Cécé, by Emmilie Prophète, translated by Aidan Rooney
(Archipelago Books, ISBN 9781962770415, pp. 213)

 

“I had nothing but the present and stories with no beginnings,” says Cécé, the eponymous heroine of Emmelie Prophète’s economical yet potent novel of life in the Cité of Divine Power, a neighborhood in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The book is as much about one character as it is about the contradictions of a place. “There are tons of countries within this one country,” Cécé notes. The story follows her life after the death of her mother and grandmother, as she cares for her alcoholic uncle, who has been deported from the US, earning a living by “entertaining” male visitors. In the novel’s most wry development, she turns to social media, where, as a figure on Facebook known as Cécé la Flamme, she finds popularity and momentary validation by posting photographs of her environment. “Dead bodies did very well,” she tells us. “The smell went uncaptured.” The prose, translated by Rooney, is unadorned and sparse, but this only intensifies the powerful emotional currents of the book which is, ultimately, about family and yearning.

 

 

Kipling Plass, by Berkley Wendell Semple
(Peepal Tree Press, ISBN 9781845235925, pp. 334)

 

Powerfully does this novel begin with a simile that signals the poetic quality of the mesmeric writing throughout: “Sun comes up like big egg yolk over the sea”. Guyanese poet Berkeley Wendell Semple’s astonishing prose taps into the rich resource of the oral storytelling tradition; he is as much concerned with language on the page as he is concerned, acutely, with how it is voiced and heard. “The village wakes up with somebody hollering or a baby crying or cow lowing on the savannah or fowl-cock crowing or music turn on loud in a house far away,” the author writes in the first chapter, and it is as if he is describing the impact of his own book on the reader, who is instantly roused. All of it in service of a stirring story of return to Guyana after decades away, one memorably and aptly described by its publisher as “Guyana’s Shuggie Bain”. As much an important social document as it is a sensory experience.

 

 

Ever Since We Small, by Celeste Mohammed
(Jacaranda Books, ISBN 9781914344954, pp. 320)

 

Trinidadian Nicholas Huggins’ evocative artwork adorns the cover of the follow-up to Mohammed’s OCM Bocas Prize-winning novel-in-stories Pleasantview. Structured in two sections, “Then” and “Now”, the book delves into the history of South Asian indentureship in the Caribbean, beginning with one woman, Jiyanti, and her dream in Bihar, India, then finding further expression through a series of interconnected tales transplanted to Trinidad. In an echo of a line from Rabindranath Tagore, it all concludes with the image of a kiskadee in flight: “She soared toward the hazy horizon, travelling over the sea and its arches of aquamarine. Those waves, those ancient waves, they had witnessed Jayanti’s arrival and had been waiting over generations, waiting more than watchmen for the morning….”