One of the overwhelming tones of the collection of stories in Tiphanie Yanique’s How to Escape from a Leper Colony is a gloomy one. It probably begins with the connotations of the words “escape” and “leper,” and their relationship to “colony”-- flight from place by group / people either themselves afflicted with an incurable disease, or from an incurable condition of dis-ease. The feeling of imprisonment in one form or other permeates the collection. And the act of escape from these conditions in many instances in the stories is in the form of desperate moves which end in death, or some form of departure, which may leave the reader (high and dry) with more questions than answers...
The reader who is looking for prophecy about the Caribbean and its people in the collection—as some readers do, particularly those fond of digging out predictions or otherwise from texts set in specific geographic spaces—may find its portrayal gloomy, and may even cringe at moments when the wisdom in the message about place seems too buried under exoticism to be fully appreciated. But even he or she (that reader with the discriminating magnifying glass) and anyone else interested in well-crafted stories may find much that is worthy of an appreciative nod in the collection.
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Coming Wednesday: My review of Tiphanie Yanique's How to Escape from a Leper Colony.
