Peepal Tree posthumously publishes Rahim’s ‘Goodbye Bay’
When poet, writer and university lecturer in literary and cultural studies Jennifer Rahim died suddenly at 60 on March 13, her publisher Jeremy Poynting, founder of Peepal Tree Press, wrote that we had lost “one of the regions very best writers”. This month as Peepal Tree Press publishes Rahim’s posthumous novel, Goodbye Bay, Poynting has pronounced it among “best Caribbean novels to have been written”, tackling questions of “society and personal being asked by great novelists from George Eliot to Earl Lovelace.”
Exclusive extract of Goodbye Bay by Jennifer Rahim with permission from Peepal Tree Press:
CHAPTER 1 – AN ARRIVAL
I arrived in Macaima in September, 1963. Petit Careme season. The island was one year a nation, free to practice what it meant to have a flag to hoist and an anthem to sing. We had a prime minister, a government sitting inside the Red House; our Governor General became a citizen. That year, too, we had retrenchment in the oil sector and disgruntled sugar workers triggered a series of union-led strikes not seen since the Water Riots. The PM, in an effort to take control, ordered a Commission of Inquiry to sniff out subversion in the ranks of the trade union movement. That September, four girls died in the bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, and hurricane Flora mashed up Tobago. In October, Mandela went on trial in South Africa; Cuba was in the midst of the missile crisis; nine Vietnamese monks were killed for flying their Buddhist flag; Martin Luther King delivered his I Have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial; John F. Kennedy was assassinated; C.L.R. James published Beyond a Boundary; the Mighty Sparrow was crowned king of Carnival with “Dan is de Man”; the Beatles and Doris Troy had number one hits with “Love Me Do” and “Just One Look”; Elizabeth Taylor starred in Cleopatra; a woman was arrested and released without charge for selling souse and black pudding on a pavement in San Fernando; and a man was murdered on his hospital bed.
It was Sunday, midmorning. The village was deserted. I had no clue what I was coming to, but Macaima was where I had landed the job as temporary postmistress. People from town would be quick to ask: Macaima, where on earth is that? No place on this island call by that name. Maybe so, but I was there. See me, Annabelle Bridgemohan, who had spent all my life in bright-lights Port of Spain, waiting on a junction for a Mr Elton, whom I had never met but who had promised to get me settled in the rental where I would spend the agreed-upon year. I had done a three-year stint at the Port of Spain head office, though it seemed like an age.
I needed more than a change of scenery or pace; whether Macaima would give it I hadn’t a clue. Life is a decision to live my mother said to me when I told her I had accepted the Macaima post. She collected maxims like that. Maybe she had discovered what they meant. I did not want to live her life. When I landed the job at head office, the first thing I did was to rent a onebedroom apartment on the edge of the city; small, but it was my space.Until my arrival on Macaima Junction with nothing but my two suitcases, I hadn’t realised that those words were still mine to learn. I was twenty-four and adrift. My relationship with my boyfriend Miles had come to a painful end; he had become increasingly bitter about my decision to end things between us and what he considered my unforgivable crime in choosing not to have our baby; my friend Thea had left the island for graduate school in the States and I could no longer put up with the conspiratorial climate in the office as management tried to fend off unionisation with divide and rule tactics. When I arrived in Macaima, I felt no more real than a ghost left over from another life.
End of Excerpt
Of Goodbye Bay, Poynting says Rahim “brings the past, a whole community and its dynamics alive through the highly skilled creation of a dozen characters who each have their own distinctive, vivid being.” Poynting calls it a “Trinidadian novel for Trinidadian readers making no concessions to the metropolitan marketplace asking probing questions about independence and its failures on race, class, gender, sexuality, the handling of power and personal integrity.
“It does this through telling the story of a young woman learning to live with herself and past decisions, with room for surprise, humour, tragedy and redemption treating intersexual identity, abortion and LGBTQ desire as matters of possibility, responsibility and moral choice.”
The late Jennifer Rahim published five collections of poetry, including Approaching Sabbaths, (Casa de Las Americas prize) two works of fiction, Songster and Curfew Chronicles, a collection of linked short stories about the 2012 state of emergency, which won the overall OCM Bocas prize in 2018. Goodbye Bay will be available in T&T bookshops in mid August.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian columnist and the winner of the non-fiction OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023.