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Herbert G. De Lisser -- Born 1878 in
Jamaica. Died 1944. Publications included Jane's Career: A
Story of Jamaica (1914), Susan Proudleigh (1915), Triumphant
Squalitone (1917), Revenge: A Tale of Old Jamaica
(1919),
The White Witch of Rosehall
(1929; 1960) Under
the Sun (1937),
Psyche
(1952),
Morgan's
Daughter
(1953), The Cup and the Lip (1956), and The Arawak
Girl (1958).
H.G. de Lisser was a prominent figure in Jamaican society.
Working upward from relative poverty he became editor of the
Jamaica Daily Gleaner -- a post held for forty years. His series
of novels reveal a knowledge of West Indian history and
understanding of Jamaican dialect. |
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The White Witch of Rosehall sets on a slave
plantation in the early nineteenth century. The owner Annie
Palmer is an Irish woman who used to live in Haiti, a mysterious
island.
From England Robert Rutherford comes to Jamaica to be a
book-keeper at Rosehall. He is sought after by both Annie Palmer
and Millie, a free native. Annie uses witchcraft and casts a
spell on Millie, which leads Takoo, a Guinea man and Millie's
grandfather, to intervene.
Takoo's magi fails and Millie dies. Rutherford realizes Annie
is a ruthless woman and is about to expose her when an
insurrection breaks out. The Europeans put down the rebellion
but Takoo strangled Annie Palmer. Rutherford is sickened by
Jamaica and returns to England. * * * *
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Claude
McKay
-- Born in
Jamaica, Died 1948. Educated in Jamaica and United States.
Publications include
Songs of Jamaica (1912),
Constabulary Ballads (1912), Spring in New Hampshire and
Other Poems (1920), Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude
McKay (1922), Home to Harlem
(novel, 1928), Banjo
(novel, 1929),
Gingertown (short stories, 1932),
Banana
Bottom (novel, 1933),
A Long Way from Home
(autobiography,
1937),
Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940),
Selected Poems (1953).
Compare to McKay's
Banana
Bottom, de Lisser's
The White Witch of Rosehall is "reactionary and
insignificant in West Indian writing."
The White Witch ends
with "a rejection of the West Indies, McKay's is an
assertion of West Indian life and manners. |
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Banana
Bottom is also a
"protest against the insensitive imposition of
European values on West Indians."
McKay was a great contrast to de Lisser: he was black and
poor and he was forced to leave Jamaica in order to seek a
living.
In
Banana
Bottom, the heroine is Bita Plant, a black
West Indian. Brought up by missionaries Reverend Malcolm Craig
and his wife Priscilla, Bita is sent at their expense to an
English university, a continental tour included. Bit becomes a
disappointment as a religious experiment: she does not return to
Jamaica and marry the local pompous Herald Newton Day, the
promising student at the Tabernacle Theological College.
Instead, Bita trips herself of the acquired European polish
which she finds "unnatural and irrelevant in a west Indian
context. Ritually, she destroys the photographs of her
university and "marries the good and strong workman Jubban."
Banana Bottom provides a "vivid picture of Jamaican life in
the 1890s." The "honest values and a spontaneous
openness to experience," characteristics of a true Jamaica,
make Bita's "rejection of European fastidiousness and
inhibition a credible act of emancipation." * * * *
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Cyril Lionel Robert James -- Born in 1901
in Trinidad. Died 1989 in south London (Brixton). Educated Queen's
Royal College, Trinidad.
Publications included The Life of Captain Cipriani
(1933), The Case for West Indian Self-Government (1933),
Minty
Allen (a novel, 1936),
World Revolution, 1917-1936: The
Rise and Fall of the Communist International (1937),
A
History of Negro Revolt (1938),
The Black Jacobins: A
Study of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938;
1963),
Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: Herman Melville
and the World We Live In (1953), Party Politics in the
West Indies (1962), and
Beyond a Boundary (1963). |
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