Earl McKenzie

In this, his fifth collection of short stories, Earl McKenzie explores themes such as filial and romantic love, thanksgiving, education, community and the relation between the visual arts and society. We meet four members of a family who give their own perspectives on an estranged son; a man who mourns the death of the first woman he loved; a poet who seeks the forgiveness of a woman he once hurt; a yam farmer who cannot forget a kindness; and a young Rastafarian artist who mounts an exhibition of his paintings in the square of his home district. A variety of storytelling techniques are used to offer these vivid interpretations of Jamaican life.

An accident-prone farmer whose misfortunes include being buried under a landslide, a three-card gambler wearing dark glasses who comes to the district, and a stranger who returns on a secret mission...these are some of the characters who Ossie meets while growing up in a rural Jamaican district. He engages with them with the guidance of his parents and teachers, and in the company of Phonso, his antagonist, and Paulette his guardian angel. These imaginative stories are a continuation of those in Earl McKenzie's much-loved A Boy Named Ossie. Written with similar clarity, humour and charm, they include themes such as competition, gambling, courage, environmentalism, magic, education, art, and the making of moral choices. They will raise questions about the challenges of Jamaican childhood then and now.

Earl McKenzie's pioneering philosophical study of the West Indian novel is based on three main assumptions: first, that philosophy is a reflection on the fundamental questions we can ask about ourselves and our world; second, that literature, particularly the novel, is the best method yet devised to provide a 'human face' to these reflections; and third, Caribbean philosophy is at present embedded in other forms of cultural expression, like literature, and these forms need to be excavated to reveal what lies within. McKenzie examines ten novels by George Lamming, Roger Mais, Wilson Harris, V.S. Naipaul, Orlando Patterson, Jean Rhys, Erna Brodber, Lakshmi Persaud, Earl Lovelace and Jamaica Kincaid, each selected to represent differences in geography, chronology, ethnicity and gender. In this cross-section of novels, McKenzie identifies ancestral influences from the philosophies of Europe, Africa and India, and shows how West Indian fiction embodies ideas from several areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of education, social and political philosophy, ethics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of literature. "Philosophy in the West Indian Novel" uncovers sections of the mostly unknown Caribbean philosophical mosaic, and McKenzie's work will encourage further study and refection on philosophical ideas in a Caribbean context. It will be of interest to philosophers, literary critics, educators, social scientists, and anyone interested in Caribbean studies.