• Why Do You Dance When You Walk?

    One morning in Paris on the way to kindergarten, a little girl asks her father “Papa, why do you dance when you walk?” The question is innocent and serious. Why does her father limp, why can’t he ride a bicycle or a scooter? Her father feels compelled to answer, to bring back the memories of his childhood in Djibouti and tell her what happened to his leg. It was a place of sunlight and dust and sickness, a sickness that made him different, unique. They called him a skinflint and a runt, but he was the smartest kid in his school.

    Waberi remembers the shifting desert of Djibouti, the Red Sea, the shanty roofs of the houses in his neighborhood, an immense loneliness and some unforgettable characters: Papa-la-Tige who sold baubles to tourists, his tough, silent mother Zahra who trembled, and his grandmother nicknamed Cochise. He tells of the moment when his life changed forever and the ensuing struggle that made him a man, a man who knows the value of poetry, silence and freedom, a man who is still dancing.

  • Pleasantview

    Winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean LiteratureWinner of the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction. Shortlisted for the Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize 2022

    Coconut trees. Carnival. Rum and coke. To many outsiders, these and other sunny images are all they know about life in the Caribbean. However, if you want to learn how the locals truly live and experience the dark and often harrowing truths that lurk behind the idyllic imagery of Caribbean culture, then come visit the town of Pleasantview.

    Come during election season, and see how one candidate sets out to slaughter endangered turtles- just for fun. Or come on the day the other candidate beats his outside woman,’ so badly she ends up losing their baby. Then come on the night of the political rally, where this grieving woman exacts very public revenge. Stay a while, and see how this single event has a trajectory far beyond the lives of the immediate actors, with often tragic and heartbreaking consequences.

    Written in a remarkable combination of Standard English and Trinidad Creole. Pleasantview showcases the entrenched political, racial, patriarchal, and class dichotomies of life in Trinidad.

    Pleasantview

    150.00

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