The second issue of PREE focuses on the theme ‘Pressure’. Pressure buss pipe, yes. But, pressure also creates diamonds. What does pressure do for us tethered to the Caribbean? Is there a pressure to be ‘Caribbean’, to perform Caribbeanness, to act St. Lucian, Grenadian, Trini or Jamaican for instance; a demand that we rigidly embody our culture(s)?
There is the financial pressure to turn coins into dollars and deflated dollars into meals and school fees. There is the cultural pressure to persist and the global pressure to give in. Economic pressure to expand tourism and environmental pressure to protect. The desire for freedom and pressure to remain ‘authentic’. There is social pressure, atmospheric pressure, population pressure, the pressure to achieve the impossible. Also, and sometimes fatally, for too many of us in the region and the diaspora, pressure builds in our blood. Pressure takes root in our hearts and manifests clinically as hypertension and the dangerous possibilities of stroke, heart attack, pulmonary embolism. Pressure underlies any number of presentations of mental illness. Pressure is not just a soul-killing thing, but a thing from which we can actually die. Whichever way you cut it, pressure exists as a powerful invisible force. These are just some of the possible launching points that we asked contributors to wrestle with in this sophomore issue. Via prose, poetry, essays, memoirs, videos, and artwork that explored the possibilities that exist for pressure, PREE contributors did not disappoint.
Editorial
Letter from the Editor—Annie Paul
Fiction
Uncle Carlos’s Socks—Patrina Pink
All That You Can Afford to Lose—Justin Haynes
The Patience of Stone—Richie Maitland
Cursing Mrs. Murphy—Roland Watson-Grant
Caribbean Hurricane Rhyme—Julia Morris Thomson
Voice: Still Want Sex—Opal Palmer Adisa
Barrel Boy/Cyborg Birth—Kwasi Shade
“We Want Justice!”—Agostinho Pinnock
Non-fiction
Turn up the Volume—Leniqueca Welcome
On Non-Renewable Energy—Katherine Agard
New Rules-–Gerard Johnson
Poetry
Resurrection/Easter Sunday—Jovanté Anderson
Three Poems from The Best Estimation in the World—Sonia Farmer
Transmutations/Hide me Away—Traci-Ann Wint-Hayles
Barbados Mulatto Girl/Mangrove Village—Adam Patterson
Da Fruit of Our Sperit—Ide Thompson
One Day She Will Ask about Her Name—Anna Corniffe
The Sun/Tortola—Jannine Horsford
a curse to Adam/Delilah—Letitia Pratt
Pressure Drops/Bring Back Love–-Ubaldimir Guerra
The Sky Has Not Changed—Nigel Assam
Essay
The Gait of the Elephant—Sunny Singh
Memoir
Coppertone—Sarah Manley
Politics Time—Karen Bumi Marks
ART-icles
10th Berlin Biennale: We Don’t Need Another Hero (REVIEW)–David Frohnapfel
Andil Gosine: Coolie, Coolie Viens–Ramabai Espinet
Bernard Hoyes: An Interview—Annie Paul
Revisit
The Novel Of Tomorrow, Today—Christopher Laird
PREE Shorties
Emancipatory Proposition—Beatriz Llenin-Figueroa
Pressure Cooking—Tiffany Walton
Audio Visual
Four Days in West Kingston—Deborah Thomas, Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn
PREE 2 BRAWTA
Coppertone and Disenchantment Grace Virtue
Roses for Mister Thorne Jacob Ross
Animated Objects: The Spirited Sculptures of Potoprens Jake Nussbaum
‘Beyond Fashion’ at the National Gallery of Jamaica Rachael Barrett
Image credit: Leasho Johnson. No. 5 afflicted from the “playing the field” series. Mixed media on paper. By kind permission of the artist.