Russ' Caribbean Book Titles from Peepal Tree Press

Below are short listings for Peepal Tree's titles by women authors. If you would like more information on particular titles, just ask! We can accept payment by cheque or international money order in UK sterling, US dollars or Canadian dollars. The prices shown are in UK sterling, please ask for current prices in other currencies.

Fiction Campbell, Hazel, Singerman August 1991, £5.99, 0-948833-44-0, 120 pages These magical realist short stories deal with black identity, gender relations and the connections between slavery and contemporary society. Flanagan, Brenda, You Alone are Dancing October 1990, £5.99, 0-948833-33-5, 201 pages Even within the solidarity of a rural Afro-Caribbean village, a young woman learns that she can rely only on herself. Gilroy, Beryl, Gather the Faces July 1996, £5.95, 0-948833-88-2, 120 pages At 27, Marvella Payne has resigned herself to growing old and single with her family, but her aunts have other ideas and find her a penfriend from her native Guyana. A charming and witty love story. Gilroy, Beryl, In Praise of Love and Children July 1996, £6.95, 0-948833-89-0, 153 pages Melda Hayley finds both comfort and pain in her Guyanese past when the stresses of fostering the damaged children of the first generation of black settlers in Britain become too great. Gilroy, Beryl, Inkle and Yarico July 1996, £6.95, 0-948833-98-X, 160 pages Thomas Inkle, a shipwrecked 18th century adventurer, is rescued by Yarico, a Carib woman who takes him as her husband. But when they are both taken to Barbados his betrayal of her is total. Gilroy, Beryl, Sunlight on Sweet Water May 1994, £5.95, 0-948833-64-5, 139 pages These charming stories depict a 1930s Afro-Guyanese village with its own distinctive identity, where Africa remains a part of everyday life. Gilroy, Beryl, Stedman and Joanna: A Love in Bondage September 1998, £5.99, 1-900715-20-1, 216 pages (to be published) A re-reading and re-visioning of John Stedman's 18th century account of his marriage to Joanna, a slave in Surinam, this is a moving portrayal of human relationships in their social and historical context. Goulbourne, Jean, Excavation July 1997, £5.99, 1-900715-11-2, 98 pages When a party of students and their professor begin an archeological excavation on the site of an old slave estate in Jamaica, the relics of the past provoke confrontations no-one has bargained for. Goulbourne, Jean, Womansong September 1998, £5.99, 1-900715-03-1, 56 pages (to be published) With both pungency and humour, these poems articulate the grievances, hopes and unquenchable spirit of Black women in Jamaica and the Caribbean. Harris, Denise, Web of Secrets May 1996, £6.95, 0-948833-87-4, pages Through whispered conversations, fantasy and folklore, Denise Harris explores divisions in a Guyanese family and the nation, and the healing power of truth. Henfrey, June, Coming Home and other stories December 1994, £5.95, 0-948833-67-X, 118 pages In settings ranging from slave times in Barbados to contemporary Britain, these are strong and moving portrayals of women attempting to definr themselves in situations where power is determined by race and gender. Jin, Meiling, Song of the Boatwoman November 1996, £6.95, 0-948833-86-6, 144 pages With lyrical imagination, painful realism and wicked humour these stories explore the lives of Chinese women at points of crisis, change and growth in China, London, Guyana, California and Malaysia. maxwell, marina ama omowale, Chopstix in Mauby October 1996, £6.95, 0-948833-96-3, 219 pages A magical realist novel about 'the birth of woman time' and a woman's journey through the Orisha chapelles and the 1970 uprising to self- relisation and choice. Persaud, Lakshmi, Butterfly in the Wind 1990, reprinted May 1996, £5.99, 0-948833-36-X, 208 pages A sensitive account of the passage from childhood to to womanhood which shows both the richness and limits of Trinidadian Indian society. Persaud, Lakshmi, Sastra December 1993, £6.99, 0-948833-71-8, 273 pages Sastra focuses on the choices a young Hindu woman in Trinidad has to make between her own desires and obedience to tradition. Persaud, Lakshmi, FOR THE LOVE OF MY NAME November 1999, £8.99/ US$15.30 / CAN$21.60, 1-900715-42-2 , 335 pages Torn between confession and self-justification, President for Life, Robert Augustus Devonish writes his memoirs as his country falls apart around him; Kamilia prepares for a workers' last stand against his regime; Vasu sets off to investigate the rumours of untold horrors in a commune deep in the interior; and Marguerite Devonish has to decide between loyalty to family or country in bringing to an end her brother's crimes. Through these and many other unforgettable characters Lakshmi Persaud tells of the last days of the Caribbean island of Maya before it sinks beneath the sea. This challenging novel profoundly dramatises the consequences of ethnic prejudices in a culture of masks which gives licence to individuals to abandon moral responsibility for their actions. Its echoes resonate across the killing fields of Bosnia, Kosova, East Timor - or wherever state power gives free rein to the most primal impulses of kith and kin. Told through multiple voices, whose tones range through the lyrical, the direct and unvarnished, the conversational and the polished, For the Love of My Name weaves a striking tapestry of hatreds and loves, duty and the degradation of consciousness, despairs and hopes. Above all the bright threads of human resilience glint in the weave. Shewcharan, Narmala, Tomorrow is Another Day March 1994, £6.95, 0-948833-47-5, 238 pages Set in a decaying dictatorship, this novel explores the human costs of social fragmentation and the wider social impact of individual choice. Shinebourne, Jan, The Last English Plantation October 1988, £5.99, 0-948833-13-0, 182 pages As colonial rule comes to an end, the struggle for a new world order is witnessed by an eleven year old girl involved in her own battles with her mother. Shinebourne, Jan, Timepiece October 1986, £5.99, 0-948833-03-3, 186 pages An important novel exploring the many levels of a young woman's fight for independence and integrity in a male-dominated Guyanese world. Poetry Evaristo, Bernardine, Island of Abraham November 1994, £5.95, 0-948833-60-2, 64 pages Writing as a Black British woman, Bernardine Evaristo reaches out to embrace a vision of the world not defined by Europe or patriarchy. Manley, Rachel, A Light Left On June 1993, £5.99, 0-948833-55-6, 56 pages Although they deal with loss and grief, these poems evoke a rich Caribbean natural world in which life is always present. Pollard, Velma, Shame Trees Don't Grow Here February 1993, £5.99, 0-948833-48-3, 72 pages Shame Trees explores the necessity for moral values in the context of a deeply politicised awareness of Caribbean history. Books for children Jagan, Janet, Anastasia the Anteater January 1997, £4.50, 1-900715-09-0, 64 pages An enterprising alligator, a freedom-loving waterdog and two brave girls lost in the Guyanese bush are just a few of the characters whose exploits children will eagerly devour. Jagan, Janet, Patricia the Baby Manatee December 1995, £4.50, 0-948833-92-0, 64 pages These Guyanese tales of brave, mischevious and kindly animals and children use humour and mystery to provide a strong framework of positive human values which children will instinctively appreciate and digest. Jagan, Janet, When Grandpa Cheddi was a Boy - second issue, December 1994, reprint March 1997, £4.50, 0-948833-75-0, 64 pages This collection of stories will delight children all over the world and give them a sense of the magical beauty of Guyana's landscape and the humanity of its peoples. Forthcoming titles Forthcoming Poetry Das, Mahadai, Bones - new edition, May 1998, £5.99, 1-900715-21-X, 56 pages Now in its second printing, writing from feminist and Indo-Caribbean perspectives, Mahadai Das's poetry reveals a daring metaphorical imagination. Escoffery, Gloria, Mother Jackson Murders the Moon March 1998, 1-900715-24-4, 60 pages Offer price: £5, usually £5.99 Whether celebrating domestic happiness or satirising contemporary Jamaican life, whether speaking through a vividly drawn cast of characters or in the persona of their creator, Miss G.E., Gloria Escoffery writes with a visionary intensity all her own. END Hannah Bannister Peepal Tree Press 17 King's Avenue Leeds LS6 1QS United Kindom tel 44 (0)113 2451703 fax 44 (0)113 2459616 Publishers of the Best in New Caribbean Writing

Below are short listings for Peepal Tree's literary, cultural and historical titles. If you would like more information on particular titles, just ask! We can accept payment by cheque or international money order in UK sterling, US dollars or Canadian dollars. The prices shown are in UK sterling, please ask for current prices in other currencies.

Benjamin, Joel, They Came in Ships August 1997, £12.95, 0-948833-94-7, 320 pages The essays, stories and poetry of Indian Guyanese writers from 1890-1997 gathered here provide a fascinating insight into the transformation of an ancient culture in the New World. Bhana, Ed. Surendra, Essays on Indentured Indians in Natal December 1991, £7.95, 0-948833-21-1, 235 pages These essays break new ground in the study of Indian indentured labour, the role of labour migration in economic development and the history of Natal. The collection includes North-Coombes' pioneering comparison of the role of indentured labour in the sugar industries of Natal and Mauritius, Swan's study of worker accommodation and resistance, Beall's investigation of the double oppression of women, and Surendra and Arvinkumar Bhana's exploration of the very high rates of suicide amongst indentured workers. Accounts of individual stories in several essays ensure that the workers are never seen as faceless victims, and Mesthrie's study of language contact and Brain's essay on religion give further reminders that these migrants brought not only their labour but their culture. The editor, Surendra Bhana, formerly Professor of History at the University of Durban-Westville, teaches at the University of Kansas, U.S.A. Grant (ed.), Kevin, The Art of David Dabydeen May 1997, £12.99, 1-900715-10-4, 232 pages In this volume, leading scholars from Europe, North America and the Caribbean discuss David Dabydeen's poetry and fiction in the context of the politics and culture of Britain and the Caribbean. Don't forget the contents list in books blurbs Mesthrie, Rajend, A Lexicon of South African Indian English March 1992, £7.95, 0-948833-10-6, 148 pages A scholarly but entertaining study of words, phrases and idioms which reflects the diverse social and linguistic currents within which the South African community has developed. It focuses on the effects of language contact in borrowings, grammatical interference and semantic shifts as speakers of Indic languages came into contact with speakers of English, Afrikaans, Fanagalo and African languages. This lexicon provides an invaluable source of comparison with Indian English, the Creoles of the Caribbean, and with the linguistic experience of other overseas South Asian communities. Dr. Mesthrie teaches linguistics at the University of Cape Town. Parekh, Bikhu, The Concept of Fundamentalism April 1992, £4.99, 0-948833-56-4, 48 pages Professor Parekh brings rigour and clarity to the discussion of the concept of religious fundamentalism and cautions against the unrestricted use of this concept to describe a wide range of contemporary religious phenomena. He argues that lumping fundamentalism together with religious conservatism, revivalism and ultra-orthdoxy fails to distinguish its particular modern character. Roopnaraine, Rupert, Web of October October 1988, £4.99, 0-948833-18-1, 72 pages This original and meditative text combines an intensive critical reading of 'You Are involved', by Martin Carter, and a series of 'poems of October' written within the spaces of the essay. Seecharan, Clem, India and the Shaping of the Indo-Guyanese Imagination December 1993, £5.95, 0-948833-61-0, 98 pages A study of the impact of 19th century Indology and the rise of Indian nationalism on the attitudes and cultural identity of the emerging Indo- Guyanese elite in the early 20th century. When the first East Indian intellectuals emerged in British Guiana at the end of the nineteenth century, most of their compatriots were still working as indentured or free labourers on the colony's sugar estates. Indians were conscious that they were looked down on as barbarous 'coolies' by other sections of the population. In response, the intellectual elite constructed a view of India, drawn from the writings of Max Muller and Tagore, which provided the Indo-Guyanese community with a sustaining sense of self-esteem. Clem Seecharan argues, though, that whilst the vision of 'Mother India' stimulated the community's cultural revival and hastened its entry into Guyanese political life, it also constrained the ways in which it thought about its role in Guyana. Shepherd, Verene, Transients to Settlers April 1994, £12.95, 0-948833-32-7, 281 pages In this valuable study of one of the smaller Indian communities in the Caribbean, Dr. Shepherd explores the contrary tendencies towards cultural absorption and cultural autonomy which can be seen in the history of the group. The role of population size and density, the availability of economic 'niches', the activity of missionaries and educators and the attitudes of the wider society are examined as contexts within which the Indo-Jamaican community worked out its destiny. Chapters on indenture, patterns of rural and urban settlement, education, economic activity and political participation provide comparative standpoints for looking at variations within the total Indo- Caribbean experience. Verene Shepherd lectures at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. She is co-editor of Caribbean Slave Society and Economy: A Student Reader. Forthcoming Literary, Cultural and Historical Studies Mahabir, Kumar, Indian in an Afro-Caribbean World August 1998, £12.99, 0-948833-11-4, pages Ranging widely over folk-culture, literature and contemporary mass media, these essays explore the challenges of cultural self-definition facing Indo-Caribbeans in the region. END Hannah Bannister Peepal Tree Press 17 King's Avenue Leeds LS6 1QS United Kindom tel 44 (0)113 2451703 fax 44 (0)113 2459616 Publishers of the Best in New Caribbean Writing

From: Hannah Bannister hannah@peepal.demon.co.uk Subject: Peepal Tree New Fiction Catalogue Date: May 6, 1998 12:48 PM Welcome to Peepal Tree Press' first ever e-mail catalogue. If nothing has gone wrong, you are receiving this e-mail because you asked for details of Peepal Tree's books. If we have made an error, please let us know. This mailing contains full details of all Peepal Tree's 1998 and 1997 fiction. In a couple of days we'll be sending you the new Poetry and Literary, Cultural and Historical studies. We won't be sending you the backlist automatically as it is very long -- in the region of thirty pages! If you would like a backlist e-mail, do ask. Otherwise you could request a copy of the printed catalogue which will be available shortly, if you would like one, please e-mail us with your postal address and we'll get a copy to you as soon as we can. To order: We can accept payment by cheque or international money order in UK sterling, US dollars or Canadian dollars. The prices shown are in UK sterling, there is a 'currency converter' below. Postage per book is 65p for UK, $2.50 for USA and $3.50 for Canada. Currency Conversion Table UK £ US $ CAN $ 3.99 $6.80 $9.60 4.50 $7.70 $10.80 4.99 $8.50 $12.00 5.95 $10.20 $15.00 5.99 $10.50 $15.00 6.95 $12.00 $17.00 6.99 $12.00 $17.00 7.95 $13.60 $19.20 7.99 $13.60 $19.20 8.99 $15.30 $21.60 9.99 $17.00 $24.00 12.95 $22.00 $34.00 12.99 $22.00 $34.00 14.99 $25.50 $36.00 Send your order by e-mail, and your payment by snail-mail to: Peepal Tree Press, 17, King's Avenue, Leeds, LS6 1QS. The moment we receive your payment, we'll send your books. School and college orders will receive a 10% discount on list prices, booksellers a 35% discount, though this may be increased depending on quantities ordered. Books are supplied to Schools and Colleges with a thirty day invoice. Bookseller credit terms are negotiable. ****************************************************

THE PEEPAL TREE CATALOGUE -- NEW FICTION Settle into a comfy chair in your house, pass the time on a plane, in a waiting room or relax on the beach with a good book and you enter its world, and the outside world and its pressures are left behind. Through this personal and individual act of opening a book and sharing its vision, you support a huge infrastructure of writers, publishers, libraries and bookshops. Without you, books are simply words on a page; they need you to open them and give them life! Without you, publishers like ourselves, dedicated to books which make a difference, could not exist. Need help choosing? Use our knowledge! Contact Peepal Tree for suggestions, whether for your new course reading list, for information on particular themes and issues explored in our books, advice on what to choose for yourself as a relaxing/exciting/mind-expanding read or as a gift for your mother/uncle/grandchild/love story reader/thriller-lover -- and well do our best to help. *** David Dabydeen Disappearance October 1998, £7.99 1-900715-30-9, 200 pages New Caribbean edition A nameless Guyanese engineer arrives in the village of Dunsmere to help shore up a crumbling stretch of the Kent coast. He comes expecting to find an England which is ordered and cultivated -- everything he dreams of as a fitting place of escape from the 'brawling creole ways' of the muddy coastland of Guyana. What he finds is a village of seething feuds and a project undermined by corruption and grandiose delusions, part of a society in an advanced state of post-imperial decay. Despairing of ever belonging to this place, he is provoked into re-evaluating his African Guyanese background in more positive ways, particularly by his curious landlady, Mrs Rutherford, who abuses him as a 'Black man with an English soul'. Disappearance speaks both to England and the Caribbean in its searching dissection of the colonial encounter and its continuing reverberations in the psyche of both worlds. On its first publication, Disappearance was praised as 'A mournful comedy... a perky beauty softening its stark messages' (Sunday Times); as 'Searching... in its clarity of style and vision' (The Scotsman) and by the Times Literary Supplement as having 'Poise, compassion and humour-- provocative and accomplished.' David Dabydeen is the author of Slave Song, Coolie Odyssey and Turner (poetry) and The Intended and The Counting House. *** David Dabydeen The Intended October 1998, £7.99 1-900715-31-7, 200 pages 'But you must tek education... pass plenty exam and get good job.' It is Auntie Clarice's advice that the young narrator remembers when, brought from Guyana at the age of ten, he is abandoned by his father in a South London slum. But this way forward brings deep problems of identity. In Britain everyone who is not white is black. How does this equate to his experiences as an Indo-Guyanese growing up in a society divided between Africans and Indians? How is he to come to terms with his divided heritage of language: the order and clarity of the written English to which he aspires, but which denies his selfhood, and the apparently unstructured Guyanese creole in which his richest memories are inscribed? 'Vivid, perceptive, funny and moving' --Penelope Lively [it]'turns a thematic Heart of Darkness around to illumine a groping pilgrimage -- Indian and Rastafarian -- issuing from distant colonies' --Wilson Harris *** Kwame Dawes Bivouac November 1998, £6.99 1-900715-19-8, 180 pages When his father dies in suspicious circumstances, Ferron Morgan's trauma is increased by the conflict within his family and his father's friends over whether the death is the result of medical negligence or a political assassination. Ferron has lived in awe of his father's radical commitments but is forced to admit that, with the 1980's resurgence of the political Right in the Caribbean, his father had lost faith, and was already dead to everything that had meaning for him'. Ferron's response to the death is further complicated by guilt, particularly over his recent failure to protect his fiance, Dolores, from a brutal rape. He begins, though, to investigate the direction of his life with great intensity, in particular to confront his instinct to keep moving on and running from trouble. This is a sharply focused portrayal of contemporary Jamaica, in which the private grief and trauma condenses a whole society's scarcely understood sense of temporariness and dislocation. For both Ferron and the society there has been the loss of the corpse of one's origins' and the novel points to the need to find a way back before there can be a movement forward. This vision is reflected in the structure of the novel with its cycles of flashback set in a non-linear, non-continuous narrative, and its movement from conventional realism, with its emphasis on the givenness of time, to the magical metaphors of the novel's dreaming in/conclusion. Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana in 1962, and moved to Jamaica in 1971 where he remained until 1987. Now Professor of English at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, he has published six collections of poetry, Resisting the Anomie (Goose Lane Editions), Progeny of Air, Prophets, Requiem, Jacko Jacobus, and Shook Foil, all published by Peepal Tree. This is his first novel. *** Beryl Gilroy Stedman and Joanna: A Love in Bondage September 1998, £5.99 1-900715-20-1, 216 pages In 1764, John Stedman, a Scottish soldier, arrived in Surinam to assist the Dutch who were putting down a slave rebellion with great brutality. During his stay in Surinam, Stedman fell in love with and married Joanna, a slave. All this is recorded in Stedman's own journal. Beryl Gilroy's novel stays faithfully within the facts in the journal but re-reads/rewrites the story in ways which bring new psychological and historical insights to it. She brings her fictive imagination to bear on the processes which led Stedman, a witness to the bestial tortures inflicted by the Dutch on captured rebels, to make his leap across the divide of race, not merely to bed Joanna, willingly or unwillingly, but to marry her. Joanna's story is brought further into the foreground and the novel explores aspects of the relationship about which Stedman is silent. Stedman and Joanna joins Beryl Gilroy's Inkle and Yarico as a moving portrayal of the interplay between the psychological core of human relationships and their social and historical context. *** Syed Manzurul Islam The Mapmakers of Spitalfields January 1998, £5.99 1-900715-08-2, 144 pages. These stories, set in London's Banglatown and Bangladesh, bring startlingly fresh insights to the experiences of exile and settlement. Written between realism and fantasy, acerbic humour and delicate grace, they explore the lives of exiles and settlers, traders and holy men, transvestite actors and the leather-jacketed, pool-playing youths who defended Brick Lane from skinhead incursion. In the title story, Islam makes dazzling use of the metaphor of map- making as Brothero-Man, the 'invisible surveyor' galloping the veins of your city' becomes the collective consciousness of all the settlers inscribing their realities on the parts of Britain they are claiming as their own. Syed Manzural Islam was born in 1953 in what was still East Pakistan. He is currently a lecturer in English studies. He is the author of The Ethics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka (MUP). *** Lino Leito The Gift of the Holy Cross July 1998, £6.99 0-948833-15-7, 260 pages. Leito's epic novel deals with the mingling of religion and politics as the people of Goa wake from centuries of Portuguese rule only to find their struggle inherited by the same classes who had aided and abetted their colonial rulers. They find, too, that their distinctive culture is in danger of being swallowed up by their incorporation into India. Focusing on the tragic figure of Mario Jaques, a village leader isolated by his own confusions and swept away by social forces beyond individual control, Leito writes passionately of a popular movement betrayed. If the old world is marked by injustice, ignorance and oppression, the poor have at least a sense of community. In the new world there is only a ruthless competitiveness in which the worst rise to the top. Leito was born in Goa, resident in Uganda for some years and now lives in Canada. He is the author of three collections of short stories. New in 1997 *** Kevyn Alan Arthur The View from Belmont August 1997, £7.99 1-900715-02-3, 230 pages. The View from Belmont tells two stories: one through the letters of a young English widow who takes over her husband's cocoa estate in Trinidad in 1823; the other through the responses of a group of contemporary Trinidadians who are reading the letters at the time of the 1990 Muslimeen black power revolt. Clara's letters present the insights of a perceptive, independent-minded and generous-spirited young woman, who is nevertheless wholly committed to the institution of slavery. The letters give a sharp sense of Trinidadian society in the process of formation, but at their heart is an account of Clara's relationships with those with whom she shares her life on the estate, in particular Kano, a 'loyal' slave who she takes to her bed. For the contemporary Trinidadians, the letters raise troubling questions about the nature of the national psyche, the absence of social consensus and the extent to which the history of that period still shapes the present. This is a comic, painful and moving novel. Its presentation of the cruelties, violence and affections of everyday relations under slavery raise questions not only about the nature of Caribbean societies, but the nature of history and its interpretation. *** Jean Goulbourne Excavation July 1997, £5.99 1-900715-11-2, 98 pages. When a group of Jamaican students and their lecturers begin an archaeological dig on the old estate of Plantation Plains, each has different expectations. For Professor Milton, recently returned home after years abroad, the dig is to be the crowning achievement of a distinguished career. For Kwame, a lecturer from Ghana, it is the opportunity to use his knowledge to help identify African survivals in the New World. For rastafarian Akete, the dig is going to be part of his mission to bring a sense of their African heritage to his fellow sufferers in the ghetto, and for Carla the excavations on the site of the Big House and the slave quarters are potent reminders that her own ancestry is both black and white. For the two young Americans who join them, the dig is the first chance to put their archaeological skills into practice in an exotic new environment. Each of the diverse group of people brought together by the dig is changed by the experience, the result both of their encounters with the relics of history, and the personal encounters within the group. This is a dramatic and poetically written exploration of the interaction of past and present, and of the issues of age, race and gender which the excavation provokes. Jean Goulbourne is Jamaican. *** Carl Jackson Nor the Battle to the Strong August 1997, £7.99 0-948833-97-1, 352 pages From Imfe who is taken in slavery from Africa, Zero and Quamina who live under slavery but never submit to being slaves, Bam and Jane who live to see Emancipation but discover that they have been given little but the freedom to starve, Tom and Louise who endure the injustices of the colonial years, to Rocky who takes part in the popular uprisings for freedom and democracy in the 1930s, Nor the Battle to the Strong is an unrivalled portrayal of the lives of five generations of a family in Barbados. Nor the Battle to the Strong is a powerful and imaginative work of grief and hope whose universality is pointed to in the title's reference to Ecclesiastes: 'The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,'for time and chance happeneth to them all' It takes the reader through horrors as elemental as those of the Greek tragedy, through the dark humour of those who endured generations of human injustice, and all that flood, drought, hurricane and disease could inflict, to arrive at a hard-won but liberating vision of the human capacity for freedom, love and forgiveness. Jackson sings a redemption song which transports the reader out of darkness into light. Carl Jackson was born in Barbados where he lives and works. He is the author of East Wind in Paradise, a political thriller. *** Geoffrey Philp Uncle Obadiah and the Alien February 1997, £5.99 1-900715-01-5, 160 pages The lives of contemporary Jamaicans both at home and in exile in Miami are portrayed with humour, pathos and deep understanding. Like the best roots reggae albums, this collection mixes a multitude of voices and attitudes with inventiveness and art. Righteous anger, ragamuffin provocations and insightful observation are present through a variety of forms: social realism, the Jamaican tall tale and even science fiction. The social environments of contemporary Jamaica and Miami are sharply drawn in these stories, but it is the inwardness and humanity of the characterisation which makes them truly memorable. 'If Dickens were reincarnated as a Jamaican Rastaman, he would write stories as hilarious and humane as these. Uncle Obadiah and the other stories collected here announce Geoffrey Philp as a direct descendent of Bob Marley: poet, philosophizer, spokesperson for our next new world.' --Robert Antoni, author of Blessed is the Fruit and Divina Trace, Winner of the 1992 Commonwealth Writers Prize *** N.D. Williams Prash and Ras November 1997, £6.99 1-900715-00-7, 192 pages Disparate worlds collide in Williams' two novellas. In 'My Planet of Ras' a young German woman joins a Rastafarian commune in Jamaica. Under the guidance of Selassie, reader and healer with herbs, Ikael, artist- painter, and Kilmanjaro, master drummer, and under the healing influence of 'the herb of nations' she learns to marvel, and to understand the true nature of community ('You and I talking, one and one -- that is community! Hardest thing to build these days. Not enough empty reflecting silence, like mortar, to build with)'. Williams' portrayal of the rootedness, the inner calm and visionary enlightment of the group is movingly convincing, not least because the novella realistically conveys the group's vulnerability, temptations and the costs of their denials. In their rejection of materialism and competition, they indeed have to live as if they are on another planet, constantly threatened by the surrounding Babylon. 'What Happening There, Prash', is a contrary and equally convincing portrayal of the magnetic pull of North America and its offer of the possibilities of individual recognition, competitive edge and material success. Prash and his wife Sookmoon abandon the decaying 'socialist' republic of Guyana for New York and for Sookmoon, at least, there is the chance, eagerly seized, to remake her life as a liberated woman. But when Prash gets mixed up in some serious drugs business, he discovers that the freedom of the market has its price. ________________________________________________ Hannah Bannister Peepal Tree Press 17 King's Avenue Leeds LS6 1QS United Kindom tel 44 (0) 113 2451703 fax 44 (0) 113 2459616 Publishers of the Best in New Caribbean Writing

Welcome to Part 2 of Peepal Tree Press' first ever e-mail catalogue. If nothing has gone wrong, you are receiving this e-mail beacause you asked for details of Peepal Tree's books. If we have made an error, please let us know. This mailing contains full details of all Peepal Tree's 1998 and 1997 poetry. In a couple of days we'll be sending you the new Literary, Cultural and Historical studies list. We won't be sending you the backlist automatically as it is very long -- in the region of thirty pages! If you would like a backlist e-mail, do ask. Otherwise you could request a copy of the printed catalogue which will be available shortly. If you would like one, please e-mail us with your postal address and we'll get a copy to you as soon as we can. Please note that books are not available before the date of publication shown, though if you are interested in a forthcoming title, let us know and we'll e-mail you when it becomes available. To order: We can accept payment by cheque or international money order in UK sterling, US dollars or Canadian dollars. The prices shown are in UK sterling, there is a 'currency converter' below. Postage per book is 65p for UK, $2.50 for USA and $3.50 for Canada. Currency Conversion Table UK £ US $ CAN $ 3.99 $ 6.80 $ 9.60 4.50 $ 7.70 $10.80 4.99 $ 8.50 $12.00 5.95 $10.20 $15.00 5.99 $10.50 $15.00 6.95 $12.00 $17.00 6.99 $12.00 $17.00 7.95 $13.60 $19.20 7.99 $13.60 $19.20 8.99 $15.30 $21.60 9.99 $17.00 $24.00 12.95 $22.00 $34.00 12.99 $22.00 $34.00 14.99 $25.50 $36.00 Send your order by e-mail, and your payment by snail-mail to: Peepal Tree Press, 17, King's Avenue, Leeds, LS6 1QS. The moment we receive your payment, we'll send your books. School and college orders will receive a 10% discount on list prices, booksellers a 35% discount, though this may be increased depending on quantities ordered. Books are supplied to Schools and Colleges with a thirty day invoice. Bookseller credit terms are negotiable. ****************************************************

THE PEEPAL TREE CATALOGUE -- NEW POETRY The breadth of Peepal Trees poetry list is unrivalled. In it you will find significant shapers of the Caribbean poetry tradition such as E.M. Roach whose collected poems represent the most important Caribbean poetry before that of Walcott and Brathwaite; the work of established poets such as Cyril Dabydeen, Howard Fergus, Kendel Hippolyte, Anthony Kellman, Marc Matthews, Ian McDonald, Anthony McNeill and Ralph Thompson; the important womens voices of Mahadai Das, Rachel Manley and Velma Pollard, who are joined this year by Marcia Douglas (an outstanding first collection), Gloria Escoffery, Jean Goulbourne and Jennifer Rahim; this year sees also new work from Miami-based Jamaican Geoffrey Philp and the highly respected academic and poet Stewart Brown. Look out for the 1997 publication Shook Foil by Kwame Dawes, which along with the new anthology of reggae poetry, Wheel and Come Again, and Dawes' critical manifesto Natural Mysticism make a hugely significant addition to Caribbean poetry. But do discover what lies beyond anthologies! Without individual collections they could not exist, and without readers and buyers neither can these collections! Need help choosing? Use our knowledge! Contact Peepal Tree for suggestions, whether for your new course reading list, for information on use of language, particular themes and issues explored by the poets, advice on what to choose to suit your mood -- to shake you up or calm you down, or as a gift for a friend/your mother/uncle/grandparents -- and well do our best to help. **edited by Kwame Dawes Wheel and Come Again: An anthology of reggae poetry April 1998, £8.99 1-900715-13-9, 216 pages This is an anthology to delight both lovers of reggae and lovers of poetry which sings light as a feather, heavy as lead over the bedrock of drum and bass. If in the past Caribbean poetry seemed split between the English literary tradition and the oral performance of dub poetry, Wheel and Come Again brings together work which combines reggae's emotional immediacy, prophetic vision, fire and brimstone protest and sensuous eroticism with all the traditional resources of poetry: verbal inventiveness, richness of metaphor and craft in the handling of patterns of rhythm, sound and poetic structure. Its range is as wide as reggae itself. There are poems celebrating, and sometimes mourning, the lives and art of such creative geniuses as Don Drummond, Count Ossie, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Bob Marley, Big Youth, Bunny Wailer, Winston Rodney, Patra and Garnett Silk. There are poems of apocalyptic vision, fantasy, humour and storytelling; poems about history, culture, politics, religion, art, human relationships and love; poems which employ standard Caribbean English, poems written in Jamaican nation language and many poems which move easily between the two. From its birth in the ghettos of Kingston, reggae has become an international musical language, and whilst Jamaicans are inevitably well represented in this anthology, Wheel and Come Again reflects reggae's universal appeal with contributors from the USA, Canada, Britain, Guyana and St. Lucia. What all have found in reggae is an art with a rich aesthetic which, like the poetry they aspire to write, speaks to the body, mind and spirit, which compels a state of heightened expectancy with its combination of pattern and surprise: 'Counting out the unspoken pulse then wheel and come again' ** Marcia Douglas Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom November 1998, £6.99 1-900715-28-7, 80 pages The reader is taken on a journey of light, from the rural flicker of the firefly, the half-moonlight of the limbo of exile, to the sense of connectedness and arrival suggested by the image of the eight-pointed star. It is also a journey towards voice, beginning with an image of the voicelessness of the country people who witness the coming of lights to Cocoa Bottom, but have no-one amongst them to record the event. It explores the moment of leaving Jamaica when 'there is something I must say before I go', but which is never said, and the loss of language threatened in the image of the American Accent Programme tape cassettes offered for sale on the flight to the USA. The collection ends with two contrary images of the possession of language. There is the 'Voice Lesson From the Unleashed Woman's Unabridged Dictionary' which urges: 'follow the instinct of your tongue/ and say it your way' and the final poem which describes her father's baptism and birth into the gift of tongues when social language cannot express his glimpse of transcendence. Each poem has its own poignant individuality, but there is also a powerful sense of architecture which runs through the collection. Marcia Douglas was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. She currently has a fellowship at the State University of New York. ** Gloria Escoffery Mother Jackson Murders the Moon March 1998, £5.99 1-900715-24-4, 60 pages A vivid cast of characters throng these poems. There is Mother Jackson, the ole hige who lays out her thoughts like a mortician, who is both creator and destroyer. There are the players of the Rootsman Theatre of the Absurd, such as fallen politician Julian Lapith, who knows too well the power of incantation; Dub Deacon Lapith with his Sankey soul; poor Bedward Lapith with his millenarian dreams of flight; Busha Godhead self swoopsing down to intervene in human affairs and -- the heroine of the cast -- Aliveyah, to whom nature speaks direct by the nudge of a beak. And there is, of course, their creator, Miss G.E., who shares with us the 'rockstone passion of a Jamaican country bumpkin born and nurtured in Arcadia'. Whether in her celebrations of domestic happiness in a house where even the chairs talk, or in her satires on Jamaican life, Gloria Escoffery writes with a visionary intensity and fantastical imagination which is all her own. And though she feels it is no joke to be three people -- old woman, young girl and child -- who don't quite understand one another, Miss G.E. cannot but write her love letter to the world. Gloria Escoffery was born in 1923. She has worked as a teacher, written extensively on Jamaican art and is one of her country's finest painters. ** Howard Fergus Lara Rains & Colonial Rites March 1998, £6.95 0-948833-95-5, 88 pages Howard Fergus' poems explore the nature of living on Montserrat, a 'two- be-three island/hard like rock', vulnerable to the forces of nature (Hurricane Hugo and the erupting Soufriere) and still 'this British corridor'. He writes honestly and observantly about these contingencies, finding in them metaphors for experiences which are universal. Nature's force strips life to its bare essentials ('Soufriere opened a new bible/in her pulpit in the hills/ to teach us the arithmetic of days') and reveals creation and destruction as one. ('We celebrate Hugo child of God/ he killed and made alive for a season'). In a small island society individual lives take on an enhanced significance: they are its one true resource and the sequence of obituary poems bring home with especial force how irreplaceable they are. Beyond Montserrat, Fergus looks for a wider Caribbean unity, but finds it only in cricket (and crime). Cricket, indeed, provides a major focus for his sense of the ironies of Caribbean history: that through a white- flannelled colonial rite with its roots in an imperial sense of Englishness, the West Indies has found its only true political framework and the means, explored in the sequence of poems celebrating Brian Lara's feats of 1994, to overturn symbolically the centuries of enslavement and colonialism. As Stewart Brown writes in the Longman Caribbean New Voices 1, Fergus is a poet of real stature. Howard Fergus was born in Montserrat. He studied at the University College of the West Indies and the Universities of Bristol and Manchester. He has been Chief Education Officer and Speaker of the Legislative Council of Montserrat. He is currently resident tutor at the Extra-Mural Department of the UWI based there. He has written extensively on Montserrat and is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Cotton Rhymes (1976) Green Innocence (1978) and Stop the Carnival (1980) ** Jean Goulbourne Womansong September 1998, £5.99, 1-900715-03-1, 64 pages In Womansong, Jean Goulbourne articulates the grief, hopes and unquenchable spirit of black women in the Caribbean. She writes with the directness of the reggae lyric, with both pungency and humour, and with an aphoristic economy which has the art of saying more with less. Her poems encompass the lives of women old and young; middle-class and sufferers; women whose lives are enclosed, who want liberation from the 'station of motherhood, wifehood and frustration', and women who through their resistance, creativity and assertion of selfhood have made space for themselves. The celebration of such lives stands as a beacon of hope in the depiction of Jamaican society in which rape, poverty and abandonment are too frequently women's lot. ** Anthony McNeill Chinese Lanterns from the Blue Child March 1998, £5.99 1-900715-18-X, 64 pages Somebody is hanging: a logwood tree laden with blossoms in a deep wood. The body stirs left in the wind; If the wind could send its miracle breath back to that person, I tell you it would. Love is Earth's mission despite the massed dead. On the night of the hanging the Autumn moon bled. Anthony McNeill was without doubt amongst the finest contemporary Caribbean poets, whose previous collections, Reel from 'The Life Movie' and Credences at the Altar of Cloud, were hailed as works of immense originality. Chinese Lanterns from the Blue Child won the 1995 Jamaican National Literary Award. Completed shortly before his death, it is a farewell to the world which moves like a bird in flight between moments of painful regret, wry humour and a sense of closure. Anthony McNeill's word-lanterns will continue to flame in the darkness long beyond his death. He was born in Jamaica in 1941. He died in 1996. ** Sasenarine Persaud The Wintering Kundalini October 1998, £5.99 0-948833-79-3, 72 pages Persaud enriches Caribbean poetry by bringing to it new dimensions of imagery and philosophical tradition from his Indian ancestry. The imagery of cobra, serpent and Kundalini from Tantric Yoga mesh with a political and personal engagement with both Guyana and more recently Canada. This is a meeting of a thoroughly modern sensibility with the riches of an ancient tradition. Persaud is a poet who, in the words of Howard Fergus in The Caribbean Writer, has to be taken seriously as an 'architect of the subconscious'. Sasenarine Persaud is also the author of the collection Demerary Telepathy, and two novels. The Ghost of Bellow's Man, and Dear Death, both published by Peepal Tree. ** Geoffrey Philp Hurricane Center February 1998, £6.99 1-900715-23-6, 67 pages El nino stirs clouds over the Pacific. Flashing tv screens urge a calm that no one believes. The police beat a slouched body, crumpled like a fist of kleenex. The news racks are crowded with stories of pestilence, war and rumours of war. The children, once sepia-faced cherubim, mutate to monsters that eat, eat, eat. You notice a change in your body's conversation with itself, and in the garden the fire ants burrow into the flesh of the fruit. Geoffrey Philps's poems stare into the dark heart of a world where hurricanes, both meteorological and metaphorical, threaten you to the last cell. But the sense of dread also reveals what is most precious in life, for the dark and accidental are put in the larger context of season and human renewal, and Hurricane Center returns always to the possibilities of redemption and joy. In the voices of Jamaican prophets, Cuban exiles, exotic dancers, drunks, race-track punters, canecutters, rastamen, middle-class householders and screw-face ghetto sufferers, Geoffrey Philp writes poetry which is both intimately human and cosmic in scale. On the airwaves between Miami and Kingston, the rhythms of reggae and mambo dance through these poems. Geoffrey Philp was born in Jamaica. He now lives and works in Miami. His publications include a poetry collection, Florida Bound and a collection of short stories, Uncle Obadiah and the Alien. ** Jennifer Rahim Between the Fence and the Forest November 1998, £6.99 1-900715-27-9, 88 pages Comparing herself to a douen, a mythical being from the Trinidadian forests whose head and feet face in different directions, Jennifer Rahim's poems explore states of uncertainty both as sources of discomfort and of creative possibility. The poems explore a Trinidad finely balanced between the forces of rapid urbanisation and the constantly encroaching green chaos of tropical bush, whose people, as the descendants of slaves and indentured labourers, are acutely resistant to any threat to clip their wings and fence them in, whose turbulence regularly threatens a fragile social order. In her own life, Rahim explores the contrary urges to a neat security and to an unfettered sense of freedom and her attraction to the forest 'where tallness is not the neighbour's fences/ and bigness is not the swollen houses/ that swallow us all'. It is, though, a place where the bushplanter 'seeing me grow branches/ draws out his cutting steel and slashes my feet/ since girls can never become trees' Jennifer Rahim was born and grew up in Trinidad. Her first collection of poems, Mothers Are Not the Only Linguists was published in 1992. She also writes short fiction and criticism. She currently lectures in English at the University of West Indies in Jamaica. ** Ralph Thompson Moving On February 1998, £6.99 1-900715-17-1, 104 pages The poems in Moving On recreate moments of change, loss and epiphany. There are vivid glimpses of a prewar Jamaican childhood -- of sexual discovery under a billiard table and of the rude ingratitude of a goat saved from dissection in the school biology lab. The long sequence, 'Goodbye Aristotle, So Long America', explores the years of study at a Jesuit university in America and the making both of a lifetime's values and of the sense of irony which has made it possible to live with them. Other poems reflect on the experience of ageing, of increasing vulnerability, but also of an increased appreciation for what sustains human relationships through time. Jamaica is present in these poems as a place of aching natural beauty, but whose violent human energies can only be viewed with an ambivalent love and fear, where: In the city's bursting funeral parlours the corpses glow at night, nimbus of blue acetylene burning the darkness under the roof, lighting the windows... crunch of bone and sinew as a foot curls into a cloven hoof. Louis Simpson described Ralph Thompson's first collection, The Denting of a Wave, as 'First rate poetry... intelligent and gifted with a sense of humour' and other reviewers praised his warmth, exact observation, craft and vivid storytelling. Ralph Thompson is a Jamaican who, as well as being a painter and a poet, is the Senior Executive of one of his country's biggest companies. New in 1997 ** Cyril Dabydeen Discussing Columbus February 1997, £6.95 0-948833-57-2, 96 pages For Cyril Dabydeen, the historical figure of Columbus is an 'illustration of an odd and idiosyncratic destiny at work'. In this collection of poems, Dabydeen explores the personal confluences and ironies of a history which brought his ancestors as labourers from India to the Caribbean in an ironic inversion of Columbus' original mistake. On 'a deserted but peopled land', Dabydeen explores experiences of Canada and the Caribbean which simultaneously speak of a past of brutal genocide and tyranny and a world of recreating newness, constantly awaiting rediscovery, constantly evolving from the heterogeneous convergencies which that voyage of 1492 began. ** Kwame Dawes Shook Foil: a collection of reggae poetry December 1997, £6.99 1-900715-14-7, 76 pages When the guitars tickle a bedrock of drum and bass, when the girl a shock out and a steady hand curve round her sweat-smooth waist, when the smell of Charlie mingles with the chemicals of her hair and the groove is of the sweetest friction -- how is a young man to keep his way pure? Kwame Dawes' poetry rises to new heights in these psalms of confession and celebrations of reggae's power to prophesy, to seek after righteousness and seduce the body and mind. Here is poetry walking the bassline, which darts sweetly around the rigid lick of the rhythm guitar yet expresses all the sadness and alienation at the heart of reggae. This, for Dawes, is the earth which 'never tells me my true home' and where behind every chekeh of the guitar there is the ancestral memory of the whip's crack. Shook Foil dramatises the conflict between the purity of essences and the taints of the actual, not least in the poems which focus on Bob Marley's life. Here is the rhygin, word-weaving prophet and the philanderer with the desperate hunger for yard pumpum, the revealer of truths and the buffalo soldier who has married yard with show biz affluence. Above all there is the intense sadness of Marley's death, for how can one live without the duppy conqueror's defiant wail in an island gone dark for the passing of his song? But for Shook Foil there is always the gospeller's hope that the dead will rise from dub ruins and patch a new quilt of sound for the feet to prance on. And when the high hat shimmering and the bass drum thumping, what else to do but dance? ** Kendel Hippolyte Birthright February 1997, £6.99 0-948833-93-9, 124 pages The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry described Kendel Hippolyte as 'perhaps the outstanding Caribbean poet of his generation'. Until now his poetry has only been available in anthologies and slim collections which have been little seen outside St. Lucia. Birthright reveals him as a poet who combines acute intelligence and passion, a barbed wit and lyrical tenderness. He writes with satirical anger from the perspective of an island marginalised by the international money markets in a prophetic voice whose ancestry is Blake, Whitman and Lawrence, married to the contemporary influences of reggae, rastafarian word-play and a dread cosmology. He writes, too, with an acute control of formal structures, of sound, rhythm and rhyme -- there are sonnets and even a villanelle -- but like 'Bunny Wailer flailing Apollyon with a single song', his poetry has 'a deepdown spiritual chanting rising upfull-I'. Whilst acknowledging a debt of influence and admiration to his fellow St. Lucian, Derek Walcott, Kendel Hippolyte's poetry has a direct force which is in the best sense a corrective to Walcott's tendency to romanticise the St Lucian landscape and people. Kendel Hippolyte was born in St. Lucia in 1952 and has lived there all his life. He is a dramatist and co-founder of the Lighthouse Theatre Company, one of the Caribbean's most important theatre groups. Three of his collections of poetry were published in St Lucia and his work has been anthologised in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, West Indian Poetry, Voiceprint, Crossing Water, Caribbean Poetry Now and the Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry. _____________________________________________________________________ Hannah Bannister Peepal Tree Press 17 King's Avenue Leeds LS6 1QS United Kindom tel 44 (0) 113 2451703 fax 44 (0) 113 2459616 Publishers of the Best in New Caribbean Writing

Hi from all at Peepal Tree, Here's a 'Stop Press', we have another new poetry collection scheduled for 1998: ** Stewart Brown Elsewhere August 1999, £7.99/ US$13.60/ CAN$19.20 ISBN: 1-900715-32-5, 128 pages Stewart Brown has been described as 'one of the most exciting and original poets currently writing.' Praised by Fred D'Aguiar for the 'peculiar chameleon-like power' of his imagination, his 'capacity to belong anywhere and to any experience without being compromised', Stewart Brown's poems encompass Africa, the Caribbean, Wales and England; to the sweep of imperial history and its painful aftermath and to the intimacies of domestic life. He writes of Africa and the Caribbean with a rare combination of sympathy, honesty and inwardness, while never pretending to be other than an Englishman abroad. He writes affectionately but without sentiment of 'ordinary' English life from the perspective of one who has been elsewhere, in ways which allow us to see it afresh. But if these poems have a passionate concern with love, politics, history and the natural world, they are no less concerned with the shaping power of art, both as a subject and in the poems' own formation. Elsewhere brings together, frequently in revised form, poems from Brown's earlier much praised collections, Mekin Foolishness, Zinder and Lugard's Bridge, and many new poems. 'Elmina', an extended and moving meditation on an Englishman's sense of complicity in the history of the slave trade, will undoubtedly further enhance his reputation. After spells teaching in Jamaica, Nigeria, and Barbados Stewart Brown has lectured at the Centre for West African Studies at the University of Birmingham for the past ten years. He has edited several anthologies of Caribbean writing and published many books and essays on aspects of West Indian culture. Best wishes Hannah Bannister Peepal Tree Press 17 King's Avenue Leeds LS6 1QS United Kindom tel 44 (0) 113 2451703 fax 44 (0) 113 2459616 Publishers of the Best in New Caribbean Writing

THE PEEPAL TREE CATALOGUE -- NEW LITERARY, CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL STUDIES **eds. Joel Benjamin, Laxmi Kallicharan, Ian McDonald and Lloyd Searwar They Came in Ships - an anthology of Indo-Guyanese Writing February 1998, £12.95 0-948833-94-7, 320 pages From 1838 until 1917, Indians arrived to work as indentured labourers in Guyana. The majority never returned to India and today over 50% of the Guyanese population is of Indian origin. This anthology of prose and poetry shows how the Indians changed the character of Guyana and the Caribbean and how, over 150 years of settlement, Indians became Indo- Guyanese. Ranging from the earliest attempts at cultural self-definition in the 19th century, to the creative writing of the 1990s, this anthology provides a fascinating insight into the transformation of an ancient culture in the New World. Brief introductory essays set historical contexts, and there is an invaluable bibliography of Indo-Guyanese writing. This is the only anthology of its kind. Contents: Section 1: Early narrative images of the Indian presence in non-Indian writing Section 2: The growth of self-awareness: the first definitions of an Indo-Guyanese identity from within the community (1890-1970) Section 3: The beginnings of Guyanisation: Essays on Indo-Guyanese cultural forms Section 4: An anthology of Indo-Guyanese prose: includes the writing of Cyril Dabydeen, Haris Khemraj, Peter Kempadoo, Rooplall Monar, Sasenarine Persaud, Sheik Sadeek, Jan Shinebourne and Narmala Shewcharan. Section 5: An anthology of Indo-Guyanese poetry: includes the work of J.W. Chinapen, Cyril Dabydeen, David Dabydeen, Mahadai Das, Arnold Itwaru, Rayman Mandal, Rooplall Monar, Sasenarine Persaud, Rajkumarie Singh, Kenneth Taharally, Shana Yardan and fifteen others. Section 6: Bibliography of Indo-Guyanese Imaginative Writing 1890-1995 ** Dale Bisnauth The Settlement of Indians in Guyana 1890-1930 June 1998, £14.99 / US$25.50 / CAN$36 ISBN 1-900715-16-3, 260 pages As Guyana struggles to overcome its legacy of ethnic hostility between Indo and Afro-Guyanese, this is a timely and unbiased study of the historical processes which led in part to these divisions. It focuses on the crucial period when Indian indentured labourers became a permanent part of Guyanese society. It explores both the inner processes of Indian settlement and the beginnings of that community's political involvement with the wider society and relationships with the Afro-Guyanese. It charts how, in the process, Indian peasants were transformed into industrialised wage labourers on the sugar estates, rice farmers and urban professionals, and a distinctive Indo-Guyanese culture emerged. It looks frankly at the ethnic considerations which shaped relationships between the two groups. In looking critically at the divide and rule policies of successive colonial governments, and situating both Africans and Indians in a common history of exploitation, Dale Bisnauth's study offers a clear and insightful basis for contemporary understanding. A valuable contribution to South Asian Diaspora studies, this book presents a scholarly treatment of the role of ethnicity in a plural society and a cogent discussion of the processes of settlement and cultural change. Dr Bisnauth was secretary of the Caribbean Council of Churches and is currently Minister of Education in the Government of Guyana. ** Kamau Brathwaite The Love Axe:/l December 1998, £12.99 0-948833-80-7, 240 pages At once a manifesto for a revolutionary Caribbean aesthetics, a work of detailed literary analysis and a scholarly documentation of a vital period in Caribbean history, Love Axe/I is unique and indispensable. As a work of literary and cultural history it deals not only with significant texts, but with the wider artistic, popular and intellectual movements which were part of the profound revolution in West Indian post-colonial consciousness which is the book's subject. In addition to major discussions of the work of Paule Marshall, Roger Mais, Derek Walcott, George Lamming and Jean Rhys, there is, most valuably, extensive coverage of the flowering of innovative writing published during the later 1960s-1970s, but so much of which is out of print. The Love Axe:/l was announced some time ago, but it has been delayed as the author is compiling updated appendices which will be an indispensible addition to this ground-breaking critical study. We promise that The Love Axe:/l will be well worth the wait! Kamau Brathwaite, as poet, historian and literary critic, is everywhere recognised as one of the Caribbean's most distinguished authors. **ed. Dr. Stewart Brown All Are Involved: The Art of Martin Carter April 2000, £14.99 / US$25.50 / CAN$36 1-900715-26-0, 413 pages Postage Rates per copy STG�1.20 2nd class STG�4.77 airmail US$7.80 air CAN$12 airmail -- sorry if these seem a bit steep, the book is a satisfying 413 pages, and consequently rather heavy. This critical anthology offers a long overdue evaluation of the work of this major Caribbean poet and critic. The Guyanese poet Martin Carter, 1927 - 1997, was without question one of the major poets of the English language in our time. In the Caribbean, Carter has long been regarded as one of the great poets who chronicled the journey from colonialism to independence, alongside such figures as Aim� C�saire, Derek Walcott, Nicholas Guillen and Kamau Brathwaite. While his earlier poems have become classics of socialist literature, translated into many languages, and are among the foundation stones of Caribbean poetry, they have hardly been acknowledged in more general accounts of poetry in English. It was too easy for lazy critics and anthologists to dismiss him as �merely� a political poet, one who swore, as he put it one poem, to use his shirt as 'a banner for the revolution.' In fact, looking at Carter�s work overall it is hard to think of a contemporary poet writing in English who showed more concern for craft, who measured his utterance with greater care. His later work, while it never lost its political edge, was more oblique and cerebral than the overtly political poems of his youth. It sits most comfortably alongside that of fellow South American poets Valejo, Neruda and Paz. They are his contemporaries in every sense; his work is of that originality, stature and elemental force. This book sets out to celebrate Martin Carter�s life and work and to establish a context for reading his poetry. Essays deal with the historical, political and literary contexts of his writing, provide detailed readings of his poetry and critical writings, and offer discussions by younger Caribbean poets of his influence on their work. There are biographical essays by Carter's contemporaries, interviews with Carter and a detailed bibliography. Contributors include John Agard, Kamau Brathwaite, Stewart Brown, David Dabydeen, Fred D'Aguiar, Kwame Dawes, Michael Gilkes, Wilson Harris, Roy Heath, Kendel Hippolyte, Louis James, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Eusi Kwayana, George Lamming, Ian McDonald, Mark McWatt, Mervyn Morris, Grace Nichols, Gordon Rohlehr, Andew Salkey and many others. ** Daryl Cumber Dance New World Adams - second edition October 1998, £12.99 (new edition) 1-900715-04-X, 340 pages In these interviews, held in the early 1980s, with twenty-two of the major writers of the English-speaking Caribbean, Daryl Dance brings together what is much more than just a valuable source book for readers of West Indian writing. The interviews are highly readable --by turns probing, combative and reflective and always absorbing. Daryl Dance brings to the interviews a rare breadth of knowledge and empathy with the work of the writers interviewed and the openly avowed insights of an African-American woman. The writers interviewed include Michael Anthony, Louise Bennett, Jan Carew, Martin Carter and Denis Williams, Austin Clarke, Wilson Harris, John Hearne, C. L. R. James, Ismith Khan, George Lamming, Earl Lovelace, Tony McNeil, Pam Mordecai and Velma Pollard, Mervyn Morris, Orlando Patterson, Vic Reid, Dennis Scott, Sam Selvon, Michael Thelwell, Derek Walcott and Sylvia Wynter. Daryl Dance is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. ** Kwame Dawes Natural Mysticism April 1998, £12.99 1-900715-22-8, 216 pages Kwame Dawes speaks for all those for whom reggae is a major part of life. He describes how reggae has been central to his sense of selfhood, his consciousness of place and society in Jamaica, his development as a writer - and why the singer Ken Boothe should be inseparably connected to his discovery of the erotic. Natural Mysticism is also a work of acute cultural analysis. Dawes argues that in the rise of roots reggae in the 1970s, Jamaica produced a form which was both wholly of the region and universal in its concerns. He contrasts this with the mainstream of Caribbean literature which, whilst anticolonial in sentiment was frequently conservative and colonial in form. Dawes finds in reggae's international appeal more than just an encouraging example. In the work of artists such as Don Drummond, Bob Marley, Winston Rodney and Lee 'Scratch' Perry, he finds a complex aesthetic whose inner structure points in a genuinely contemporary and postcolonial direction. He identifies this aesthetic as being both original and eclectic, as feeling free to borrow, but transforming what it takes in a subversive way. He sees it as embracing both the traditional and the postmodern, the former in the complex subordination of the lyric, melodic and rhythmic elements to the collective whole, and the latter in the dubmaster's deconstructive play with presences and absences. Above all, he shows that it is an aesthetic which unites body, emotions and intellect and brings into a single focus the political, the spiritual and the erotic. In constructing this reggae aesthetic, Kwame Dawes both creates a rationale for the development of his own writing and brings a new and original critical method to the discussion of the work of other contemporary Caribbean authors. Natural Mysticism has the rare merit of combining rigorous theoretical argument with a personal narrative which is often wickedly funny. Here is a paradigm shifting work of Caribbean cultural & literary criticism with the added bonus of conveying an infectious enthusiasm for reggae which will drive readers back to their own collections or even to go out and extend them! ** Mirza Sheikh I'tesamuddin The Wonders of Vilayet - translated by Kaiser Haq November 1998, £9.99 1-900715-15-5, 160 pages In 1765, Mirza Sheikh I'tesamuddin, a Bengali munchi employed by the East India Company, travelled on a mission to Britain to seek protection for the Mogul Emperor Shah Alam II. The mission was aborted by the greed and duplicity of Robert Clive, but it resulted in this remarkable account of the Mirza's travels in Britain and Europe. Written in Persian, 'Shigurf Nama-e-Vilayet' or 'Wonderful Tales about Europe' is an entertaining, unique and culturally valuable document. The Mirza was in no sense a colonial subject, and whilst he wrote frankly about what he felt accounted for India's decline and Europe's contemporary ascendance, he was a highly educated, culturally self-confident observer with a sharp and quizzical curiosity about the alien cultures he encountered. His accounts of visits to the theatre, the circus, freakshows, the 'mardrassah of Oxford', Scotland, of the racial alarms his presence sometimes provoked and of his impressions of British moral codes (including the 'filthy habits of the firinghees') make for fascinating reading. Kaiser Haq's scholarly, modern translation is the first to appear in English since the original 'abridged and flawed translation' which appeared in 1827. The Wonders of Vilayet is an important document, a salutary addition to Western accounts of the 'Otherness' of India, orientalism in reverse. ** Marc Wadsworth Comrade Sak September 1998, £9.99 0-948833-77-7, 180 pages There has been a recent revival of interest in the life of Shapurji Saklatvala, the Black Communist MP who won the seat of Battersea North in 1922. Comrade Sak charts Saklatvala's movement from privileged Parsi beginnings in the Tata family to revolutionary communist. It examines his quarrel with Gandhi over the goals and tactics of the Indian independence movement and Saklatvala's not always easy relationship to the Communist International. Above all, the study documents his role in a radical phase of British Labour politics and the traditions of local activism which made the Battersea North constituency such a congenial home. Drawn from his speeches and letters, Saklatvala's passionate and radical voice speaks clearly to our times when the mainstream left is in retreat. His words and his life serve to remind us that the goals of ending inequality and making possible human liberation are too important to be consigned to historical memory. What Marc Wadsworth brings to this study are the insights of an active participant in the contemporary struggles to define a Black position within the British Left. In exploring how Saklatvala negotiated the roles of Indian anti-imperialist, Black MP and Communist, Wadsworth has written an important study of Black Working Class history in the 1920s and 1930s. Marc Wadsworth has worked as a senior news reporter at Thames Television, Chair of the NUJ's Black Members' Council and National Secretary of the Anti-Racist Alliance. He currently works as a freelance journalist and broadcaster. ** Matthew French Young Guyana the Lost El Dorado: My fifty years in the Guyanese Wilds April 1998, £12.99 1-900715-25-2, 304 pages As diamond prospector, gold-panner, surveyor of the uncharted bush, hunter and builder of roads, Matthew Young spent over fifty years working in the wild forests and savannahs of his native Guyana. He writes vividly of the beauties and hazards of that life, of marauding jaguars, deadly labaria snakes dropping from the trees, piranhas that can strip the flesh from a body in seconds and thirty foot anacondas that can squeeze the life out of a man; of battling up river against life-threatening rapids and thunderous waterfalls. His is a story of resourcefulness and wonder, of a practical man who never lost his sense of the forest's mystery, who learnt a profound respect for the culture, knowledge and skills of the Amerindians of the interior. This is a fascinating social history from colonial times to the 1980s, including Young's involvement with the aftermath of the tragic mass suicide of over 900 followers of the American cult leader Jim Jones at Jonestown in the Guyanese interior. Guyana: The Lost El Dorado gives an engrossing account of one of the last untouched tropical rainforests in the world and its teeming wildlife. It is an indispensable guidebook for the intrepid armchair traveller, gold prospector and diamond panner! New in 1997 **ed. Kevin Grant The Art of David Dabydeen May 1997, £12.99 1-900715-10-4, 232 pages David Dabydeen is from the younger generation of Caribbean writers living in Britain. His work has been .highly praised for its originality and imaginative depth. In this volume leading scholars from Europe, North America and the Caribbean discuss his poetry and fiction in the context of the politics and culture of Britain and the Caribbean. These studies explore David Dabydeen's concern with the plurality of Caribbean experience, with its African, Indian, Amerindian and European roots; the dislocation of slavery and indenture; migration and the consequent divisions in the Caribbean psyche. In particular, these essays focus on Dabydeen's aesthetic practice as a consciously post-colonial writer; his exploration of the contrasts between rural creole and standard English and their different world visions; the power of language to subvert accepted realities; his use of multiple masks as ways of dealing with issues of identity and the use of destabilizing techniques in the narrative strategies he employs. ________________________________________________________________________ Hannah Bannister Peepal Tree Press 17 King's Avenue Leeds LS6 1QS United Kindom tel 44 (0) 113 2451703 fax 44 (0) 113 2459616 Publishers of the Best in New Caribbean Writing


Greetings, we have a new novel for you. This is E.A Markham's first

novel: Hugely entertaining, and as well crafted as you would expect from

a Professor of Creative Writing and a writer of Archie's pedigree.

Enjoy!



MARKING TIME

E.A. MARKHAM



Pewter Stapleton is drowning under a pile of marking. He teaches

creative writing at a university in Sheffield, a campus peopled with

malign cost-cutting accountants, baffled security staff and colleagues

cloning themselves.

Pewter is a brilliant comic creation, an endless lister of tasks which

are never quite completed, who is strung forever between seriousness and

send-up, a commitment to his writing and boundless cynicism about

writers and the arts industry.

From Pewter's desk and his marking, the novel radiates backwards and

forwards in time, to his childhood in the small volcanic Caribbean

island of St. Caesare and memories of his headmaster, the libidinous

Professeur Croissant and Horace his half-mad cousin, and to his

relationships with Carrington, a highly successful Caribbean writer

whose plays Pewter is editing, to Balham, a professional of the race

industry (where Pewter is a self-admitted slow learner in blackness) and

to Lee, the woman he loves, but who despairs of him as 'sporadic'.

As a novel about life and writing, factuality and invention rub

shoulders to hilarious effect as Pewter is incessantly driven to turn

his experiences, his friends and their experiences into works of drama

and fiction, maybe even you... Yet we note the awkward questions he asks

about the Academy...

Born in Montserrat, West Indies in 1939, E.A. Markham completed his

education in Britain, which has been his home since 1956. He has worked

in the theatre, in the media and is a literary editor. His publications

include collections of poems, short stories and a travel book.  He has

been writer-in-residence at the Universities of Humberside and Ulster,

has taught at the University of Newcastle and is now Professor of

Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.



Specifications

ISBN: 1-900715-29-5

Price: STG£7.99 / US$13.60 / CAN$19.20

Pages: 262

Date of Publication: October 1999







HENDREE'S CURE

Scenes from Madrasi Life in a New World

MOSES NAGAMOOTOO



Madrasis in Guyana used to pour a drop of white rum in memory of their

ancestors. Moses Nagamootoo's libation is, like the best high wine, an

intoxicating mix of fire, sweetness and pungency.

Blending fiction and documentary, he reanimates a world now mostly gone,

that of the Madrasi fishermen, market-traders, rice farmers, Kali

worshippers, cricketers, turfites and see-far practitioners who

inhabited the Corentyne village of Whim in the 1950s and 60s.

Though only a small percentage of the quarter million Indians who came

to Guyana, the South Indian Madrasis, now much dispersed through

emigration to North America, played an influential role in Guyanese

life. The Kali-Mai churches they established, for instance, now draw

devotees from all Guyanese ethnic groups.

At the heart of the narrative are the stories of the entrepreneurial

Naga, like pot-salt in everything, his wife Chunoo, resolute in her

sense of community and justice, and Hendree, Naga's sidekick, an idler,

brilliant drummer and would-be healer. In their lives are played out the

polarities which gave Madrasi life its extraordinary dynamism: its

spirituality and earthiness, its respect for goodness -- and delight in

scampishness, its faithfulness to Madrasi culture and openness to the

culture of others, particularly the Afro-Guyanese.

What is to be savoured above all in this book is its language,

particularly when we hear the Whim villagers and the pungent and elegant

Creole through which they represented their world and maintained their

place in it.

Moses Nagamootoo was born in Whim Village. Since 1992 he has been a

Member of the Guyanese Parliament and presently holds the portfolio of

Minister of Information.



Specifications

ISBN: 1-900715-45-7

Price: STG�7.99 / US$13.60 / CAN$19.20

Pages: 148 pages

Date of Publication: March 2001







PAYMENT:

We can accept payment by cheque or international money order in UK

sterling, US dollars or Canadian dollars. Add 15% to the total for

postage, but if you order five or more books, postage is free!



HOW TO ORDER

E-mail me hannah@peepal.demon.co.uk

and tell me:

a) How many copies

b) The postal address to which we should send the book(s)

c) Which currency you would like to pay in



We'll let you know how much your order will cost, and tell you what to

do next.



We hope you are happy to receive details of new publications from Peepal

Tree Press. If you want to be removed from our mailing list, please let

us know.

Best wishes

Hannah



____________________________________________________________________

Peepal Tree Press -- Publishers of the Best in New Caribbean Writing

17 King's Avenue, Leeds LS6 1QS, United Kingdom

tel 0113 2451703 fax 0113 2459616 e-mail hannah@peepal.demon.co.uk



Our catalogue is now available by e-mail.



You can choose from:



1) New Fiction (1999 titles)

2) New Poetry  (1999 titles)

3) New Literary, Cultural and Historical Studies (1999 titles)



4) Backlist Fiction (1986-1998)

5) Backlist Poetry (1986-1998)

6) Backlist Literary, Cultural and Historical Studies (1986-1998)


CURRY FLAVOUR

Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming



The poems in Curry Flavour will grab you with their exuberant

recreation of the dramas of an intensely experienced inner life.

Their imagery is sensuous, drawn from, among other sources, the

flora and fauna of the Caribbean landscape. Their voice is

erotic, humorous, subversive, prayerful, angry, revolutionary

and celebratory.

Inspired by the all-embracing nature of the Hindu Gods, these

poems attack biases and false polarities of all kinds, not least

between stereotypes of gender, the sexual and the spiritual and

the personal and the political. They express a New World, pan-

Caribbean consciousness which is rooted in a womanist

revisioning of her Indian ancestral heritage and a childhood and

youth spent on the sugar-growing Caroni plains of Trinidad.

With the ceremonial incense of prayer, the ripe mango-syrup of

erotic celebration, the pungency of wild coriander and shadon

beni of the Creole folkworld, this is a feast for all the

senses, blended together but keeping fresh all their individual

piquancy, accompanied by the sound of tassa and steelband,

simmered over a fire that burns away the jumbies of homophobia,

incest, violence and racial hatred.



Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming was born in Trinidad in 1960. A

mechanical/building services engineer and part-time college

lecturer, she now lives in Nassau, Bahamas. As well as writing

poetry and short stories, she draws and sculpts.



Paperback original

Specifications

ISBN: 1-900715-35-X

Price: UK�7.99 / US$14.95 / CAN$19.20

Pages: 120

Date of Publication: July 2000 -- copies available now!



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