness. Her youthful obsession and frustrations with Prime Minister Eric Williams return to her late in life as she and her husband attempt to help a local victim of police brutality, opening many unresolved issues, both personal and political.

5. Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing (nonfiction)

Julian, son of Fernando Henriques, who authored one of the first studies of Jamaican popular culture (and possible Sean Paul cousin?), goes deep into the politics of Caribbean bass and the attendant bass culture of soundsystems with such fine-grained detail that there is even a thorough examination of the art of building the bass-cabinets themselves. Illustrated throughout with photographs, Sonic Bodies brings to Caribbean soundsystem culture the reverence it deserves.

4. Rahul Bhattacharya, Sly Company of People Who Care (fiction)

What begins as a slow and colorful collection of impressions of Guyana from an outside accelerates into a meditation on placelessness, sex and identity. The unnamed narrator, an Indian national (distinct from East Indians, who are Guyanese, and Amerindians, who are indigenous) visits the South American country with no particular direction, knocking about from diamond-country in the rainforest to a failed passa passa-type dance in Georgetown. Vivid descriptions of Guyana’s beauty combine with a tender but honest look at an oft-ignored place to hold the reader’s attention deep into the story.

3. Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary (fiction)

A hollyweird movie starring Johnny Depp seems like a pretty good excuse to reprint the lost and found first novel of one of America’s great writing talents, the original gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. If said novel happens to be a rum-powered cocktail of sex, greed and intrigue in the Caribbean boomtown of 1950s San Juan, Puerto Rico? Make it a double.

2. Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat (fiction)

Akashic Books have long since expanded their city-by-city series of crime fiction (which began with Brooklyn Noir) into the Caribbean islands with Havana Noir, Trinidad Noir and other (highly enjoyable) volumes. But the latest (January 2011, Hardcover) installment in the series Haiti Noir, assembled by award-winning Haitian novelist Edwige Danticat, represents their literary pinnacle. To go even deeper into Haiti’s heart, pick up the other 2011 title with Danticat’s name on it, the critically-acclaimed reflection on ‘the immigrant artist at work’ Create Dangerously.

1. Kamau Braithwaite, Elegguas (poetry)

A late 2010 release, this collection of verse from Bajan poet Kamau Braithwaite nevertheless demands recognition as one of the most important works of Caribbean literature in recent memory; the sycorax style he develops within it the closest thing to a purely (impurely?) West Indian literary form the world has yet seen. It can be glimpsed in the lovely lines of a poem like “Defilee”:

The meat they make of you I cannot sell
tho i sell sutler meat at Ogoum all my life
the fragments of yr body’s dream I can but touch
O cruel piece by piece I can but gather

from the entrail entrance of the knife

But it can only be fully appreciated in book-form, it’s very typefaces “a rebellion against ‘Prospero’s’ poetry, staid lines advancing in orderly fashion from left to right, and stanzas marching in ranks down the page.”

Honorebel Mention: Derek Walcott, White Egrets (poetry).

Technically published in 2010, but winning the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in 2011, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s White Egrets is a remarkable, wide ranging work of personal, intimate intensity.

Honorebel Mention: Kei Miller, A Light Song of Light (poetry).

Jamaica’s young but prolific poet and fiction writer Kei Miller had his excellent poetry collection A Light Song of Light long-listed for the Bocas Prize this year. But it is his novel, The Last Warner Woman (published in paperback in the US this year) that demonstrates Miller’s amazing storytelling abilities. Pay attention to Miller’s blog, Under the Saltire Flag and you won’t be disappointed.