African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
268 p., In an examination of the fiction of contemporary women writers of the African Diaspora, these writers engage important texts from writers in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, largely ignored by mainstream literary scholars. They employ fresh and poignant critical perspectives accessible to both scholars and students. Includes Carolyn Cooper's
"Sense make befoh book": Grenadian popular culture and the rhetoric of revolution in Merle Collins's Angel and the Colour of forgetting," Paula C. Barnes "Meditations on her/story: Maryse Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and the slave narrative tradition," and Erna Brodber's "Guyana's historical sociology and the novels of Beryl Gilroy and Grace Nichols."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
174 p., Reading the fiction of Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand, Jean Rhys, Erna Brodber, and Michelle Cliff alongside British texts such as Dickens's Great Expectations and Bronte's Jane Eyre, Renk demonstrates how contemporary Anglophone Caribbean women's writing radically subverts the myth of the family as it is constructed in 19th century British and colonial texts. These women writers reconfigure Caribbean identity, family, and nation according to cross-cultural, trans-national and transtemporal paradigms.
Verila, on the other hand, is a woman who is in constant flight and change. She lives in Canada and has returned to her island birthplace, ultimately in search of happiness. Elizete professes her love for Verila early in the book. The excitement and overwhelming for desire Elizete has for Verila is palpable. She claims, "I abandon everything for Verila. I sink in Verila and let she flesh swallow me up. I devour her. She open me up like any morning. Limp, limp and rain light, soft to the marrow."
