Caribbean Children's Literature, Volume 2: Critical Approaches

Contributions by Jarrel De Matas, Summer Edward, Teófilo Espada-Brignoni, Pauline Franchini, Melissa García Vega, Dannabang Kuwabong, Amanda Eaton McMenamin, Betsy Nies, and Michael Reyes

Caribbean Children's Literature, Volume 2: Critical Approaches offers analyses of the works of writers of the Anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora—or, except for one chapter on Francophone Caribbean children’s literature, those who write in English. The volume addresses the four language regions, early children’s literature of conquest—in particular, the US colonization of Puerto Rico—and the fine line between children’s and adult literature. It explores multiple young adult genres, probing the nuances and difficulties of historical fiction and the anticolonial impulses of contemporary speculative fiction. Additionally, the volume offers an overview of the literature of disaster and recovery, significant for readers living in a region besieged by earthquakes, hurricanes, and flooding.

In this anthology and its companion anthology, international and regional scholars provide coverage of both areas, offering in-depth explorations of picture books, middle-grade, and young adult stories. The volumes examine the literary histories of both children’s and young adult literature according to language region, its use (or lack thereof) in schools, and its place in the field of publishing. Taken together, the essays expand our understanding of Caribbean literature for young people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: May 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781496844606

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Betsy Nies

While Caribbean literature has been internationally established as an area of study since the 1960s, the scholarly analysis of this literature that targets adults has overshadowed the field’s counterpart—the world of Caribbean literature specifically written for children and young adults. The region’s complicated history as a site of imperial and colonial domination, with educational systems and libraries offering content reflective of their ruling nations, has impacted, of course, the field. As various countries claimed their independence or distanced themselves ideologically from colonial powers, changes in books for children mirrored evolving concepts of national and cultural identity. Cynthia James argues that in the Anglophone region, following outsiders’ ethnographic fascination with recording oral stories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, folktales emerged as one of the first local sources of children’s literature, entering classrooms as primers or readers (166). The gradual transformation of literature taught in secondary schools in the same region following independence reflected the urgency to build postcolonial curricula reflective of local voices, a move already underway or emerging in the educational and library systems of the Spanish, Dutch, and French Caribbean.¹ In the Anglophone region, the adoption of short stories, novels, and poetry by secondary schools included such renowned authors as Sam Selvon, Earl Lovelace, and George Lamming in the 1960s, to be followed by Olive Senior, Merle Hodge, Jamaica Kincaid, and Erna Brodber in the 1970s and 1980s (among others). Across the Caribbean, educators now provide students with material that reflects local contexts and familiar situations. Yet, in 1990, Merle Hodge, a well-known Trinidadian author of two young adult books, noted the lack of good fictional literature for teachers to bring into the classroom beyond the folktales for young readers or literature written for adults being served up to secondary students (207–8). Even today, exposure to contemporary children’s and young adult literature remains limited in schools and among the reading public according to several sources.² Indeed, the use of readers that contain local material has created a certain institutionalization of reading as a pedagogical tool instead of an act of pleasure.³ In one 2012 study of regional children’s literature in Trinidad and Tobago’s Port of Spain Children’s Library, Sujin Huggins discovered that a high proportion of books focused on folklore, pedagogy, and language mastery instead of reading for enjoyment (90, 200). Such local literature represented only 3 percent of the collection (2). Truly, regional literature written specifically for children has faced a host of barriers in terms of reaching the general public, according to people familiar with the industry: a glut of international literature available at far cheaper rates than local literature; a lack of sustained visibility of trade books via bookstores, libraries, or schools; limited (but growing) support for trade books among local publishers; a failure to substantially introduce such literature in teacher preparatory programs; and a dependency on self-publishing as an alternative, resulting in restricted access to marketing platforms and, therefore, sales.⁴

While many of these issues remain, public recognition of the value of children’s and young adult literature has risen throughout the Caribbean. Efforts have been made to grow the field through the work of universities, local literary festivals, and individuals who provide ongoing access to workshops, writers’ groups, and associations, often participating in public initiatives to deepen the field.⁵ In the Anglophone Caribbean, Summer Edward has been one of the region’s greatest advocates for the recognition of children’s literature as a field of scholarly import and public importance.⁶ She launched the online magazine Anansesem: News, Ideas, Arts, and Letters from the World of Caribbean Children’s & YA Publishing in 2010, providing authors, educators, and interested parties extensive book lists, interviews, and historical information about the state of children’s literature in the region. Notably, awards for such literature have encouraged the publication and circulation of such books. The Canadian Organization for Development through Education (CODE) Burt Awards have stimulated young adult novel production in Anglophone Caribbean countries beginning in 2012 with its award guaranteeing both the publication and distribution of prize-winning books. Blue Banyan Books in Jamaica started a young adult line supporting these finalists and winners, lending credence to this emerging field. The newly launched Caribbean Readers’ Award, out of Jamaica, includes categories for Best Young Adult Novel and Best Middle Grade/Tween Novel. Additionally, Trinidad’s Bocas Lit Fest, which ran the Burt Awards, now offers the Bocas Children’s Book Prize, encouraging growth in the literary and illustrative quality of children’s books written by Caribbean authors. Finally, many well-known writers of the Caribbean diaspora now write for children and young adults, including Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, and Olive Senior. The extensive and growing nature of the field warrants scholarly attention.

Historically, American and British children’s literature has attracted the most academic attention internationally, with interest in African, Asian, and Latin American children’s literature surfacing only in the past few decades (see, for example, Routledge’s Children’s Literature and Culture series). Understanding regional literatures such as that of Caribbean can contribute to a broader understanding of the international field of children’s literature. Additionally, understanding literary histories and finely tuned analyses of specific works can serve as a launching point for educators and scholars to broaden their literary horizons. Only one anthology to date has brought awareness to Caribbean children’s literature, with an emphasis on concepts of the child: The Child and the Caribbean Imagination (2012), edited by Giselle Rampaul and Geraldine Skeete. While volume 1 of Caribbean Children’s Literature provides coverage of children’s literary history across language regions, and pedagogical and publishing issues, this second volume offers analyses of the works of writers of the Anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora—or, with the exception of one chapter on Francophone Caribbean children’s literature, those who write in English. It addresses the early children’s literature of conquest, in particular the US colonization of Puerto Rico, and the fine line between children’s and adult literature, via the lens of the Francophone region. It explores multiple young adult genres, probing the nuances and difficulties of historical fiction and the anticolonial impulses of contemporary speculative fiction. Additionally, the volume offers an overview of the literature of disaster and recovery, significant for readers living in a region besieged by earthquakes, hurricanes, and flooding. With the rise of sea levels and the effects of global warming, the volume targets books that envision strategies for survival. As Caribbean educators struggle to meet the challenges of what’s ahead, they can turn to such books as a resource for guiding children through the thicket of ongoing environmental, political, and global change.

Politicizing the Picture Book

Summer Edward brings her wide-ranging knowledge of children’s literature to the first comprehensive review of Caribbean picture books published in English in chapter 1 of this volume, "The Picture Book Is Political: English-Language Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Literature as Littérature Engagée. As an advocate of what has been critically termed the literature of own voices," Edward believes that authors from the region can provide authentic perspectives unavailable to those without the lived experience. She locates a range of historical categories—from slavery through abolition and independence, labor organizing and civil rights, and socialism and communism. She reviews books that examine contemporary issues like disability rights, environmentalism, and gender and sexuality. While picture books serve as her focal point, she also outlines information on books for middle-grade readers and teens. She includes a range of genres—biography, fiction, historical fiction, and more—creating a deep resource for librarians, curricula builders, teachers, scholars, and parents. Her chapter also discusses works originally published in Spanish (and then English). She provides an appendix with books grouped by age category. Her chapter then becomes a treasure trove of information, useful for building in-class libraries for leisure reading, supplementing interdisciplinary subjects, or supporting children’s leisure-reading habits.

History’s Troubled Waters

As Marilisa Jiménez-García writes, Children’s literature is often at the forefront of nation and empire building (114). Signature British works and their iterations clearly play out this practice in their fantasies of the physical and cultural domination of islanders and their geographical spaces. One need only think of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), or J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904) and their endless spin-offs for young children to consider the ideological ramifications of this literature. For example, Robinson Crusoe, a text that takes place off the coast of Venezuela, was commonly received by its readership as a structuring fantasy of the British colonization of the West Indies (Sands-O’Connor 5). As Crusoe so famously narrates,

My island was now peopled, and I thought myself very rich in Subjects; and it was a merry reflection, which I frequently made, How like a king I look’d. First of all, the whole Country was my own meer [sic] Property, that I had an undoubted right of Dominion. 2dly, my People were perfectly subjected. I was absolute Lord and Lawgiver; they all owed their lives to me, and were ready to lay down their lives, if there had been occasion of it, for me. (174)

Crusoe rescues his servant Friday from a cannibal tribe, converts his new subject to Christianity, and makes the island inhabitable, all typical tropes of literary colonialism. In France, Jean de Brunhoff’s The Story of Babar: The Little Elephant was published the same year as the Exposition Coloniale Internationale of 1931, which contained twelve thousand booths showcasing the various colonial possessions of Europe’s leading powers, attracting more than thirty-three million visitors (O’Harrow 89). It is then not surprising that Babar would serve as a conduit for imperialistic desire, given France’s position as Europe’s second-leading colonizer at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the second book, The Travels of Babar (1932), the protagonist and his wife, Celeste, set off on their honeymoon in a balloon, only to find themselves stranded on a tropical island; while Babar explores, Celeste finds herself tied up by stereotypical black-skinned cannibals. The reliance on oppositions—civilized versus savage, European versus African or Caribbean—similarly informed US efforts to define itself as a nation, not only during the formation of the country but continually, peaking during its imperial period, which included the acquisition of Caribbean territory from Spain at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Spanish-American War resulted in the US attainment from Spain of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines in the 1898 Treaty of Paris. As Jiménez-García notes, following the war, a series of children’s books about Puerto Rico emerged to celebrate the US’s new possession. Children’s and young adult stories featured this freshly colonized space as one of investment or adventure. Titles included the anonymously published Our Latest Insular Possession (1899), Edward L. Stratemeyer’s series book Young Hunters in Porto Rico; or, The Search for Lost Treasure (1900), and Margaret Penrose’s The Motor Girls in Waters Blue (1915) (Jiménez-García 140–41, n10). In 1899, the US-based A. Flanagan Company sought financial gain by introducing such fiction into the US school system. They started an educational series—an imagined travelogue of journeys to these places, including Puerto Rico and Cuba—that established imperial relationships with impunity, narrativizing the subjectivity of its child readers according to their national identities. Unpacking such imperial histories serves as one step toward lifting the veil on the relationship between children’s literature, imperialism, and the interpellation of young readers into dominant ideological formations.

Teófilo Espada-Brignoni, in chapter 2 of this volume, "Constructing Puerto Rico: Marian M. George’s A Little Journey to Puerto Rico and Creative Voyeurism, examines a book from Flanagan’s series. Relying on Foucauldian discourse theory, Espada-Brignoni analyzes the way this educational work encouraged young, white US readers to identify themselves as superior to their Puerto Rican counterparts. As with other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travel literature, readers were encouraged to become voyeurs, peering into houses, peeping into rooms, dissecting strange" customs similar to but different from their own. Perhaps not surprisingly, George sought to educate these schoolchildren about the economic benefits of imperial expansion and the presumed cultural and educational benefits such expansion provided for the territory. Espada-Brignoni’s analysis of the text opens a window to understanding the long, intricate, and unequal relationship that continues between the US and Puerto Rico today.

Rejoinders to such long-standing colonial children’s literary traditions have always been part and parcel of Caribbean literature for children, whether it be the folktales, proverbs, songs, or riddles of the oral traditions with their trickster figures such as Anansi (ready to unseat anyone in a position of power) or the recent spate of literary fiction that seeks to reclaim an indigenous connection to the Taíno.⁷ Writers such as Puerto Rico’s Tere Marichal-Lugo and Haiti’s Maryse Noël Roumain provide coverage of Taíno myths in picture books, while Manuel Otero Portela and the Puerto Rican publishing collective Editorial El Antillano offer introductions to Taíno daily life alongside superhero adventures (featuring a Taíno superhero named Tai) through picture books, DVDs, and graphic novels, work that started in the 1970s. Haitian American Edwidge Danticat adds to the conversation with her book Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490 (2005), one among several books that treat this famed Taíno leader who was hanged by the conquering Spanish.

As Elena Machado Sáez notes, writers of the Caribbean diaspora such as Danticat, Díaz, and Alvarez frequently adopt historical fiction as a genre to educate US and global readers about the history of the region. She writes,

Postcolonial ethics that aim to teach the reader about Caribbean history are key to the aesthetic design of Caribbean diasporic historical novels that exemplify the traditional defining qualities of the genre. The pedagogical imperative is primarily expressed through the genre of realism, illuminating a previously marginalized aspect of Caribbean history or challenging the dominant narrative about a historical period or figure. (82)

Using Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) as an example, Machado Sáez notes that the author situates historical information in footnotes, essentially building a bridge between the uninformed reader and knowledge about the history of the Dominican Republic. Writing for children, however, poses a different set of challenges. A genre marked by counternarratives that challenge fantasies of empty or savage-filled spaces, Caribbean historical fiction for children also must address the complexities of navigating self-imposed authorial restrictions in response to audience expectations that position children’s books as narratives of hope and child readers as naïve or innocent. Engaging with the past then becomes a tricky endeavor. With genocide so central to Caribbean history—the loss of Taíno and Kalinago peoples to disease, warfare, and slavery—how then do authors address the trauma of such events? Additionally, can they counterbalance a history of erasure without romanticizing the precolonial moment?

In chapter 3 of this volume, "‘What Will I Be Called in the Future?’ Subverting Expectations of Taíno Tragedy in Edwidge Danticat’s Anacaona: Golden Flower," Francophone scholar Michael Reyes explores how Danticat walks this line between despair and hope. He argues that she foregrounds Anacaona’s royal training, her romance with another provincial leader, and her role as a mother, rejecting then the common interpretation of her life in Haitian historical and literary accounts as tragic. Instead of focusing on her death, Danticat supplies young readers with fictionalized opportunities to connect to the Taíno people through memory and place. Targeting readers ages nine to twelve, Danticat structures Anacaona’s diary according to agricultural seasons, months, and days. The book ends with a Taíno victory (burning down a Spanish settlement), saving historical information about Anacaona’s hanging (and her husband’s capture by the Spanish and ensuing death by drowning) for the epilogue. She allows Anacaona prophetic dreams but ends the plot before her own ending arrives. As Reyes notes, Danticat does not omit the graphic violence of the colonization, such as the gutting of a pregnant woman and the killing of children. But she highlights a life well lived, an important focal point, Reyes argues, given the current impact of globalization in the Caribbean and subsequent erasure or sublimation of local histories.

While Danticat educates about the Taíno, Julia Alvarez educates readers about the reign of the murderous dictator Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic in her young adult book Before We Were Free (2002). Rather than examining an early colonial interaction, she focuses on destabilizing oppositions between dominating and subjugated nations, writing not only of the violence and terror of this brutal dictator, as experienced by twelve-year-old Anita de la Torre, but also of US complicity in promising but failing to assist opposition leaders following Trujillo’s assassination. Anita lives in a compound with her family and the US consul, Henry Washburn. Both her father and uncle are killed—and another uncle has gone missing—after they participate in the dictator’s assassination. As Amanda Eaton McMenamin argues in chapter 4 of this volume, "When Will ‘We’ Be Free? Interrogating US Imperialism in Julia Alvarez’s Young Adult Novel Before We Were Free, even though Anita’s family escapes from the Dominican Republic to join relatives in New York, the narrative questions whether Anita actually reaches freedom; she escapes from one repressive situation to another in which racism and the oppressive authority of the Catholic Church weigh heavily on her spirit. As Machado Sáez notes, Caribbean diasporic historical novels often impart to their readers a comparative vision of history, revealing parallels between the Global North and the Caribbean" (88). McMenamin unpacks not only a critique of American colonial history in the text (Anita has to play an Indian in the American diplomatic school’s Thanksgiving play—in opposition to her white classmates, who play colonists) but also the imperial relationship of the US to the Dominican Republic and by extension Latin America. Even with Alvarez’s seemingly progressive agenda, McMenamin observes, in a study of teachers’ use of the book in the classroom, US students continue to see the Dominican Republic as a place of oppression and the US as one of freedom—thus instituting the very oppositions the book challenges. Having US educators read such critical analyses can heighten their attention to details that challenge the hegemonic view of the dominant culture in which they participate.

Espada-Brignoni, Reyes, and McMenamin then draw attention to the ways that oppression leaves it mark—through colonization, imperialism, and even education. This anthology hopes to support teachers in their professional practice, in their own efforts to unravel embedded hierarchies in literature that may impact their students. Teaching history through literature remains an important avenue for laying bare the inequities between majority and marginalized groups across time so that students can make connections between the past and the present. Contemporary writers for young adults provide opportunities to integrate such histories into the classroom in ways that move beyond the prepackaged synthesis provided by textbooks into the more nuanced interpretations of personal experience.

As with writing about colonialism and genocide in children’s literature, historicizing slavery in fiction for young people also proves challenging for similar reasons. Writers, to meet the imagined needs of their young audiences, rely on heroism and exceptionalism to drive narratives, pushing into the background the unrelenting oppression and violence most slaves faced.⁸ For example, Cuban American Margarita Engle, who publishes in Spanish and English, offers a series of biographies that highlight some of Cuba’s civil rights heroes and slaves. In The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist (2014), she tells the story of nineteenth-century fourteen-year-old Cuban feminist and abolitionist Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, who went on to write a widely known abolitionist novel Sab (1841). In The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano (2006; winner of the 2008 Pura Belpré Medal for Narrative), she writes in verse about a young nineteenth-century slave kept, in her narrative words, as a pet, only to later become one of Cuba’s most renowned poets. James Berry of Jamaica and the United Kingdom veers closer to exposing the cruelties of slavery in his young adult book Ajeemah and His Son (1994). The story details the journey of two young adults who, while betrothed, are captured in Africa and sold to separate plantations in Jamaica, never to see each other again. In another account, humorous in nature, Puerto Rican author Fernando Picó, with illustrations by María Antonia Ordóñez, published La peineta colorada (1991; translated as The Red Comb, 1994), tells the story of a young girl and an elderly woman hiding a runaway slave. Drawing on the fugitive slave laws of Puerto Rico, which he details in the book’s back matter, Picó depicts a tale of a strong Black community that works together. But perhaps as interesting as the fictionalized historical accounts are the speculative narratives that allow for retribution. While historical fiction tries to ground its tales in actual events, speculative fiction allows history to serve as a more distant anchor, offering the writer greater flexibility in righting the wrongs that support social, economic, physical, and material inequities.

Speculative Fiction: Transformations in the Genre

When Trinidadian Canadian Nalo Hopkinson solicited science fiction stories from Caribbean writers for her edited anthology Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000), she received stories not populated by spaceships and alien worlds ripe for colonization, so common to European and US science fiction, but rather what she calls fabulist fiction, featuring the accepted presence of the spiritual world as a reality in everyday life. More commonly called speculative fiction and celebrated as liberatory in African American and Afro-Caribbean adult literary traditions, the genre evokes the unseen, the submerged, the suppressed—otherworldly knowledges that survived the Middle Passage or other immigrant passageways that helped produce the syncretic religions of the Caribbean. The forces of maligned faiths such as Vodou, Espiritismo, and Santería, or figures from folklore such as Papa Bois, Mama Dlo, and other Caribbean familiars, butt up against the technological and rational engines of globalization that keep the marginalized—often people of color—firmly in place. Caribbean writers such as Hopkinson, Karen Lord (Barbados), and Erna Brodber (Jamaica) spin such tales for adults, critiquing the economic, social, and cultural values that undergird the status quo. Following in their footsteps or walking alongside them, writers for children from the Caribbean and its diaspora present similar perspectives, challenging readers to consider how the forces that generate the coloniality of power—and other interlocking systems of oppression such as racism, heterosexism, and ableism—can be transformed.

In Caribbean speculative literature for children, providing imaginative ways to transcend the past stands front and center. While children might walk through portals (wardrobes or train platforms) into allegorical Christian lands or schools of wizardry in British high fantasy, or fight aliens in US science fiction, in Caribbean fiction, child readers are more likely to meet a spiritual figure, often of African origin, who has arrived to help the protagonist mitigate some contemporary social or cultural ill. For example, Richardo Keens-Douglas of Grenada, Joel Franz Rosell of Cuba and France, and Joanne Skerrett of Dominica all rely on the genre to challenge slavery’s legacy. In Keens-Douglas’s Freedom Child of the Sea (1995), illustrated by Julia Gukova, a swimmer nearly drowns off an unnamed Caribbean island, only to find himself rescued by a boy with scars covering his back. When the swimmer shares this remarkable story with a stranger on the beach, he learns the legend of the Freedom Child of the Sea, whose pregnant mother was thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. Now she lives with her son under the sea, willing to surface only when those on land have learned to live together peacefully. Rosell spins a similar tale written in a more traditional allegorical fashion. First published in French and distributed in French Guiana and France, La légende de Taïta Osongo (The Legend of Taïta Osongo; 2004) has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese for wide distribution in Latin America and Cuba. In the story, a rapacious sailor named Severo Blanco takes the boat Fortuna to search for and pillage a rich African nation. Despite being rescued from his sinking ship, Blanco kidnaps his rescuers and one spiritually powerful elder—Taïta Osongo—to sell them into slavery in Cuba. Rosell then rolls the story forward to a moment when Osongo’s grandson, who has fallen in love with Blanco’s daughter, faces persecution for their interracial relationship. Capable of offering protection to his grandson even after death, Osongo interferes, throwing a wrench into the unyielding white supremacy that infects this Caribbean island nation. Joanne Skerrett also draws on speculative forces to topple an Australian fortune seeker, a descendent of British slave owners, who comes to steal the rightful treasure of two Afro-Dominica teens. In Abraham’s Treasure (2012), part of Macmillan Caribbean’s Island Fiction series for young adults, Skerrett depicts the landscape as sympathetic to the plight of the boys, who first find the treasure in a boiling volcanic lake; with the treasure in view, the boys watch the Australian and his men enter the lake only to be subsumed by its gothic powers. This speculative moment punishes those who embrace the coloniality of power while educating young adults on moral and intellectual empowerment.

Writers of the diaspora similarly return to African-derived syncretic spirituality to provide young readers with models of strength and courage. The Yoruban orisha Yemaya (with iterations in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America as Yemonja or Yemanja, and Iemonja in Santería, Espiritismo, Candomblé, and Ifá) populates the Shadowshaper Cypher series, created by US-based Daniel José Older (of maternal Cuban heritage) as an oceanic feminine power who assists the Afro-Boricua protagonist in fighting evil. In the opening novel, Shadowshaper (2015), Sierra Santiago reclaims power from her Afro–Puerto Rican grandmother’s spiritual lineage to fight off the postcolonial inroads of a white anthropologist who has harnessed the energy of the orisha for his own evil ends. Reconnecting to what her family has repressed, the young protagonist claims her mystical inheritance to fight contemporary wars against racism, gentrification, and other issues affecting her Brooklyn neighborhood. Fully alive and celebratory of her hair, Sierra represents what’s new and powerful in the field—a representation of how to embrace oneself without giving any nod to a collective vision that historically has rejected brown and Black bodies as nonnormative and aberrant.

These writers present alternative worlds, or spiritual realities, as openings to sustain and enliven their protagonists. By turning to the fabulist genre, to use Hopkinson’s term, writers for young audiences break through the alienation and despair faced by many people of color today. As I explore in chapter 5, "Vodou Illuminations, Diaspora Literacy, and Racial Violence in Ibi Zoboi’s Young Adult Novel American Street, the author explicitly engages with Vodou—not the Vodou of the Western imagination with its carnivorous zombies walking mindlessly across emptied landscapes, but forces that can fight the zombification of the modern urban world. Zoboi, who immigrated to New York from Haiti as a young child, spins a fictional story in which the teenage daughter of a Haitian mambo (priestess) finds herself living with her cousins in Detroit. Through traditional ceremonial figures such as Papa Legba and Ezuli, Zoboi’s text suggests that repressed knowledge is actually real" knowledge. The author relies on Vodou ontologies to reveal the corrupt economic and racist US systems that have condemned African Americans to poverty for generations. Only by engaging with her spiritual faith can the young Haitian protagonist lift her cousins out of despair and present them—and young readers—with a hopeful vision of the future.

In chapter 6, "Growing Up Speculative: Comics, Spiders, and Child Subjectivities in Rabindranath Maharaj’s The Amazing Absorbing Boy and Imam Baksh’s Children of the Spider," Jarrel De Matas explores two other young adult texts that dabble in speculation. The young protagonist, Samuel, of Maharaj’s The Amazing Absorbing Boy (2010) turns to fantasies of shapeshifters, imagined through comic figures, to create a sense of agency for himself as he moves from Trinidad to Canada. While his father suffers a sense of despair and turns to such gadget-driven television shows as MacGyver to block the painfulness of his Canadian reality, Samuel turns instead to his comic imagination to become the shapeshifter of his internal pantheon. The imaginative or speculative realm of comics becomes a tonic for reenvisioning his surroundings. De Matas also treats CODE Burt Award winner Children of the Spider (2016) by Guyanese writer Imam Baksh. A female protagonist travels from the fictional world of Zolpash to Guyana to escape from the patriarchal strictures of the omnipresent Brothers, who force women to bear children. With the help of Anansi, the West African trickster with many incarnations in the region, this young woman rises above her foremothers by claiming her liberty and rights over her mind and body. With her friends—including a boy who cannot hear or speak, and a poor child from Guyana’s urban slums—she engages in Spider Talk, a type of mental telepathy unavailable to most adults. As De Matas argues, the childlike ability to be receptive to other worlds creates a metaphor for transcending the limiting mindsets of the past, leading then to maturation and new options for imagining immigration for young people.

By showcasing these speculative traditions, the writers in this volume strengthen the link between what has already been established in adult traditions and what is now happening in young adult literature. Writers in this field will continue to contest systems of power by addressing what has been historically elided. While many books for children contain such spiritual or folkloric elements, recent texts for young adults offer concrete political arguments for radical social change.

Environmental Disasters and Ecological Readings

In her essay The Great Bonanza of the Antilles, Cuban–Puerto Rican writer Mayra Montero notes how she suspected in some way, even at [an] early age, that there was a philosophy in the [Afro-Caribbean] cults of Ocha, Palo Monte, Vodou, and Espiritismo de Cordon that in one way or another expressed an integral conception of the world—a concept of man and of his organic relationship with the world (197). In Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert’s analysis of Montero’s and other contemporary Caribbean texts for adults, African-derived religions express such a cosmic relation between all beings—representing not the dominion of man over nature but a recognition of the interdependency of all, a philosophical background congruent with environmentalism.

As Paravisini-Gebert and others note, colonialism flattened the landscape; colonists clear-cut forests and destroyed local ecologies to open the way for plantations. With the loss of indigenous populations, whose practices modeled sustainability, the newcomers inserted the Caribbean into a global monetary system that privileged capitalist gain over interdependency. Tourism followed, generating other impacts such as the destruction of habitats and the decimation of native plant and animal species; changes caused by industrialization—pollution and the resulting global warming—threaten the region through the direct effects of hurricanes, tropical storms, and rising temperatures and waters that impact both who and what can survive. The Caribbean gods, derivative of West African faiths, populate fictional landscapes, showing up as protectors and teachers, mirroring their historical position as resisters to the colonial status quo. The maroons, runaway slaves who formed their own communities in forested areas, practiced such African-based religions. Figures of such faiths populate natural spaces—Papa Bois, Osain, the Old Man of the Forest. They surface in children’s fiction to bring balance and calm. Water deities such as Mami Wata who traveled from Africa to become Mama Dlo/D’Leau, River Mama, or Yemaya of Caribbean waters, who protected Africans during the Middle Passage, arrive to express their rage over the destruction of island habitats.

As Melissa García Vega notes, The Caribbean deity from water or land is a mythical avatar for the subsistence perspective (77). She continues, They function as creolized, syncretic, transcultural figures of agency, locating nature’s subsistence potential at the centre of Caribbean community and culture (77). Dannabang Kuwabong explores such intersections in chapter 7, Caribbean Disaster Narratives: Hurricanes and Caribbean Children’s Literature. In his reading