Poetry,Prose and Playfulness for Teachers and Learners

Unknown, Author

Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

This novel explores the connections between personal and political integrity and reflects sensitively on the position of women in Guyanese society. Sandra Yansen must leave behind the close ties of family and village when she takes a job as a reporter in Georgetown. After establishing a tenuous footing in the city, Sandra is summoned home, where she encounters the enduring matriarchy of her mother’s friends. Their values sustain Sandra in her search for independence.

Timepiece

Shinebourne, Janice

Literature & Fiction

Told in two voices, one standard English, the other Creole, this novel is an ironic fable of a tragi-comic self-deception. It portrays the tensions between authority, freedom, law, and love in Trinidadian society through the character Manko and the stories of the other local yard dwellers. These range from memories of Trinidad's popular uprisings to a prostitute's narrative of what has led to her occupation. In exploring the popular folk archetype of the self-crucified preacher, the novel takes the balladic form of the calypso to greater depths.

Crucifixion (Caribbean Classics)

Khan, Ismith

United States

Focusing on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, these seven one-act radio plays vividly capture the loneliness and isolation that can be felt in one of the world's largest cities. With characteristic humor and poignancy, these stories touch on the dreams and disappointments of both the young and old as they face racial and class differences in a sprawling, urban London.

Eldorado West One

Selvon, Samuel

Dramas & Plays

The first Indian indentured laborers came to the Caribbean more than150 years ago, and their traditional values have had to confront a rapidly changing world in 20th century Trinidad. Highway in the Sun tells the story of Tiger and Urmilla’s first year of marriage away from their extended family and their struggles relating to their new Afro-Creole neighbors in the suburbs of Port of Spain. In Home Sweet India, Johnny is dismayed by his loss of culture and threatened by the emergence of Creole nationalism, and plans to return to India. In Turn Again Tiger, Tiger learns that he must not turn his back on his Indian past. These plays demonstrate the choices Indians in the Caribbean must make between tradition and creolization.

Highway in the Sun: A Collection of Plays

A Day in the Country and Other Stories

Ismith Khan

Contemporary

Leitao's novel brings alive the vanished world of colonial Goa, a hybrid creation of Portuguese Catholicism and the Hindu caste system. From its beginnings in village rivalries, fought out by the bulls of neighbouring Cavelossim and Carmona, the sleeping dragon of Goan nationalism awakes. But when the Goan people rise up against their Portuguese masters, their victory is hollow. The fruits of their struggle are plucked by the new commercial elite and their distinctive culture is swamped as Goa is annexed by India. Focusing on the tragic figure of Mario Jaques, a village leader who wants to preserve the best of the old world in the new but who is isolated by his own confusions and swept away by social forces beyond his control, Leitao writes passionately of a popular movement betrayed.

The Gift of the Holy Cross

Leitão, Lino

Religion & Spirituality

This original and meditative text combines an intensive critical reading of 'You Are involved', by the late Guyanese poet Martin Carter, and a series of 'poems of October' written within the spaces of the essay.

Web of October: Rereading Martin Carter

rupert-roopnaraine

A finely observed comedy of manners, this novel presents an imaginative and poetic play on the symbols of Hinduism in a secular and cosmopolitan society. Devan, a teacher of Hinduism to rural Indians, finds his life turned upside down when he leaves his village and family and heads to the urban, cosmopolitan capital of Georgetown, Guyana. In a city that is ethnically diverse, he meets members of the wealthy and politically cynical Indian elite—an experience at odds with the ardent simplicities of his teaching—Devan is exposed to the dangers of religion when it is made to serve the needs of ethnic assertion. With a blend of humor and sobering insight, this novel explores the friction between religious fundamentalism and cosmopolitanism.

The Wizard Swami

Dabydeen, Cyril

Humor & Satire

Folk belief confronts rationalistic science in this poetic fable that sees events through both European and village eyes. Set in the remote Canje region, the villagers feel that they have only the most vestigial remnants of their original Hindu world view. They have indeed absorbed much of the local mix of Amerindian/African folk beliefs, like the existence of the legendary massacouraman. What they still have is a residual Hindu view of the interconnectedness of all living things, though, in their state of rootlessness, this sometimes expresses itself in feelings of mutual hostility and unwarranted cruelty.

Dark Swirl

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Books by Peepal Tree Press Ltd.