Pressure Points
A personal reflection in which literary scholar Kavita Ashana Singh responds to the National Gallery of Jamaica’s 2022 Kingston Biennial and its theme, Pressure, which piques her curiousity and interest.
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Shades of Brown: The Life and Times of The Satanic Verses
The Satanic Verses represented a paradigm shift on several levels across the Islamisphere, not least among converts in the West. For one thing, the original text was written in English, which saved many of us the time-consuming argument that something must have been lost in translation.
Read MoreBloodlines
NEALA LUNA The imam caught all manner of jinn, trapped them in glass jars; buried them in the dark two feet deep beneath silk cotton trees. His great-grandson once caught a purple jellyfish, entombed tentacles and all in a cocoa...
Read MoreRitual for Remaking Yourself/ The Naming of Things
It’s true,
Sometimes meaning moves through a sound
like current, like darting silver
God Doesn’t Live in the Sky, They Live in the Ocean
TEJAN GREEN WASZAK The pond, a church The bay, a church Carrying the sentimental And peace, like a river. Spirit leaves body briefly to wade, Coconut wata wash off yuh heart. Sometimes I think of not being able to go home When...
Read MoreMenstrual Thobe
SUHAYLA HEPBURN After 23 days of Ramadan, I haven’t touched the Quran, I’m perpetually deducting menstrual days, I feel no shame Yah Sheik, Oh Brother of high esteem knowledge and visual molestation Oh...
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Crick Crack, Lopinot
Douens had stolen the baby and hidden her in the village dirt oven. This was the treasured oven that baked many treats for the villagers, like their daily bread, special cakes, and Christmas ham. It was now part of the scheme of the impish douens to bake the baby.
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“Say a Prayer for Abu Bakr”: A Eulogy for the Caribbean’s No. 1 Muslim Terrorist
The firebrand was going strong a mere month before his death. In September 2021, in a Facebook Live broadcast from the compound that lasted 75-minutes, he threatened the government with “war” over lack of education funds for Afro-Trinidadian children, alleging that “all the money [was] for the Indian children.”
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The Sacrifice
“Animal sacrifice is for protection. Or like in your case to ketch somebody heart. And when you do it, you does do it once and done. Human sacrifice is when you want money and power. That does summon thing you eh want in your life. But you does have to pay a price. If you do it once, every year you does have to make another sacrifice to please the spirit. It doh ever stop. Not until you dead.”
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The Light of the World
Boundaries were blurred so that Christmas was no longer the only festivity — now prasad was parceled out for Divali and ladles of sawine for Eid-ul-Fitr. All Trinidadian cultures were now represented. And though the cane-fields had been replaced by housing settlements, coffee shops, gourmet stores and delicatessens that sold imported cheeses, the name Bush Convent had never left, as if the miasma of rotting bagasse had settled permanently within its walls.
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