you were born in a hurricane
amber williams-king
My heart clenches like a fist everytime I think about what air we will breathe; how much fresh water may cost; how the heat will wrap around us like a weighted blanket, so heavy we may hardly move.
Category: PREE 7
Drop
FELENE CAYETANO
At the last minute, she had gone on the annual pilgrimage with a busload of community elders to pray to the Black Christ. Maybe it was the combined scent of Bengay and Vicks VapoRub on that journey that compelled her to return with something her late grandmother would approve of.
They Cannot Have our Ancestors’ Bones; Or Their Memories
M. NourbeSe Philip
Sometime in 2020, WUP sold the rights to Benway Series as they are entitled to do by contract. The rights were sold for $150. Neither WUP, nor Benway Series, nor Renata Morresi contacted me about this. I understand that it is common practice to contact living authors when doing translations of their work.
The Wailers
Akhim Alexis
Everybody knows that when you go to a funeral you don’t wear all black, you must slip in some colour for the Lord to see you in mourning. If everybody wear black then he might look down and decide is just a swarm of black garden ants moving from one place to the other looking for their hole in the ground.
Daughter 4
Patrice Grell Yursik
Her father was Frederick Bailey, the legendary steelpan arranger known throughout the archipelago as a genius and a scoundrel with women in every port and a child anywhere there was an annual Caribbean festival. Her mother was Leslie-Ann, the voluptuous dark-skinned gyal from the gingerbread house on the corner who joined the damn steelband just to be in his orbit.
Homecoming
RENEE ASHLEY
I meandered through rows of relatives. It was hard to dodge obligatory questions like “Whoffa pickney you is?” questioning where I fell in the line of seemingly endless grandchildren.
On returns and reset: Roland Watson-Grant
ANNIE PAUL
In this video interview I talk to Roland about the long pause after his second novel, Skid (2014) and the curveballs or googlies life has thrown at him these last few years
The Gordon Town Bruk-weh
Latoya Briscoe
One morning in November 2020, we woke up to news that the main road connecting our community to the rest of Jamaica had broken away after heavy rains.
Halawa Musings
MARIANNA FARAG
I’ve been telling myself that we need to be bigger than this. I’ve been telling myself this life is going to need tough people. If someone provokes you, don’t hit back. Just walk away. And sometimes, being tough will also mean being kind.
In the Beginning Was the Water: On inciertas-eroded spectacle by/with Teresa Hernández
BEATRIZ LLENÍN FIGUEROA
We have turned water, the symbol of plenitude, into the symbol of misery. Islands, made and unmade by landslides or submarine volcanoes, have the most intimate relationship with water.
Circles
MERRIE JOY WILLIAMS The sun is melting, a disc of dark honey in a sky of white rum. Crimson bleeding every which way, like the air around this house is itself a young woman — stood slightly proud from the road through this...
The Admiral
GEOFFREY PHILP Freed by an obeah woman, who wanted”a likkle company every Friday eveling,”the Admiral, when everyone else was asleep,would crawl down his pedestal to answerthe summons to her bed where he’d...
