Category Archives: Carribbean American
Stir It Up by Ramin Ganeshram
Food writer Ramin Ganeshram shares her Indo-Caribbean culinary prowess in her debut title for younger readers about eighth-grader Anjali Krishnan who really knows how to stir things up … and make it all taste great. Working part-time in her family’s busy roti shop – which specializes in Trinidadian comfort cooking – in Richmond Hill, Queens with her father and grandmother, Anjali has delicious dreams: “I want to have my own show about Caribbean food. No one has done that yet. I’ll be the first.”
At 13, she’s well on her way to chef-dom, learning all the family recipes from her grandmother, testing and sharing her own unique creations with some of the shop’s appreciative regulars, and taking serious classes at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan. Then Anjali gets a chance to compete in a reality show featuring kiddie chefs: making the finals turns out to be the easy part, but convincing her parents to let her go to the auditions proves to be a much tougher challenge, especially since tryouts are the exact same date and time as the admissions test for a coveted spot to Stuyvesant High School.
Regardless of her parents’ old-world immigrant insistence on education first, Anjali is not about to give up her dream, especially when she’s can practically smell the curry: “‘… we curry just about everything.’” As talented as she is, however, Anjali’s still got a thing or two to learn about cooking up true success.
With all her cooking and writing experience, Ganeshram gets the blend just right in this toothsome tale about food, family, and feeding not just the belly, but nourishing the mind and soul, as well. The recipes read deliciously, too … as I’m an utter disaster in the kitchen, maybe I can rally my teenagers to give me a helping hand!
Readers: Middle Grade
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, Carribbean American, Indian American
Drown by Junot Diaz
Talk about a surprisingly fortuitous bonus: If you get the audible version of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, included in the deal is Junot Diaz‘s debut title, Drown, a collection of 10 mostly-related short stories. That both Diaz titles are read with such fluency by Jonathan Davis melds both together, as if each book is a complementary extension of the other.
If you haven’t discovered either book yet, the audible versions are highly recommended together. The main reason is Yunior, Oscar‘s narrator, who in spite of his near omniscient vantage point in the novel, reveals little about himself beyond his love for Oscar’s sister Lola which is never enough to curb his extracurricular exploits. Instead, Drown is where Yunior’s life gets revealed in snippets: his origins in the Dominican Republic, growing up with a mostly absent father who left for the United States, his adventures (sometimes brutal) with his older brother Rafa (“Ysrael”), the struggles his mother faces trying to raise her two sons abandoned and alone (“Aguantando”).
Meanwhile, in New York, Yunior’s father works numerous dead-end jobs, trying to figure out how to reunite his family, and falls into another marriage, another life (“Negocios”). The family is eventually reunited, adding a little sister for Rafa and Yunior. Yunior is prone to car sickness earning his father’s violent wrath (“Fiesta 1980″), worries about his sexuality (“Drown”), yet knows all the certain love moves for girls of different ethnicities (“How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie”). As an adult, he’s mourning the loss of his girlfriend for whom he used to steal spending money at his pool table delivery job (“Edison, NJ), although he thinks he might get over his latest breakup by befriending the model in the apartment below whose lover has recently broken her heart (“Boyfriend”).
Diaz’s stories here, about Yunior or not, are all raw, visceral, and each aching with need. The rejected suffering endured in the Dominican Republic does not necessarily abate with an American address. Material and physical comforts (food, transportation, a home) are not enough for the good life, especially with fractured families that can’t seem to find a way back together, regardless of closing distance. Yunior and Oscar: two overlapping books, two diametric lives, one parallel quest for lasting true love.
Readers: Adult
Published: 1996 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Carribbean American
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Here are a few new things I learned from Junot Diaz‘s 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winner that many of you already read long ago …
I get why Junot Diaz’s “guiltiest pleasure of all” is Naoki Urasawa’s 18-volume manga, Monster. I’m right there with him!
I now recognize the splattered gruesome-ness of the cover.
I understand why Diaz deserved the Pulitzer. Who else can go so seamlessly and effortlessly from Toto to Dungeons & Dragons to Scooby-Doo to Elvish … and spout perfect political theory, rant about colonialism, and enlighten you about “linguistic and computational complexity”?
I rejoice once more for Jonathan Davis who narrates Oscar Wao in the audible version, who rightfully won Audible.com’s 4th Annual Tournament of Champions of Audiobooks earlier this year with his recitation of Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. Davis works the same fluid magic with Oscar and company.
But back to Wao (WOW!). In spite of Oscar’s name on the cover, the contents are shared by his extended family, including the many unrequited loves of his life. Narrated by Yunior (who I’m assuming is the same Yunior from Diaz’s short story collection, Drown), the story begins and ends in the Dominican Republic with Oscar’s first and last amors.
Dovetailed with Oscar’s endless search for love – from his 7-year-old Dominican Casanova self, to his rotund New Jersey teenaged years obsessed with role-playing games, to his depressed overweight adult incarnation scribbling hundreds of pages of fantasy novels (not to mention his expansive erudite vocabulary) – is an intricate family saga that spans two countries, three generations, multiple decades, and the heinous reign of “Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated.”
From the barest distance, Yunior – as Oscar’s friend and short-term roommate who should have been Oscar’s brother-in-law if only he could keep his manhood from wandering – omnisciently fills in Oscar’s family tree. Oscar’s protective older sister Lola is a feisty, independent woman forced to grow up too soon by a mother incapable of showing the love her daughter craves. Mother Beli with secrets of her own, is dying from cancer, but determined to protect her children any way she can. And Oscar and Lola’s waiting grandmother La Inca back in DR is the holder of an ancestral nightmare her grandchildren will never know, but from which we readers cannot turn away.
The resulting collage of legends, memories, curses, and history is as gorgeous as it is horrific. Brief, yes. Wondrous, yes. And shattering, funny, wrenching, inspiring, tortuous … and finally, hopeful. “The beauty! The beauty,” the final page hauntingly echoes …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2007 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, Carribbean American
Eight Days: A Story of Haiti by Edwidge Danticat, illustrated by Alix Delinois
This has been one tragic week: the deadly Oaxaca, Mexico mudslide, the two Rutgers freshmen whose abusively invasive actions led to the suicide of a third first-year student, the deaths of iconic actor Tony Curtis and director Arthur Penn … and goodness, I feel like I’m just getting started …
So on this last day of September, I thought it was time to post a happy ending story of survival against all odds.
No one writes as memorably of Haiti than the award-winning Edwidge Danticat. And goodness can she render some of the most horrific, haunting inhumanity into remarkably flowing, unforgettable prose. Her latest title is dedicated to “the children of Haiti,” the children who survived the January 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake, who “in spite of everything, … still dream … laugh … live … [and] love.”
Eight days after the earth shook, a young boy is pulled from the rubble that was once his house. “I was brave,” he states simply when asked if he was afraid, sad, if he cried. And he tells the wondrous story of how he survived through his imagination: “In my mind, I played.”
Trapped and frightened, the little boy created delightful adventures each day, imagining that he was playing with his best friend Oscar, flying kites, gathering “the biggest game of marbles ever played … in the entire world!” He plays ‘hide-and-seek,’ teases his sister, visits his father’s barbershop, sings “the best solo ever sung,” gives his mother mango-kisses, even remembers to recite his lessons. And when he is finally pulled to freedom, he “hugged [his family] so tight I thought I would never let go.”
Captured with hopeful vibrancy by Haitian American artist Alix Delinois, the power of imaginative play, of hours spent in childhood wonder, the final relief of grace-filled reunion, emanate from the pages. In spite of all the tragedy around us, how lovely (and necessary) to be reminded of happy endings and miraculous re-beginnings.
Today … and every day … hold your children tight, teach them to be kind and gentle, read them stories like this one and keep fueling their joyful spirits.
Click here to see Edwidge Danticat’s other titles on BookDragon.
Readers: Children
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Fiction, African American, Carribbean American
I and I: Bob Marley by Tony Medina, illustrated by Jesse Joshua Watson
A gorgeously rendered collection of poems that capture the colorful life of Nesta Robert Marley, born in 1945 to a young island girl just 18 and a 63-year-old British white man in a small town in Jamaica. Although his father quickly abandoned the young family, the older Marley’s choice of the name ‘Nesta,’ which means “messenger,” proved prescient. As a young child, Marley was thought to have special gifts as a divine messenger and seer able to look into the future.
Growing up in the island’s shanty neighborhoods, Marley saw music as his only escape. Dropping out of school, he pursued his dream first with a band, the Wailng Wailers, adopted Rastafarian as his religion, and eventually became a voice for the voiceless through his distinct music. He brought reggae to the international forefront, traveling all over the world with his messagae of peace, justice, and equality. He collapsed in 1980 after a Madison Square Garden concert, was diagnosed with cancer which had already spread throughout his body, and quickly passed away at just age 36 – a death he had predicted 11 years previously.
A four-page guide to the poems appears at book’s end, and provides invaluable insight into the legendary Marley’s life. While the youngest readers will appreciate the simplicity of the story and its many gorgeous pictures, adults sharing the book with their lucky youngsters will be able to enjoy it on an even more meaningful level.
Readers: Children
Published: 2009 Continue reading
He Drown She in the Sea by Shani Mootoo
This one is just delicious – and delightfully plotted as to how it plays with time and place and people. The beginning: a man, a woman, her husband, her daughter. Fast backward to the man and woman and their intertwined childhoods until the woman’s father unjustly banishes the then-boy. Thankfully in the end – in this case, the middle, as well – true love triumphs.
Review: “New and Notable Books,” AsianWeek, August 4, 2005
Readers: Adult
Published: 2005 Continue reading
The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat + Author Interview
Horror, Hope & Redemption: A Talk with Edwidge Danticat About Her Latest Novel, The Dew Breaker
When I mention to a dear friend in England, who happens to be an excellent fiction writer herself, that I’m preparing to interview Edwidge Danticat, her reply is swift: “I can’t believe you’re interviewing Edwidge Danticat. She is an amazing writer, writes all those things we Europeans are trained to feel they shouldn’t name.” Indeed, Danticat’s books have covered some of the worst atrocities humans perpetrate on one another, while her prowess as a writer allows her to reveal her stories in nuanced, elegant prose. In spite of her youth – she’s just in her mid-30s – the seemingly effortless grace of Danticat’s work belies a wisdom gained only in experiences that cannot possibly be measured by age.
Her latest book is no different. Published last spring to unabashedly glowing reviews, The Dew Breaker is ultimately a novel of hope and redemption, but the details throughout are horrific and haunting. The title refers to a torturer employed by the brutal government of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier to kidnap, maim, and kill people, so named because the dew breaker usually arrived “before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves.”
Like her latest novel, Danticat’s other fiction, Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!; The Farming of Bones; and young adult novel Behind the Mountains, is a powerful mixture of her native Haiti’s turbulent collective history and her own transforming journey to America. Born in a time of political and economic instability, Danticat was raised by her aunt and uncle in Haiti until her parents, who had previously emigrated to the United States, sent for her when she was 12. …[click here for more]
Author interview: The Bloomsbury Review, September/October 2004
Readers: Adult
Published: 2004 Continue reading
Series Profile: First Person Fiction
Behind the Mountains by Edwidge Danticat
Flight to Freedom by Ana Veciana-Suarez
Finding My Hat by John Son
The Stone Goddess by Minfong Ho
With the exception of the Native Americans—and some may still argue that they walked over the Bering Straits from Asia – every so-called American is actually an immigrant. Even as the term “American” may still connote a fair-skinned Caucasian who is blond and blue-eyed, in reality Americans come in every color, from every ethnicity and every culture.
In the publishing industry, Scholastic has been a major leader in depicting the lives of every type of young American with three highly popular series – Dear America, My America, and My Name Is America – all of which capture the American experience from colonial to modern times, including numerous historical immigrant experiences as well. The latest Scholastic series, First Person Fiction, focuses on the more recent immigrant experience. “Today’s immigrants have different expectations from the people who came a hundred or more years ago,” says Amy Griffin, senior editor of Orchard Books, the Scholastic imprint responsible for the series. “Before, it was about assimilation. Today, it’s about maintaining a balance between the culture of the world left behind, and marrying that home culture with the new culture that is America.”
First Person Fiction debuted in October 2002 with two titles – Behind the Mountains by Edwidge Danticat and Flight to Freedom by Ana Veciana-Suarez – then added two titles, Finding My Hat by John Son and The Stone Goddess by Minfong Ho, in October 2003. The first two are scheduled for paperback release in February 2004. “We wanted to find writers who themselves had immigrated to America,” explains Griffin. “Because they would understand the struggles and get the voice right, readers could trust these writers’ knowledge of the immigrant experience.” …[click here for more]
Series profile: The Bloomsbury Review, January/February 2004
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2003 Continue reading
House of Waiting by Marina Tamar Budhos
Sarah, a young and naive New York Jew, impulsively marries Roland, an Indian immigrant from the Caribbean. Months after the wedding, Roland returns to his native Guiana, embroiled in its political turmoil. As Sarah waits for his return, she creates a new life among Roland’s tight community of East Indian transplants.
Review: “Asian American Titles,” What Do I Read Next? Multicultural Literature, Gale Research, 1997
Readers: Adult
Published: 1995 Continue reading
A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez
A young woman, the child of a Chinese Panamanian father and a German mother, grows up in New York housing projects trying to make sense of her identity. She survives her adolescence by immersing herself in ballet, escapes to college, and as an adult, teaches English to immigrants, eventually becoming involved with a Russian student.
A remarkable debut novel that has at its core, an powerful exploration of language – of English as a foreign language that both parents are forced to learn yet will never master, of the mother tongues of both parents that the narrator is denied, of the language that the narrator as an adult tries to impart to her students, and the broken language she shares with her foreign lover.
Review: “Asian American Titles,” What Do I Read Next? Multicultural Literature, Gale Research, 1997
Readers: Adult
Published: 1995 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, Carribbean American, Chinese American, European, Hapa
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