I recently reviewed Opal Palmer Adisa's I Name Me Name for the Caribbean Review of Books, and I'm including that review in my Caribbean Women Writers series here. The following is an excerpt:
A well-supported theory about contemporary writing on ethnic identity — the kind written by immigrants based in the United States — is that it tends to follow the lines of a familiar autobiographical plot: the story of becoming American. Such writing often contends with problems of assimilation, self-reinvention, and cultural translation, and questions of language, memory, gender, and place. And, like most autobiographical writing, ethnic-identity writing in America tends to follow a trajectory which moves from deeply personal, solitary introspection, to the familial, the communal, and to some form of political activism — from an “I” to a “we” — that is full of longing, full of definitions of belonging, and insistent on recognition.
Jamaica-born writer and professor Opal Palmer Adisa’s I Name Me Name (her eleventh book) is a collection of carefully constructed “I” narratives-- [prose] and verses--and one photograph, which fit the above description of contemporary ethnic-identity writing. [http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/23-september-2010/the-shape-of-i/].
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I Name Me Name, by Opal Palmer Adisa (Peepal Tree Press Ltd, 2008, 220 pp).
