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Poetry Caribbean & Latin American

Caribbean Blues and Love's Genealogy

by (author) Dannabang Kuwabong

Publisher
Mawenzi House Publishers Ltd.
Initial publish date
Sep 2008
Category
Caribbean & Latin American, General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781894770507
    Publish Date
    Sep 2008
    List Price
    $20.95

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Description

In this new collection of poetry, Kuwabong shows a maturity of voice and a larger poetic vision to celebrate love-love for the people of the Caribbean and love between lovers.

In the first part of this collection the love that is celebrated emerges from a deep sense of historical reconnection with the poet's African ancestors who were taken captive and sent to the Caribbean. But the focus is not on the brutality of their enslavement, though that is the guiding principle that informs the poetic voice. The poems perform a retrospective search for the roots that his African ancestors planted in the new world without romanticizing their struggles, defeats, and victories. Thus they recreate the continental African as a seeker of a poetic understanding of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean.

In the second part, Kuwabong takes the reader through a Prufrockian maze of relationships complicated by expectations and disappointments. The city of Hamilton, Ontario especially provides the social and physical landscapes that initiate the personae's responses to love made tricky by the extreme challenges of the mundane. Though the poems silently scream with pain and disappointment, these moods are calmed by epiphanies of extreme tenderness that bind the relationships.

About the author

Dannabang Kuwabong, PhD is a professor of postcolonial Caribbean literature in English at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. He has published widely on different fields in academic journals, contributed numerous essays in books and journals. His books include Rhetoric of Resistance, Labor of Love: The Ecopoetics of Nationhood in the Poetry and Prose of Lasana M. Sekou, Voices from Kibuli Country, Caribbean Blues & Love’s Genealogy. He has co-authored books including Myth Performance in African Diaspora Drama: Ritual, Theatre, and Dance, Mothers and Daughters, etc. His critical essays on Caribbean and Caribbean-Canadian literature on mothering, have been published in numerous academic journals and books: Confluences I & II & III: Essays in the New Canadian Literature, Creative Contradictions, Positive Interferences, Caribbean Studies, Sargasso, Interviewing the Caribbean, The Mouth, Eleven Eleven, The Caribbean Writer, The Mouth, Interviewing the Caribbean, etc.

Dannabang Kuwabong's profile page

Editorial Reviews

". . . these poems are rhythmical, full of life, meant to be read aloud." --Rabble.ca