In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Preface: Facing the Literary
  • David Scott

Every negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will.

—Marlon James, The Book of Night Women

What do we do when we face the literary?

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that we are facing Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women, the second novel of a young writer whose art has the graphic urgency of outraged violation and the ripe odor of perspiring black bodies. And let us say that we are facing that moment in the novel’s arc when the story’s end is upon us: Homer and the rest of the Night Women have carried into action their daring—and doomed—plan of destroying the regime of slavery, and have, in turn, been destroyed by the plantation’s powers of vengeance and violence. Only Lilith has ambiguously survived. The narrative voice reflects:

Every negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will. But sometimes when a negro die and another negro take him place, even if that negro not be blood, they still fall in step with the same circle. The same circle of living that no nigger can choose and dying that come at any time. Perhaps nigger take things as they be for what used to be will always be what is. Maybe it better for backra and nigger that things go back to what people think is the best way until the fire next time. White man sleep with one eye open, but black man can never sleep.1

What is the attitude of regard and anticipation, and perhaps also of desire and submission, that we assume when we face the burdensome experience of this figured reality of New World plantation slavery? What of ourselves, our doubts, our fears, our hopes do we share, do we yield, do we keep; what changes in us, what remains the same, in the semiotic interaction [End Page vii] that constitutes our literary experience of this past and its terrors? What raced and gendered practices of agonism and fellowship, what dimensions of filiative memory and identity, are brought into being; what games of truth are enacted, what pressures of authority are brought to bear, when the literary language of James’s slave narrative works on and through us?

To be sure, these are not novel sorts of questions. They are old, even perennial obsessions for intelligent readers and writers alike. But there are times and places, arguably, when they come to haunt our “social imaginaries” more acutely, more urgently, than at others; when they seem to demand, impatiently, impetuously, something more from us than the blandishments of our complacent attention—when they demand, like the Night Women, our creative and engaged response. Such, perhaps, are times when the enchantments of an older literary language (with its now conventional stock of images) have faded, when the idioms in which we have, for a generation or more, encountered our (imagined) selves, or tried out new ones, have lost the capacity to surprise us, to awaken in us new and unfamiliar compulsions, new and unfamiliar ways of connecting our remembered pasts to our anticipated futures—such are times when we are in search of fresh literary luminosity, a fresh sense of literary experience. I wonder whether ours isn’t such a time and our Caribbean such a place?

This, anyway, is our working intuition. And this is why Small Axe has launched a literary competition for new writers. Our goal is simple. We aim to provide a platform for writers of poetry and fiction beginning to make their way, and whose work, though eminently worthy, has yet to be adequately acknowledged. From our beginnings Small Axe has taken the literary arts seriously, publishing poetry and fiction (and drama) as often as we have been able. But we now endeavor to go further, to help to cultivate a more productive, a more generative, a more supportive relation to young writers and new writing.

In this issue we are pleased to publish the winners of our inaugural literary competition— two poets, Monica Minott and Tanya Shirley, and two writers of fiction, Ashley...

pdf

Share