Who or what inspired them to write? What did they write about first? What are they writing about now? Where were they first published? What do they have to say about writing? About the Caribbean? About being women writers? These are some of the questions I'll be thinking about as I read the works of 12 women writers from the Caribbean this Summer and a little beyond. On my list are Jamaica Kincaid, Nalo Hopkinson, Marion Bethel, Michelle Cliff, Cecilia Samartin, Opal Palmer Adisa, Miriam Chancey, Tanya Shirley, Tiphanie Yanique, Elizabeth Nunez, Mahadai Das, and Karen King-Aribisala.
Of course, I'll share with you as I go along, and I hope you'll be encouraged to read them (again if you've already done so) and help me create an on-going discussion of their work.
First up is Antigua's Jamaica Kincaid. I posted an excerpt from her essay "On Seeing England for the First Time" last year when she was chosen to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This time around I'm reading her first collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River.
It's a slim collection (82 pages) consisting of ten stories, many of which had been previously published (individually) in notable places like The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. So in 1983 when the collection was published, Kincaid had already been a published writer for a decade or so. But arguably, a collection gives new meaning to a writer's work. It's in that light that I'm regarding the stories as firsts. More later, but here's a bit from the title piece "At the Bottom of the River":
This, then, is the terrain. The steepest mountains, thickly covered, where huge, sharp rocks might pose the greatest danger and where only the bravest, surest, most deeply arched of human feet will venture, where a large stream might flow, and, flowing perilously, having only a deep ambition to see itself mighty and powerful, bends and curves and dips in many directions, making a welcome and easy path for each idle rill and babbling brook, each trickle of rain fallen on land that lies sloping; and that stream, at last swelled to a great, fast, flowing body of water, falls over a ledge with a roar, a loudness that is more than the opposite of complete silence, then rushes over dry, flat land in imperfect curves--curves as if made by a small boy playfully dragging a toy behind him...
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Visit Amazon Prime and Amazon Sellers for new copies of Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River, beginning at just $6.48.
Note: As of July 2010, I've added more Caribbean women writers to the above list.
