Kirjahaku

From the 1930s to the new century, Doux Thibaut, one of Merle Collins' most memorable characters, negotiates a hard life on the Caribbean island of Paz. As a child there is the shame of poverty and illegitimacy, and there are the hazards of sectarianism in an island divided between Catholic and Protestant, the rigidity of a class and racial system where, if you are black, your white employer is always right—and only the ladies live upstairs. Doux confronts all such challenges with style and hidden steel.We leave Doux as an old lady moving between the homes of her children in Boston and New York, wondering whether they and her grandchildren really appreciate what her engagement with life has taught her. In these tender and moving stories, Merle Collins demands that we do not forget such lives. If ghosts appear in several of the later stories, they are surely there to warn that amnesia about the past can leave disturbed and restless spirits behind.In addition to the Doux stories, this collection restores to print an earlier 'Paz' story, Rain Darling, and their juxtaposition contrasts two very different responses to the hazards of life.Merle Collins is Grenadian. She is the author of two novels, a collection of short stories and two previous collections of poetry. She teaches Caribbean literature at the University of Maryland.

First published to great acclaim in 1987, Angel begins in 1951, when the workers of Grenada revolted against the white estate owners, moving forward to 1983 when the US invaded to put an end to a radical experiment that had turned violently in on itself. At the story's heart are the headstrong Angel and her mother, Doodsie. What makes Angel such a rewarding novel to return to, especially in this revised new edition, is the seamless movement between the warmth and tensions of family life and the seriousness of irruptive, life-changing political conflict."[There is] a richness, a thickness, a stinging slangy that-there thingyness of observation and detail…" Robert Nye, The GuardianMerle Collins was born in 1950 in Aruba. She was deeply involved in the Grenadian revolution and served as a research coordinator for the Government of Grenada. Her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, was published in 1995, and her short-story collection The Ladies are Upstairs by Peepal Tree in 2011. Her third and most recent poetry collection is Lady in a Boat (Peepal Tree, 2003). She teaches Caribbean Literature at the University of Maryland.

Set on the Caribbean island of Paz (not a million miles from Grenada), this is a book that creates a space between epic poetry and the novel in the way its sequence of interludes bring into focus the lives of family and community through time – and in the confinements of space. It moves from the days of slavery through to the 1980s, through the difficult inheritance of one family – or rather the disinheritance of those in the family born illegitimate. Throughout, the novel conveys a powerful sense of place, of both attachment and confinement, of the meaning of land in relation to the island’s smallness, and the ever-present danger of the communal violence that can spring from those pressures. Through the generations comes the voice of three generations of the women the islanders know as Carib, warner women, whose prophecies of disaster are dismissed as madness, but who have an unerring sense of what is to come. Signalled in her title, Merle Collins has much to say about the nature of memory and the fatal nature of amnesia when it comes to the lessons of the past. Whilst the book is written in the continuing shadow of Grenada’s catastrophe of 1983, it signals hope in small things: the courage of women like Mamag who will not be silenced, the reconciliation between father and son that crosses the incomprehension between generations, the capacity of a young man to confront his innermost fears.

The mother of the revolutionary firebrand Malcolm X was a Grenadian woman born at the turn of the 20th century in a small rural community in a deeply colonial society where access to education had only just begun for the children of working people. She emigrated to Canada and then the USA, where she became involved in the struggle for Black dignity and human rights then led by Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Malcolm X and others of his siblings have testified to their mother's powerful influence on their lives. Within the sparse facts of Louise Langdon Norton Little's biography, Merle Collins, the distinguished Grenadian novelist, has created a moving and deeply feminist work of fiction that gives vivid inwardness to both the heroism and tragedy of a life that involved fighting the Ku Klux Klan, discovering that male comrades in the struggle could be abusers at home, recognition of her skills as an organiser, but also a period of mental collapse that saw her incarcerated in a mental hospital until her family fought for her release. What Merle Collins dramatizes is the meeting of a collective struggle for equal rights with an individual life profoundly shaped by growing up with her forceful matriarchal grandmother and by her schooling. In the classroom she meets teachers who show Oseyan, Louise's family name, how to turn the imperialist ideology of her schoolbooks on its head. These are the contexts of Oseyan's life, but what Merle Collins most profoundly gives us is its breathing texture, through a mix of fictive narrative, letters and poetry, with episodes of great warmth, exuberant humour and drama, as well as the pathos of separation from community.

In poems that express an oblique and resonant disquiet ('people dream of a lady/ in a boat, dressed in red/ petticoat, adrift and weeping') and a sequence that addresses memories of the death of the Grenadian revolution, too painful to confront until now, Merle Collins writes of a Caribbean adrift, amnesiac and in danger of nihilistic despair. But she also achieves a life-enhancing and consoling perspective on those griefs. She does this by revisiting the hopes and humanities of the people involved, recreating them in all their concrete particularity, or by speaking through the voice of an eighty-year-old woman 'making miracle/ with little money because turn hand is life lesson', and in writing poems that celebrate love, the world of children and the splendours of Caribbean nature. Her poems take the 'new dead ancestors back to/ mountain to feed the fountain/ of dreams again.'Merle Collins is Grenadian. She is the author of two novels, a collection of short stories and two previous collections of poetry. She teaches Caribbean literature at the University of Maryland.