WHITE WOMEN’S TEARS – plenty flowed at the launch of the first issue of PREE, a magazine of new Caribbean writing conducted out of Kingston by our comrade the brilliant editor and critic Annie Paul.
Exhibit A, this beautiful essay by Kei Miller which had been withdrawn from the inaugural issue – because the floods.
Thankfully it is back online – dig in!
Along with the second issue, which centers on the theme “Pressure”. “Pressure buss pipe, yes. But, pressure also creates diamonds. What does pressure do to and for us tethered to the Caribbean?” Takes include fiction by Patrina Pink, Justin Haynes, Richie Maitland, Opal Palmer Adisa, Kwasi Shade, Agostinho Pinnock and more; poetry by Sonia Farmer, Anna Corniffe, Jovanté Anderson, Ubaldimir Guerra and more; essays that enlist the visual to unsettle our complacency with spectacular and everyday forms of oppression and violence; explorations into Trinidad Oil; and a look at big dreams and tiny countries; guidelines on how to pressure cook a goat; memoirs, articles reviews and more.
As Editor Annie Paul writes: PREE was born out of the desire to be part of shaping the new, of providing an experimental, technologically savvy platform to elicit forms of writing emerging from the transformed scapes of the Caribbean, a postcolonial Caribbean not yet fully decolonized but one willing to participate in the global ebbs and flows that sometimes threaten to submerge us. Can we grab a passing wave and ride it with the dexterity and aplomb of the region’s musicians and athletes? Can we show that we are perfectly capable of following in their wake while surfing new Caribbean imaginaries built on the world handed down to us by earlier generations? What does the writerly gaze look like almost two decades into the 21st century? Is new writing illuminating the Creolescapes we occupy? Are there new horizons of readership and writership? Can the archipelago be written? In what tone of voice and in what accents do we write it? Can it be written as it’s spoken?
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