This brief biography looks at one of the most influential writers from the francophone Caribbean. Aimé Césaire was a poet, playwright and politician, who, along with Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana and Léopold Senghor of Senegal, founded the Negritude movement in the 1930s. The men had come together as young black students in Paris at a time when the French capital had become the locus of ideas on black identity and pan-Africanism. The Negritude movement called for a cultural awakeni...

This novel, loosely inspired by Flaubert's Madame Bovary, focuses on the life of an upper middle class family in modern day Trinidad.The island, independent since 1962, still struggles with its multiethnic and multicultural complexities, and is fraught with corruption and violence. The heroine, Mrs. B (Marie Elena Butcher), is fast approaching 50. In her mid-life she is forced to admit that neither Ruthie, her daughter, nor her marriage to Charles Butcher, has met her expe...

"To travel through the nineteen works of poetry and prose in this remarkable anthology is to experience Trinidad and Tobago through a kaleidoscopic lens. The writings are grouped into four historically significant periods ('Leaving Colonialism,' 'Facing Independence,' 'Looking In,' and 'Losing Control'). It's an effective construct; the reader experiences island culture and history as a part of its time, formed by a pastiche of nationality, culture, and social class. Standouts abound."

This book is distinctive by its trilingual nature; the short stories by Caribbean women writers appear in English, French, Spanish.

Literature has no geographical border and can so easily relocate and migrate into our literary imagination. The only real difficulty facing such crossings is the ever-present language barriers that have for too long limited the ways in which the Caribbean is read, perceived and interpreted. What is distinctive about Border Crossings: A Trilingual Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers is its trilingual nature; all of the stories appear in English, French and Spanish. To date, no ant...