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A promise to return to a place that has changed you, where youve lived and loved with the intensity and passion of youth, is often made but rarely kept. This provocative memoir begins with such a promise, made in 1962 by three young American women  the author among them  on a windy mountaintop overlooking the Caribbean Sea. Using tools of the historian, novelist and poet to share memories of her experiences and emotional journey, Gail Porter Mandell offers an unaccustomed perspective on Belize in the waning days of colonial rule, with political and cultural revolutions brewing.

Seen through eyes opened wide, the seaside town of Angel Creek and its diverse cast of characters  Garifuna, Creole, Latino, Amerindian, Asian, European and American  come alive. Years later, a surprise-filled return journey affirms that human relationships can transcend racial and cultural differences  and even time.

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Indo-Caribbean women writers are virtually invisible in the literary landscape because of cultural and social inhibitions and literary chauvinism. Until recently, the richness and particularities of the experiences of these writers in the field of literature and literary studies were compromised by stereotypical representations of the Indo-Caribbean women that were narrated from a purely masculine or an Afrocentric point of view. This book fills an important gap in an important but underestimated emergent field. The book explores how cultural traditions and female modes of opposition to patriarchal control were transplanted from India and rearticulated in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora to determine whether the idea of ""cultural continuity"" is, in fact, a postcolonial reality or a fictionalized myth. The Indian women who braved the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic, or the kala pani, to Trinidad and Guyana provided courage, determination, self-reliance and sexual independence to their literary granddaughters who in turn used the kala pani as the necessary language and frame of reference to position Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity with equating writing as a pubic declaration of one's identity and right to claim creative agency. The book is of critical interest to those interested in twentieth-century literary studies, Caribbean studies, gender studies, ethnic studies and cultural studies.