Barbara Jenkins writes about the experiences of a personal and family-centred life in Trinidad with great psychological acuteness, expanding on the personal with a deep awareness of the economic, social and cultural contexts of that experience. She writes about a childhood and youth located in the colonial era and an adult life that began at the very point of Trinidad’s independent nationhood, a life begun in considerable poverty in a colonial city going through rapid change. It involves a family network that connects to just about every Trinidadian ethnicity and their respective mixtures. It is about a life that expanded in possibility through an access to an education not usually available to girls from such an economically fragile background. This schooling gave the young Barbara Jenkins the intense experience of being an outsider to Trinidad’s hierarchies of race and class. She writes about a life that has gender conflict at its heart, a household where her mother was subject to beatings and misogynist control, but also about strong matriarchal women. As for so many Caribbean people, opportunity appeared to exist only via migration, in her case to Wales in the 1960s. But there was a catch in the arrangement that the years in Wales had put to the back of her mind: the legally enforceable promise to the Trinidadian government that in return for their scholarship, she had to return. She did, and has lived the rest of her life to date in Trinidad, an experience that gives her writing an insider/outsider sharpness of perception.

River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer

River Sing Me Home is a beautiful, page-turning and redemptive story of a mother’s gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children in the aftermath of slavery.

Eleanor Shearer is a mixed-race writer and the granddaughter of Windrush generation immigrants. She splits her time between London and Ramsgate on the English coast so that she never has to go too long without seeing the sea. For her Master's degree in Politics at the University of Oxford, Eleanor studied the legacy of slavery and the case for reparations, and her fieldwork in St. Lucia and Barbados helped inspire her first novel.

After a personal tragedy upends his world, American-born artist Chris travels to his mother's homeland in the Caribbean hoping to find some peace and tranquility. He plans to spend his time painting in solitude and coming to terms with his recent loss and his fractured relationship with his father. Instead, he discovers a new extended and complicated "family." The people he meets help him to heal, even as he supports them in unexpected ways. Told from different points of view, this is a compelling novel about unlikely love, friendship, and community, with surprises along the way.

Alecia McKenzie is a Jamaican writer based in France. Her first collection of short stories, Satellite City, and her novel Sweetheart have both won Commonwealth literary prizes. Sweetheart has been translated into French (Trésor) and was awarded the Prix Carbet des lycéens in 2017. Her most recent novel is A Million Aunties - longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award. Her work has also appeared in a range of literary magazines and in anthologies such as Stories from Blue Latitudes, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, Global Tales, Girls Night In, and To Exist is to Resist.

Reading: Chapter 11, pages 148 - 150 (Miss Vera)
Background music by guitarist Djavi D.

Reading Chapter 3, pages 52 to 54 (Chris)
Background music by guitarist GVD.

THE GOD OF GOOD LOOKS SUMMARY
Combining the honesty, warmth, and humour of Queenie and a modern-day Bridget Jones’s Diary, award-winning writer Breanne Mc Ivor’s entertaining, transportive, and luminous debut novel follows a young Trinidadian woman finding her voice and a new kind of happy ending.

Bianca Bridge has always dreamt of becoming a writer. But Trinidadian society can be unforgiving, and having an affair with a married government official is a sure-fire way to ruin your prospects. So when Obadiah Cortland, a notoriously tyrannical entrepreneur in the island’s beauty scene, offers her a job, Bianca accepts, realizing that working on his magazine is the closest to her dreams she’ll get.

Sharp-witted and fiercely fun, The God of Good Looks alternates between Bianca’s diary entries and Obadiah’s first-person narrative to portray modern Trinidad’s rigid class barriers and the fraught impact of beauty commodification in a patriarchal society. Boisterous, moving, and full of meaty, universally relatable questions, Mc Ivor’s sparkling debut is an open-hearted, awakening tale about prejudice and pride, the masks we wear, and what we can become if we dare to take them off.

Breanne Mc Ivor is an award-winning writer with degrees in English from the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh and a certificate in Advanced Professional Makeup Artistry; she lives in her home country of Trinidad and Tobago.

In Traveling Freely: Essays, Roberto Carlos Garcia explores intersecting topics such as race, identity, American socioeconomic inequality, police violence, our inability to partake in our culture as innocents, and our complicity as Americans in all that’s wrong with the United States from the author’s specific vantage point as a Black Dominican American man. The voice in these essays is both clear and nuanced, and as readers move through the collection, the various themes cohere into a multilayered investigation of institutional racism and the inherent exploitations of capitalism.

In essays that are uniquely straightforward and accessible, Garcia insists that in order to resist state-sanctioned violence against marginalized bodies and populations, we must understand our shared history of oppression—so that we can rise against it effectively and find new paths forward.

This episode of BCLF Cocoa Pod was made possible with the support of funds from the Brooklyn Arts Council Local Arts Support Grant.

"What you’re about to hear is the opening of my novel-in-progress, The Price of Two Pence. It begins in Battersea, January 1975, on the Number 77 bus, where Ronald Jones — a Jamaican bus conductor — asks two young men for a two-pence fare for their dog. What happens next alters his life, and the life of his sister Nancy, forever.

The novel traces the aftermath of that moment across London and rural Jamaica, exploring the grief and rage of a family, the silences of a city that tried to forget this death, and the persistence of memory across generations. At its heart, it’s about what it takes for a community to keep someone’s story alive — and the fire we must walk through to bring it into the light."

Blessings,

Jason Allen-Paisant

You may follow Jason's journey and his award-winning work at www.jasonallenpaisant.com

This episode of BCLF Cocoa Pod was made possible with the support of funds from the Brooklyn Arts Council Local Arts Support Grant.

We at the BCLF are proud to mark the release of “Getting Through: New and Selected Poems” by Mervyn Taylor, an extraordinary collection which gathers decades of lyrical mastery into one definitive volume, with this special episode of Cocoa Pod.

Described as “a treasure trove… capturing the beauty and nuances of ordinary and extraordinary lives,” this poetry collection is a profound offering of Caribbean life, exploring themes of love, death, migration, aging, and grief with Taylor’s signature lyricism and care. A collection “worth relishing, celebrating, and revisiting.”

Mervyn Taylor, a Trinidad-born poet, is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Country of Warm Snow (2020), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, The Last Train (2023), and the chapbook, News of the Living, concerning the Covid pandemic. Getting Through: New & Selected Poems (2024), from Beltway Editions, was shortlisted for the Bocas Prize. A new collection, Unpainted Houses, is forthcoming from Broadstone Books.

Taylor has taught at Bronx Community College, The New School University, and in the NYC public school system. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and Belmont, Trinidad.

This episode of BCLF Cocoa Pod was made possible with the support of funds from the Brooklyn Arts Council Local Arts Support Grant

Ever Since We Small – A Reading by Celeste Mohammed

In this episode of BCLF Cocoa Pod, award-winning writer Celeste Mohammed reads from her second novel-in-stories, Ever Since We Small. Spanning generations of an Indo-Trinidadian family, the book follows the Gopauls from Jayanti’s journey as a girmitiya to the struggles of her descendants in modern Trinidad.

Along the journey of these ten interconnected stories, the alchemy necessary to turn the Gopauls' inheritance of pain into a "generation of gold" requires intervention by the living and dead, the "real" and the mythical, the mundane and the magical, the secular and the sacred.

This episode of BCLF Cocoa Pod was made possible with the support of funds from the Brooklyn Arts Council Local Arts Support Grant