Myal

Jamaican-born novelist and sociologist Erna Brodber describes Myal as "an exploration of the links between the way of life forged by the people of two points of the black diaspora the Afro-Americans and the Afro-Jamaicans." Operating on many literary levels thematically, linguistically, stylistically it is the story of women's cultural and spiritual struggle in colonial Jamaica. The novel opens at the beginning of the 20th century with a community gathering to heal the mysterious illness of a young woman, Ella, who has returned to Jamaica after an unsuccessful marriage abroad. The Afro-Jamaican religion myal, which asserts that good has the power to conquer all, is invoked to heal Ella, who has been left "zombified" and devoid of any black soul. Ella, who is light skinned enough to pass for white, has suffered a breakdown after her white American husband produced a black-face minstrel show based on the stories of her village and childhood. This cultural appropriation is one of a series Ella encountered in her life, and parallels the ongoing theft of the labor and culture of colonized peoples for imperial gain and pleasure. The novel's rich, vivid language and vital characters earned it the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Canada and the Caribbean. The novel links nicely with Brodber's coming-of-age story, Jane & Louisa Will Soon Come Home, also from Waveland Press, for its similar images, themes, and specific Jamaican cultural references to colonialism, religion, slavery, gender, and identity. Both novels are Brodber's way of telling stories outside of published history to point out the whitewashing and distortion of black history through religion and colonialism. Titles of related interest from Waveland Press: Brodber, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (ISBN 9781478622840); Hodge, Crick Crack, Monkey (ISBN 9781478606598); Lovelace, The Wine of Astonishment (ISBN 9781478611271); and Warner-Vieyra, Juletane (ISBN 9781478611783).

Brodber, Erna

New Beacon Books

Louisiana: A novel

Linking the living and the dead, a brilliant novel imbued with the magic of hoodoo and conjuring

Louisiana: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

United States

University Press of Mississippi/New Beacon Books, Ltd.

This is the first American publication of Brodber's eagerly awaited third novel. In Louisiana: A Novel she explores her continuing fascination with the power of the past to live in the present.Here, Ella Townsend, a young African American anthropologist whose roots are Caribbean, researches Louisiana folk life and discovers not only the world of voodoo and carnival but also the mystical connection of the living and the dead. With her tape recorder she explores the rich heritage of Creole Louisiana, but Mammy, Ella's primary informant, dies during the project. Then from beyond the grave she continues to transmit messages. Although the academically minded Ella is dubious about the authenticity of the medium, gradually, as she confronts her prejudices, the tapes convey enriching mysteries about the past lives of Mammy and her friend Lowly. From this supernatural experience, Ella learns much about herself and her background. Louisiana celebrates the magico-religious culture of hoodoo, conjure, obeah, and myal. Like Brodber's previous works, Myal: A Novel and Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Louisiana reveals the author's fascinating gift of myth-making. The Louisiana of her title represents two places sharing the same name---the American state and Brodber's native parish in Jamaica. Through this blending of localities, Brodber shows how elements from the African diaspora are kept alive in the Creole culture of the Americas.

Louisiana

New Beacon

The Rainmaker's Mistake

Contemporary

New Beacon Books Ltd.

Clear Word and Third Sight examines the strands of a collective African diasporic consciousness represented in the work of a number of Black Caribbean writers. Catherine A. John shows how a shared consciousness, or third sight, is rooted in both pre- and postcolonial cultural practices and disseminated through a rich oral tradition. This consciousness has served diasporic communities by creating an alternate philosophical worldsense linking those of African descent across space and time. Contesting popular discourses about what constitutes culture and maintaining that neglected strains in negritude discourse provide a crucial philosophical perspective on the connections between folk practices, cultural memory, and collective consciousness, John examines the diasporic principles in the work of the negritude writers Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, and Leopold Senghor. She traces the manifestations and reworkings of their ideas in Afro-Caribbean writing from the eastern and French Caribbean, as well as the Caribbean diaspora in the United States. The authors she discusses include Jamaica Kincaid, Earl Lovelace, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, and Edouard Glissant, amon

Woodside, Pear Tree Grove P.O.

University Press of the West Indies

Nothing’s Mat is told by a black British teenager – “every black girl” – for she has no name until the very last chapters when she is teasingly called “Princess” by her husband. Somewhere in the 1950s London-based Princess is allowed to complete her sixth-form final exams by writing a long paper on the West Indian family instead of sitting an exam. She thinks this a godsend and that all she has to do is to interview her parents. Her father tries to help her with his side but they both find that their kin will not fit into the standard anthropological template. Her father thinks it a good time for her to go to Jamaica and meet her grandparents, who can better help her with her study. In Jamaica, much as her middle-class black Jamaican grandparents and her parents in England might not have liked it, Princess meets and spends time with her obscure cousin Nothing, called Conut. Conut introduces Princess to a plant that obeys certain divine principles and is available to humans to make artefacts for their comfort. Accordingly, they begin to make a mat and as they twist straw and bend it into intricate shapes, Conut tells her the family history so that their creation becomes for her a mat of anthropological template. The resulting shape presented to her teacher earns her an A and the comment that she has managed to project the West Indian family as a fractal rather than fractured as the published literature sees it. Her studies and subsequent academic career take her to London University and then back to Jamaica, but under-stimulated by the academy, she chooses to continue the family study from high school and to do so by crafting the information into the mat, which becomes for her a shield against spiritual and physical evil. Making the mat of ancestors takes her into myriad histories of young Englishmen in Jamaica, of Jamaican women in Panama, and of African Americans in Virginia, among others. This work is at once a fictional family history and a comment on anthropological methodology and African systems of thought.

Nothing's Mat

Moments of Cooperation and Incorporation is a set of six essays showcasing moments between 1782 and 1996 when the Jamaican and American people of the African diaspora have cooperated with each other in the socio-geographic spaces of each. For both groups, this was a period defined by slavery, resistance, struggles for freedom, decolonization and civil rights. Brodber’s work relates the long connections between black Jamaicans and blacks in the United States from the late eighteenth century well into the twentieth century and aims to foster understanding and self-respect among these people brought without their permission to the Americas.
 This work makes a vital contribution to the history of the African diaspora and is essential reading for students and scholars of the New World. Brodber employs a variety of disciplinary methods – historical and anthropological, most notably – in presenting and interpreting this long history, and her skill as a novelist makes this scholarly work equally compelling for the general reader.

Moments of Cooperation and Incorporation: African American and African Jamaican Connections, 1782–1996

History

Americas

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Books by Brodber, Erna

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Myal

Myal

Louisiana: A Novel

Louisiana

The Rainmaker's Mistake

Woodside, Pear Tree Grove P.O.

Nothing's Mat

Moments of Cooperation and Incorporation: African American and African Jamaican Connections, 1782–1996