Description

This enlightening, entertaining, profoundly political and poetic gathering of essays by the Poet Laureate of Jamaica covers a wealth of subjects, from the odd dissociation of a colonial education to the reality of life in the wider world, the singing of hymns in school and the way their words stay with us, to the many influences--music, art, storytelling, theatre, cinema, travel, religion, family life and politics--that nurture our imaginations and her own writing voice. Taking her title from Kingston's oldest market and downtown meeting place that was almost destroyed by fire last year, Lorna Goodison introduces us to an extraordinary cast of characters and range of influences--from finding a black hairdresser in Paris and crying at a movie in Jamaica to having a life-changing epiphany in New York's Bottom Line Club or drinking tea with an old friend and new strangers in London's Marylebone High Street.

Bibliography

Lorna Goodison is the author of nine collections of poetry, threecollections of short stories and an award-winning memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017 and will serve until 2020. She has won numerous awards for her work, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Gold Medal, the Henry Russel Award for Exceptional Creative Work, and the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Her poetry has been included in major anthologies and collections of contemporary poetry over the past twenty-five years. Her work has been translated into many languages, and she has been a central figure at literary festivals throughout the world. Born in Jamaica, Lorna Goodison now divides her time between Canada and the US where she teaches at the University of Michigan.

Description

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Bibliography

This reconstruction of one of the rare Caribbean slave narratives is an amplification, interrogation, and modification of its original texts by cross-reference with official documents, contemporary diaryentries and reports, present-day oral sources, and secondary analyses of plantation society. Accessing a variety of primary records, Maureen Warner-Lewis meticulously reconstructs a biography of enslaved Archibald Monteath, an Igbo, who was brought to Jamaica around 1802, became active in the Moravian Church and later purchased his freedom. Through Monteath's biography she explores the sociology of slavery from 1750 to the 1860s. Fieldwork conducted in Africa brings an important dimension to the work, and scholars of Caribbean history, church history, diasporic studies, Atlantic studies and Jamaica will find it of significant interest.