Jacqueline Bishop’s groundbreaking work highlights her ‘art of the interview’ style

The book focuses on female Jamaican writers. For Bishop, “people forget how submerged women’s voices actually are in Caribbean literature.” The “socalled ‘Golden Age’ of Caribbean literature is almost all male” and she asserts boldly that “we seem now to be in another age where the main voices given space in Caribbean and Jamaican literature are male voices.” As to the directions of contemporary Jamaican literature represented, she sees a “deeper and deeper engagement with various aspects of Jamaican history and culture.”

One can make the case for this volume as a groundbreaking work, even though only Jamaican writers are featured. Eighteen are included, among them poets, fiction writers and one biographer.

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Peepal Tree Press and Jacqueline Bishop are owed gratitude for ensuring that such a seminal work exists. It will make valuable and necessary reading not only for our Caribbean women writers but also for their male counterparts.