Pamela Mordecai was born in Kingston, Jamaica and educated there and in Newton, Mass., USA. A trained language arts teacher, she has worked extensively in media – she was a freelance television presenter for 17 years.
With Mervyn Morris she edited Jamaica Woman (Heinemann, 1980), the first anthology of poetry by Jamaican women. In 1987 she edited From Our Yard: Jamaican Poetry Since Independence. Her Storypoems for children appeared in the same year. Journey Poem (Kingston, Sandberry Press, 1989), Pamela Mordecai’s first collection of poetry, was published in 1989. She has also written on Caribbean literature and language teaching ad authored/c0-authored some 13 textbooks for the region.
A former Publications Officer I the Faculty of Education, University of the West Indies, abnd Editor of the Caribbean Journal of Education, Pamela Mordecai now runs her own company in Kingston. Betty (Elizabeth) Wilson, Pamela Mordecai’s sister, has a Diploma in Education from London University and a doctorate from Michigan State University. In 1988 she gained a senior Fulbright Award. A member of staff of the French Department of the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, she is also Assistant Chief Examiner for French for the Caribbean Examinations Council. Betty Wilson authored Language Arts for Primary Schools (Heinemann, 1983) with Don Wilson and Hyacinth Campbell and has translated Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s French novel, Juletane for Heinemann’s Caribbean Writers Series (1987). She is currently working on a comparative study of Caribbean and Afro-Anerican women’s prose writing, as well as a translation of another French Caribbean novel.
Writers:
Dionne Brand (Trinidad & Tobago) Excerpt: “Photograph” (179-182). From Sans Souci and other Stories.
From Her True-True Name 1989 bio: “Dionne Brand was born in Trinidad and has lived in Toronnto for the past 19 years. Brand is already well-known for her work as a poet. She has published five books of poetry: ‘Fore day Morning (Toronto, 1978), Earth Magic (children’s poetry, Toronto, 1980) Primitive Offensive (198s), Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984) and Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defence of Clauda (1983). Her short stories have appeared in several publications … Despite her long absence from the land of her birth, Brand’s Caribbean voice remains uncompromised and her evocation of Caribbean places ad situations is sharp and moving. ‘Photograph’ deals with a situation which is a very frequent feature of Caribbean life: being brought up by a grandmother.”
Erna Brodber (Jamaica) Story/Excerpt: “Into this Beautiful Garden”. From Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home 1980)
From Her True-True Name 1989 bio: Erna – ‘Lixie’ or ‘Stick’ – Brodber was born in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica in 1940. She went to school there and in Kingston, attended the University of the West Indies (when it was the University College of the West Indies) and obtained one the first MSc degrees in Sociology. After working as a caseworker in private and public children’s services, she was awarded a National Institute of Mental Health Ford Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship to the University of Washington in 1967, where she studied psychiatric anthropology. Having gained a Ph.D in History at UWI, she worked there as Research Fellow in the Institute of Social and Economic Research (Mona) … Her two novels, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980) and Myal (1988) were published by New Beacon Books. Brodber has been a member of the (Rastafarian) Twelve Tribes of Israel since 1976.”
Merle Collins (Grenada) Excerpt: “Angel” (172-178). From Angel (1987)
Excerpt from Her True-True Name 1989 bio: Merle Collins is from Grenada where she has worked as a teacher and researcher. She was a member of the National Women’s Organization in Grenada and is currently completing a doctorate at the London School of Economics. A collection of her poetry Because the Dawn Breaks (London: Karia Press) appeared in 1985. She is a member of African Dawn, a group which performs poetry to African music, and is actively concerned with creole language issues. With Rhonda Cobham she co-edited Watchers and Seekers: Creative Writing by Black Women in Britain (Women’s Press, 1987), to which she also contributed. Angel, her first novel (Women’s Press, 1988) is set in Grenada.
Maryse Condé Excerpt: “Elikia” (122-127). From A Season in Rihata. Translated by Richard Philcox.
From Her True-True Name 1989 bio: Maryse Condé was born in Guadeloupe, where she now resides, but has spent long periods in West Africa, in France, and more recently in the United States … A novelist, playwright, critic and scholar, her works have been published extensively in translation as well as in the original French … Her novels include Heremakhonon (1976), Une Saison à Rihata (Paris, Laffont, 1981) and the monumental works: Segou I (1984) and Segou II (1985), set against the background of an ancient African kingdom in the nineteenth century … Moi, Tituba, sorcière Noire de Salem (I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, 1986), the fictional reconstruction of the life of a black woman burnt as a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century, won the Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme. In her latest novel, La vie scélérate (1987), Condé writes the saga of a Guadeloupean family over several generations. She has also written short stories.
Christine Craig (Jamaica) Story title: “In the Hills” (1989, 56-59). Previously unpublished short story.
From Her True-True Name 1989 bio: Christine Craig was born in Jamaica and graduated with an honours degree in English from the University of the West Indies. Her first published works were the texts for two full-colour children’s books produced by her husband, Karl Craig, and published by Oxford University Press in 1970 and 1971. She has produced several non-fiction publications and training manuals on feminist and health topics. Her short stories and poems have been published in local, British and American anthologies and journals. Her first collection of poems, Quadrille for Tigers was published in 1984 by Mina Press, Berkeley, California … She lives with her two daughters in Kingston, Jamaica and was recently awarded a fellowship to the International Writers Programme at Iowa University, USA.
Carmen Lugo Filippi Excerpt/Story: “Recipes for the Gullible” (102-105) Translated by Lizabeth Paravisini. From the collection Vírgines y mártires.
Excerpt from Her True-True Name 1989 bio: Carmen Lugo Filippi is Professor of French Language and Literature at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. She holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Toulouse and a Masters in French Literature from Columbia University, New York. Carmen Lugo Filippi has done extensive work in foreign language teaching, literary ciriticism and women’s writing, particularly in Puerto Rico. She is co-author, with Ana Lydia Vega, of Vírgenes y mártires (Virgins and martyrs: Editorial Antillana, Puerto Rico, 1981), which won the P.E.N. Club of Puerto Rico National Literature Prize (Short Story category) in 1982. She has also published many other short stories in magazines and anthologies including the one here, ‘Recetario de incautos’ (Recipes for the Gullible), which won first prize in the Revista Sin Nombre short story competition.
Excerpt from Her True-True Name 1989 bio: Merle Hodge was born in Trinidad in 1944 and has spent most of her life living and working in the Caribbean. Author of Crick Crack, Monkey (Deutsch, 1979; Heinemann Caribbean Writers Series, 1981) as well as short stories for children, numerous articles and reviews and a translation of a collection of poems by Leon Damas. Merle Hodge … has lectured in French at the University of the West Indies and taught in high schools in Trinidad and Grenada, where she worked during the Bishop regime…. In Crick Crack, Monkey Merle Hodge considers – often humorously – the growing up of Tee, her young heroine … In this extract, from which the title of our anthology is taken, Ma tells Tee the story of her grandmother’s insistence on being called by ‘her true-true name’. The fat that the incident occurs at Ma’s country place perhaps suggests something about the context in which self-knowing and self-affirming are best achieved.
Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua) Excerpt:”Marbles” and “At the Bottom of the River” (112-121). Excerpts from Annie John (1985) and At the Bottom of the River (1983)
Excerpt from 1989 Her True-True Name bio: Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua in 1949 and spent her early years there. Her mother, a woman who loved books, came originally from Dominica; her father was a carpenter and joiner. She came to the United States in her teens to continue her education, and worked initially as a freelance writer, publishing articles in the New Yorker, Ms, Rolling Stone, and The Paris Review. A staff writer for the New Yorker since 1976, she is the author of At the Bottom of the River (Picador, 1983), a collection of prose fiction which won the Morton Dawwen Zobel Award of the American Academy and Institute of the Arts and Letters, and Annie John (Picador, 1985), a novel. Her third book, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988) is a witty, provocative, searing critique of her birthplace. She lives in New York with her husband and children.
Grace Nichols (Guyana) Excerpts: “Archie” and “Ivy” (10-17) From Whole of a Morning Sky (1986)
From Her True-True Name 1989 bio: Born in 1950 in Guyana, where she grew up and worked among other things as pupil teacher, reporter and freelance writer, Grace Nichols came to Britain in 1977. She has had poems published in journals and magazines such as Frontline, Ambit, Kunapipi, Artrage, City Limits, and Third Eye. Her cycle of poems, I is a Long-Memoried Woman, won the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She is also the author of three children’s books published by Hodder & Stoughton: Trust you Wriggly, a collection of stories; Baby Fish and other stories, a collection of folk stories; and Leslyn in London. Virago has produced a second collection of her poems, The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984) and her first novel, Whole of a Morning Sky (1986) … Whole of a Morning Sky tells the story of a family’s move from a Guyana village to the capital, Georgetown, and of the dramatic political events in which they become caught up as Guyana, racially split between blacks and East Indians, struggles towards independence.
Velma Pollard (Jamaica) Excerpt/Story “Monologue” (59-65). From “Karl,” published here for the first time. Karl and other stories was published later, 1994.
From Her True-True Name 1989 bio: Velma Pollard, sister of Erna Brodber, was born at Comfort Hall, Benbow, St. Catherine in 1937 and grew up in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica. She red languages at the University of the West Indies, Mona, when it was UCWI and subsequently did post-graduate degrees at McGill and Columbia Universities and the UWI, Mona where she recently completed a PhD in Language Education. A member of staff of the Faculty of Education since 1975, she has published various articles on the teaching of English and on Caribbean Literature and Language. She has also edited – with Jean D’Costa – OVER Our Way (London, Longman, 1980), as well as Anansesem (Kingston, Longman Jamaica, 1985) and Nine West Indian Poets: An Anthology for the CXC Examination (London, Collins, 1980. Crown Point and other Poems, her first collection of poetry, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 1988 and the Women’s Press published Considering Woman, a collection of prose writing in spring, 1989.
Magali García Ramis (Puerto Rico) Story: “Every Sunday” (98-101). From her 1976 collection La Familia de Todos Nosotros.
From Her True-true Name 1989 bio : Magali García Ramis is Professor of Journalism at the University of Puerto Rico. Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1946, Magali García Ramis comes from a very close-knit middle-class family. She describes herself as a ‘second-generation Puerto Rican’, (her great-grandparents and two grandparents were originally from Spain) … Influenced by ‘comics, films, especially François Truffaut,’ and writers as diverse as Tolstoy, Fuentes, Woolf, Dostoevsky, and Vonnegut, her publications include a short story collection, La Familia de todos nosotros (Our Family: 1976) and a novel, Felices días, Tio Sergio, (Happy days, Uncle Sergio: 1986) as well as numerous short stories published in anthologies and magazines in Puerto Rico and the United States … The extract which appears here is from her first short story, ‘Every Sunday’, which won first prize at the Ateneo Puertoriqueño’s Annual Contest in 1970.
Joan Riley (Jamaica) Excerpt: “Closing the Case” (66-70). From Waiting in the Twilight (1987)
From Her True-true Name 1989 bio: Joan Riley was born in Hopewell, Richmond, St. Mary, Jamaica in the 1950s, the youngest of eight children, six girls and two boys. She received her undergraduate and degrees from Sussex University and the University of London, respectively. Currently resident in London with her two children (a boy aged eight and a girl aged three), she describes herself as ‘action researcher, mother, community involved’. She sees as influences on her writing, “the lives and struggle of ordinary folk and probably … the painter Lowry: I wanted to do with words what he did with brush and canvas, create a permanent tribute to the everyday life of working people’ … Joan Riley’s works include The Unbelonging (1985), Waiting in the Twilight (1987), Romance (1988) all published by The Women’s Press, London … Ms. Riley’s works address social issues of relevance to the lives of Caribbean peoples as well as of blacks living in Britain.
Simone Schwarz-Bart (Guadeloupe) Story/Excerpt: “Queen Without A Name” (127-136). Translated by Barbara Bray. From The Bridge of Beyond (1972. English translation, 1982).
From Her True-True Name 1989 bio: Best known for her novel Pluie et vent sur Telumée Miracle (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1972; translation: The Bridge of Beyond, Heinemann, 1982), Simone Schwarz-Bart is also author of several other works. With her husband, the Jewish writer André Schwarz-Bart, she wrote the very moving U Plat de porc aux bananes vertes (Pork and Plantain: Editions du Seuil, 1967). She has also written the narrative /mythical, Ti-Jean l’horizon (Edition du Seuil, 1983), and nost recently, a play – Mon beau capitaine. Born in France in 1938, Simone Schwarz-Bart went back to Guadeloupe with her mother at the age of three. Like many other writers of her generation she studied in France and lived abroad, in Europe and in Africa, for many years. However, her subjects and preoccupations remained firmly rooted in the Caribbean.
Olive Senior (Jamaica) Excerpt: “Do angels wear Brassieres?” (70-77) From Summer Lightning and Other Stories.
From Her True-True Name 1989 bio: Olive Senior was born in rural Jamaica in 1941 and spent much of her childhood in Trelawny, Westmoreland and St. James. She received her high school education in Jamaica after which she went to Carleton University in Canada to study journalism … In 1980 she received the Institute of Jamaica’s Centenary Medal for Creative Writing and in 1988 its Silver Musgrave Medal for Literature. Olive Senior has published various poems and short stories, as well as scholarly articles, in journals in the Caribbean and overseas. Her books include The Message is Change (Kingston, Kingston Publishers, 1972), The A-Z of Jamaican Heritage (Heinemann Educational Books (Caribbean) Ltd, 1983, a collection of poetry, Talking of Trees (Mona,K ingston, Calabash, 1985), a collection of short stories, Summer Lightning and Other Stories (Longman, 1986) which won the first Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1987 and Arrival of the Snake Woman (Longman, 1989). She has also written Working Miracles, a book on the roles and status of Caribbean women, in connection with the Women in the Caribbean Project ( ISER-UWI, Barbados).
Janice Shinebourne (Guyana) Excerpt: “This is modern times” (18-26). From her 1986 novel Timepiece.
From Her True-True Name 1989 bio: Janice Shinebourne was born in Canje, Guyana. She lived there until the late 1960s when she moved to Georgetown to attend the University where she read English. She moved to Britain in the early 1970s, completed a BA degree, qualified as a lecturer and taught in colleges in Brixton and Southall. In the mid-1980s she left lecturing to work as a community activist in Southall and co-edit the Southall Review. Ms. Shinebourne began to write fiction in Guyana in the early 1960s and her literary and journalistic writing has been broadcast on BBC radio and appeared in several London and Caribbean newspapers and journals … Her first novel, Timepiece, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 1986 and won the Guyana Prize (1987) in the category of first novel. Her second novel, The Last English Plantation, also published by Peepal Tree Press, appeared in 1989.
Ana Lydia Vega (Puerto Rico) Story/Excerpt: “Cloud Cover Caribbean” (105-111). Translated by Mark McCaffrey. From the collection Encaranublado y Otros Cuentos de Naufragio.
From Her True-True Name 1989 bio: “Ana Lydia Vega was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1946. Currently professor of French and Caribbean literature at the University of Puerto Rico, Ana Lydia Vega is also one of Puerto Rico’s best-known writers. Educated in Puerto Rico and in France, Vega holds a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Provence. She has written numerous reviews, articles, essays and a foreign language textbook as well as fiction: children’s literature, a film script and the short stories for which she is well known. Vega is fluent in English and French, as well as her native Spanish. Her work is characterized by an innovative and liberating use of language: she mixes metaphors, registers, colloquialisms and classical allusions, slides between linguistic codes, even switches languages mid-sentence, with exciting and challenging effect.”
Sylvia Wynter Carew (Jamaica) “The Kingdom of Heaven” and “The Rape.” Excerpted from Hills of Hebron
From Her True-True Name 1989 bio: “Sylvia Wynter Carew was born in Cuba of Jamaican parents in 1928 and was educated at the Universities of London and Madrid. After leaving university, she worked as a writer for radio and television producing, inter alia, plays for thye BBC, and translating Gabriel Garcia Lorca’s Yerma for the BBC”s Third Programme. In 1962 her only novel, Hills of Hebron, was published by Janathan Cape. She began contributing articles on culture, politics and history to the Jamaica newspaper, The Daily Gleaner in that year, and continued to do so for the next 18 years. Her academic career began in 1963 when she joined the Department of Spanish at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, as a lecturer. She has held posts at the Universities of Michigan and California (San Diego) and has been Professor in the African and Afro-American Studies and Spanish departments at Stanford University since 1977.
Mirta Yáñez (Cuba) Story/Excerpt: “We Blacks All Drink Coffee” (38-41) Translated from her 1976 collection Todos los Negros tomamos Café
From Her True-True Name 1989 bio: Mirta Yáñez is from Havana, Cuba, where she was born in 1947. After completing her studies in Spanish language and literature in 1970, she won a prize for poetry for her volume Las Visitas (Visits: Havana Comisión de Extensión Universitaria, 1971) which was published the following year. Mirta Yáñez has taught Spanish-American literature and has collaborated on and authored many publications both within and outside Cuba. Her interests include children’s literature and cultural history and she has been director of the Department of Cultural Activities in the University Extension service. ‘We Blacks All Drink Coffee’ (Todos los Negros tomamos Café) is from a volume by the same name (Editorial Arte y Literatura Instituto Cubano del Libro, Havana, 1976) which won honourable mention in a short story competition in Cuba.