Novel
Myal
Erna Brodber · 1988
Synopsis
In colonial Jamaica at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ella O'Grady, a young mixed-race girl from Grove Town, distinguishes herself by reciting Kipling at school; the Brassingtons then send her to study in the United States, where she marries Selwyn Langley, a white American who turns stories from her village into a minstrel show in blackface. Back on the island after this unhappy marriage, light enough to pass for white, Ella is struck by an illness that no one can name, and the community gathers to heal her.
Context
The novel appeared in London from New Beacon Books in 1988, in one hundred and twelve pages, eight years after its author's first novel, and Waveland Press has reissued it in the United States. She presented it as an exploration of the links between two points of the Black diaspora, African Americans and Afro-Jamaicans. It takes myal, an Afro-Jamaican religion, as its principle of healing, and makes the heroine's “zombification” an image of what colonisation takes from minds.
Who it is for
A short novel, of a little over a hundred pages, whose story draws on Afro-Jamaican beliefs; it demands attention.
Prizes and reception
Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Caribbean and Canada region in 1989, the year after its publication.
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