#CurrentlyReading More #CaribbeanLiterature
Cayman Connection’s Book Club has grown from an idea shared with me by Cayman Connection ED Kate Kandiah into a little community of students, readers, and writers with remarkable speed.
The governing goals and guidelines that make up Book Club’s mission practically wrote themselves, reflecting the reading goals and habits of its three founding chairs with a surprising harmony. Kate’s love and knowledge of Caribbean literature gained during graduate studies in the field, combined with her mission to unite Caymanians studying and living abroad and build a community with services and programmes that enrich.
With so many young people in our community choosing their studies to prepare for careers in the financial services industry, Rita’s dedication to the arts and experience in cultural heritage preservation is unique and invaluable, reinforcing our common shared beliefs in the value of the humanities across life and society. We have approached the project from three unique directions, but surprising common ground. Hopefully my interest in fiction, focus on writing and storytelling’s importance across industry, government and the third sector round us out.
We’ve certainly reached consensus with our scheduled and suggested reading lists. They combine local voices, emerging talent, and the regions’ important writing. Chosen books hopefully entertain, inspire discussion of familiar themes and issues in Caymanian life, offer broad historical and social scenarios that might improve understanding of the Caribbean, and our place within it. Some of the books recommended might offer something of island cultures, similar and unfamiliar, that help to inspire a conversation about our own Caymanianness.
Our first two gatherings were well received, including a launch event featuring unpublished works by living legend J.A. Roy Bodden, followed by a reading and discussion of Andrea Levy’s Small Island. The White Woman on the Green Bicycle seems like the appropriate next choice.
Monique Roffey’s award-winning novel spans the eventful half century from 1956 (eight years after the story told in Small Island). It employs an interesting timeline and structure and is almost like reading two books in one, with the first opening in 2006, fifty years since Sabine Harwood agreed to board a banana boat to Trinidad with a few bags and her green bicycle, to please her new husband George. After all, it’s only supposed to be for a couple of years. But George is immediately seduced and embraced by Trinidad. Sabine’s observations and reflections from the corners as an outsider tell the story of the private, restricted clubs of Trinidad’s final days as a colony, independence and transition, evolving Carnival culture, and some of the island’s turbulent early years and growing pains. The Harwoods’ lives are written over top and against history, often intertwined with events. The challenges of life, love and marriage feel as real as the time and setting, as does Sabine’s means of coping by an unusual correspondence with Eric Williams, the father of Trinidad’s independence movement whose legendary charm and charisma are rumoured to have had a powerful effect on the opposite sex, including the unhappy Mrs. Harwood.
The novel (not unlike Andrea’s coincidental discovery relatively late in life of her family’s connection to the Windrush story) is inspired by real life events, as Roffey’s mother recalled her unusual arrival in Trinidad in 1956 as a young newlywed, arriving with just a couple of suitcases and a green bicycle. That memory, shared while chopping vegetables, was the catalyst that inspired the premise for Roffey’s novel. It’s a terrific reminder to the writers within Book Club that inspiration can arrive anytime, and from anywhere.
Please visit the Cayman Connection Book Club page for more information, or to join us.
