Merle Collins

26/2021. This is a collection of short stories set mostly on a fictional Caribbean island resembling Grenada. The first part is a reprinting of the author's 50 page story Rain Darling, which revolves around child neglect and the adult mental health consequences in a fully realised community setting, and was an innovative and unusually sympathetic perspective on the subject in 1990 when it was first published (and continues to stand out now). The next 100 pages are a set of ten short stories show more revolving around the life of Doux from girlhood to old age, and her family and communities. These successfully manage to be a bildungsroman, a detour into folktales (told in contemporary legend style), and an honest account of ageing. The language is plain but powerful, as readers would expect from Merle Collins who is known for her poetry. Every word is necessary to the overall effect, especially the occasional repetitions for emphasis, exactly as in the author's poetry. I'll mention that two of the three contemporary legends might not be as effective for readers not familiar with that style of storytelling but they should work for readers unfamiliar with the particular folktales on which they're based (and I personally find stories about sensible Joe from the garage seeing a ghost are much more effective than squamous eldritch whatnots). Oh, and the final line of the book is an absolute winner, but I won't spoil it.

Quote

"Tisane's mother always said, 'Don't wait on nobody to make you happy, especially not no man. (...) Take you happiness outa de general world and don't wait on no one person to make you happy.' " show less

A collection of poems by Merle Collins, encouraging and celebrating her nation's independence from British imperial control in the 1970s. The poems which deal with the specifics of Grenadian society, language, and identity are the strongest and the most engaging; those which are more generally about ideas of freedom tilt a little bit in the direction of being platitudes.

50/2021. Angel by Merle Collins, is a novel about three generations of Grenadian women, during the thirty years from 1951 to 1983, that the author originally wrote and published in 1987 and then rewrote and republished with Peepal Tree Press in 2011.

This book is mostly written in Standard English but various characters also speak varieties of Grenadian Creole English and even Grenadian Creole French. There's more older Creole than I'm used to reading in Caribbean literatures and I was glad show more of the two page glossary at the back, especially for words of African or Carib or French origin, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to every reader although there's no deliberate obscurity (or obfuscation to use my own specialist vocabulary, lol) by Collins who clearly wants her work to be read as well as being representative. Many scholars consider this text to be a valuable archive of historic language in addition to a historical novel.

In form the novel is divided into chapters and each chapter divided into shorter scenes headed by Creole proverbs. In style and content this reads as much like an oral history collection as a novel, which is intentional on the author's part, with the structure following three generations of women in one family: through ageing and death, through motherhood, and through growing up and coming of age, through Independence from Britain, through the revolution, and through the US invasion.

The conclusion of the book is, of course, not happy: that Grenada doesn't count as a country with its own borders because economics dictate people must work abroad, and because the US (or any larger power) can impose its will through military or economic violence at any time it pleases; that those (men) who fight their way into leadership positions are often either destructively corrupt or destructively egotistical; that if only the chickens would work together as a flock then the chickenhawks would go home hungry more often than not, but chickens scatter by instinct and have to be taught their best hope is mutual aid. 4.5*

Quotes

Bush: "When she looked up, the other trees around had started rustling too as the breeze got stronger. She lowered her eyes, left them to their conversation, and went on inside."

Proverb: "Never trouble trouble until trouble trouble you."

Poverty ("caan" = can't): "'Well is so it is!' Cousin Maymay said, 'We caan let one another sink. Is you, is me. We ha hol one another up!'"

Education ("djab" = diables = devils): "We did just know bout Britain an we feel British, so we great! Poor djab us!"

Chickens and chickenhawks ("caan" = can't): "'Allyou self too stupid,' she said to the fowls, 'Don run when they try to frighten you. Stay together an dey caan get none!'" show less

I really enjoyed these stories. The language was wonderful and Doux is a very compelling character. I think "Mapping" might be my favorite.