Two leading Caribbean writers, Esther Phillips and Hazel Simmons-McDonald, recently held a reading and book-signing event at the Henry Fraser Auditorium, UWI, Cave Hill Campus. Esther Phillips is Editor of BIM: Arts for the 21st Century, as well as the first Poet Laureate of Barbados, a post to which she was appointed in 2018. Her appointment as Poet Laureate has been extended until 2024.
She read from her most recent poetry publication: Witness In Stone. Publisher Peepal Tree Press, Leeds, had this to say about Phillips’ work: “This collection explores the fragile territory between remembering and forgetting, both as an individual experience and in the life of a society. If in the end, all is equal to ‘time’s slow bleed,’ these poems enact the capacity of the imagination to ‘pass through ancient walls’ and to reorder failures long gone in time into more hopeful connections.
“Poems recreate those childhood moments when physical presences, such as the ‘great house’ at Drax Hall provoke the beginning of poetry, the searching for what is ‘hidden in the dark,’ and thence to a grasp of the history that society would rather forget. For while forgetting is human, the collection also explores how amnesia can be cultivated in a society as a means of hiding the sources of contemporary privilege and economic power… Not least powerful in this conversation are the poems about Barbadian childhoods, poems of grace, humour and insight.”
Hazel Simmons-McDonald read from Shabine and Other Stories. She is Professor Emerita of Applied Linguistics, UWI, Cave Hill Campus and served as Pro-Vice Chancellor and the first Principal of the Open Campus, her last appointment with UWI before retirement.
Esther Phillips
One reviewer described Shabine and Other Stories as “an impressive first collection of short stories (in which) the writer presents a deft exploration of class, of how values are shaped by religion, and of the tensions that undergird family life. She makes a place for voices hitherto not heard and creates characters who closely guard the secrets of their hearts but who, through her narrative dexterity, come to experience moments of truth and clarity of memory.
“Simmons-McDonald’s energetic prose not only captures the polylinguistic character of St. Lucian society, but it also creates the space for an exploration of an Eastern Caribbean brand of magical realism. With polished assurance, she weaves folk beliefs into the fabric of her stories, creating memorable tales marked by notes of sadness, yet balanced by tenderness and joy.”
Another described it as “a work with a wide and complex appeal… The calmness of the style leads the reader into worlds of joy, or pain and horror made visible and bearable by the calculated moderation, exactitude, and poignancy of the diction”.
Dr. Nicola Hunte, Lecturer in Literatures in English, UWI, Cave Hill Campus made the following remarks: “I want to put these works against the context of a literary tradition, one that is now looking toward contemporary Caribbean writing. The appetite for Caribbean literature beyond our shores remains at a pace but for those who enter my classroom, there seems to be the view that canonical West Indian literature means outdated, irrelevant, colonial – I don’t think they have that view when they leave. I’d like to think so and I believe that the featured works tonight can be part of what helps to change that initial view. These speak to our present, with its ties to the past and the hope we have for ourselves as social beings confronting our day-to-day concerns.”
Linda M. Deane, herself an award-winning poet, officiated as Master of Ceremonies on this occasion. The photos are credited to Sharon Hurley-Hall.
Both books, Witness in Stone by Esther Phillips and Shabine and Other Stories by Hazel Simmons-McDonald are available at the UWI, Cave Hill Campus Bookstore. (PR)
