New ebooks From Canadian Indies
Description
Shani Mootoo’s great-great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad as indentured labourers by the British. There is no record of where they were from in India or whether it was kidnapping, trickery, or false promises of wealth that took them to the Caribbean.
In Oh Witness Dey! Mootoo expands the question of origins, from ancestry percentages and journey narratives, through memory, story, and lyric fragments. These vibrant poems transcend the tropes of colonial violence through saints and spices, rebellion and joy, to reimagine tensions and solidarities among various diasporas. They circumvent traditional conventions of style to find new routes toward understanding. They invite the reader to witness history, displacements, and the legacies of our inheritance.
Editorial Reviews
“In addition to an invigorating use of documentary poetics, Mootoo uses linguistic maximalism to propel and punctuate the text. One such example is a list…she repeats throughout the book, and it functions to draw connections between disparate peoples’ experiences across the vast scope of the text.” —melanie brannagan frederiksen, Winnipeg Free Press
"Biting and gritty, each poem is a snapshot of the “flotsam and jetsam” of the world, “the origins of you and me / In the crucible of nuclear reaction.” Oh Witness Dey! confronts the politics of belonging and reflects on how individual experiences—those crucial “umbilical cords”—connect us to our common history."—Literary Review of Canada
