Merle Collins is a distinguished author whose works draw deeply from the rich Caribbean literary tradition. Through her poetry and short stories, she delves into the complexities of identity and history, with her writing reflecting the intricate connections between cultures and the past. Her style is marked by incisive analysis and a lyrical quality that draws readers into narratives where personal experience intertwines with broader social and political themes. Collins primarily explores how the past resonates in the present, shaping collective memory and individual understanding.
Through a mix of fictive narrative, letters and poetry, Ocean Stirrings tells the story of the mother of Malcolm X. From the shores of Grenada to Canada and the USA, this is a powerful and poignant tribute to a remarkable woman and an important chapter in the history of the civil rights movement.
Set on the Caribbean island of Paz (not a million miles from Grenada), this is a book that creates and occupies a space between epic poetry and the novel in the way its sequence of interludes bring into focus the lives of family and community through time - and in the confinements of small island space.
From the 1930s through the dawning of a new century, these tender and moving stories underscore living life with style and hidden steel despite one's circumstances and warn against disregarding the past struggles of others. Doux Thibaut negotiates a hard life on the Caribbean island of Paz, confronting the shame of poverty and illegitimacy, the hazards of sectarianism on an island segregated into Catholics and Protestants, and the injustices of racism and classism. As an old lady moving between the homes of her children in Boston and New York, Doux wonders whether they and her grandchildren really appreciate what her engagement with life has taught her. In The Ladies Are Upstairs, Merle Collins has created a mosaic novel from these stories of a Caribbean woman's life, demanding that such lives not be forgotten.
First published in 1987, 'Angel' covers Grenada from 1951, when the workers revolted against the power of the white owners of the sugar and cocoa estates, to 1983 when the US invaded to put an end to a radical experiment that turned violently in on itself.
In poems that express an oblique and resonant disquiet ('people dream of a lady/ in a boat, dressed in red/ petticoat, adrift and weeping') and a sequence that addresses memories of the death of the Grenadian revolution, too painful to confront until now, Merle Collins writes of a Caribbean adrift, amnesiac and in danger of nihilistic despair. But she also achieves a life-enhancing and consoling perspective on those griefs. She does this by revisiting the hopes and humanities of the people involved, recreating them in all their concrete particularity, or by speaking through the voice of an eighty-year-old woman 'making miracle/ with little money because turn hand is life lesson', and in writing poems that celebrate love, the world of children and the splendours of Caribbean nature. Her poems take the 'new dead ancestors back to/ mountain to feed the fountain/ of dreams again.' Merle Collins is Grenadian. She is the author of two novels, a collection of short stories and two previous collections of poetry. She teaches Caribbean literature at the University of Maryland.
This collection of poems from the Caribbean poet, novelist and performer reflects on the ironies and paradoxes of living in Britain, the longing for "home", wherever it may be, and the balm of forgetting.