Caribbean. Writing.
My navel string bury in Guyana. Fuh true, my mother keep it and I see it, a dry-up dry-up twist of skin, but it didn’t come with us to New York. I frighten where it deh, under some Dutchman silk-cotton tree or in some water mumma river. My mother is a real fullaman Muslim lady, but she warn me about jumbie and ting since I small. In dem days not so long ago even the cocaine taking over the country was obeah.
The plane came to an abrupt stop and Mavis turned to stare through the oval window on her right. Spread away from them were acres of concrete, flat and marked with giant numbers and lines and shapes in black, white and yellow and in the distance the terminal had shrunk to a toy barn surrounded by mini planes each bouncing specks of the weak sunlight that penetrated the cloud layer.
Continue reading “Return”I use to work a place where I cut news clippings
till one day I left my scissors and reach for a blade
next ting I know is blood all over,
so I start write letters to the editor instead.
it is the earth
the lime or reddish
soil we plow for nourishment.
it is the banana & sugar cane
a sweetness that seasons
our tongues.
it is the manners
the tank you’s or excuse me’s
it is the mornin’
mornin’
mornin’
in Grammy’s spirit, telling you
don’t talk to da v’oman in v’hite
it is buried faiths;
Obeah, Islam, Rastafari.
it is our feet
moving on our own time
because no place is more important than the grave.
it’s the death mark on Mummy’s leg.
& the fedora Uncle Lenny does wear
because it reminds him of when
we were dependent but rich.
it is the dream
that we can be autonomous.
it is not the sea, no,
it is the sand
& the cracks we often fall in between.
The thing that made
Fyre Fest lucrative
was the dream.
of clear waters &
palm trees – not
The Bahamas
& its people.
They do not dream of the people
nor the hands that
build their hammocks &
butter their boiled lobsters.
They dream of lush;
of gold & blue diamonds
of villas & canopies
overlooking their Paradise.
They’ve forgotten that
pirates dreamt here too
wrecking their legacy by the docks
& the Bermuda triangle
is still a mystery.
Tanicia Pratt is a millennial, Bahamian-Muslim poet based in Nassau, New Providence. Her writing naturally explores the cultural experiences of Caribbean women. She cares about human wellness, the environment, and cultural preservation. Her work has been featured in Write About Now, POUI, Transforming Spaces, NE8, and Double Dutch. Tanicia loves coffee + horror films + staying in bed on a rainy day.
By Grace Virtue
An online photo of a woman caught my attention late last year. Beyond the undefined ethnicity, perfectly coiffed hair, and flawless bronze skin, she seemed like someone I should know.
It was Barbara Lewars, I soon found out, second wife of the late Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley and mother of their daughter, Sarah. Lewars died from cancer in the late sixties when I was a toddler in rural Manchester but I knew Sarah from CARIMAC, which explained the vague sense of familiarity. The shiny black hair, the deep expressive eyes and luminous smile, were all the same.
Continue reading “Coppertone and Disenchantment”
For the fallen (June 1980)
PREE is happy to republish award-winning Grenadian author Jacob Ross’s short story from Akashic Books‘ So Many Islands anthology .
Anni pushed a reluctant hand towards her little plastic radio and cut off the outraged voice of Mister Thorne. She would have liked to listen to his whole speech but she had work to do. Her yams were strangling the sweet potatoes, and today she was going to tame them. Out in the garden, though, her head was full of Missa Thorne: his talk of Bloody Thursday ‒ the bomb-blast that was meant to kill him, and the retribution he’d let loose on the Counters who’d placed the device beneath the stage on which he stood.
Continue reading “Roses for Mister Thorne”
A saint stands at the back of the gallery in joyous salutation. His arms are salvaged metal, perhaps the tie rods of a scrapped truck. His head is a human skull, a real skull, mouth agape. A red christmas light pops out of one eye socket, a shotgun shell through the other. Wiry human hair bunches around his shoulders and neck. He wears a dusty-green WWII helmet, held in the halo of a rusty hubcap. In one axle-hand, he holds an iron rod from which rubber cords dangle and twist. In the other, he holds a rusty metal crucifix.
Continue reading “Animate Objects: The Spirited Sculptures of Potoprens”