Dominic Green Dominic Green

A hellish paradise

The islands’ history of slavery means violence is always erupting amid the music and the poetry, says Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

issue 21 January 2017

‘Short of writing a thesis in many volumes,’ Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote in his preface to The Traveller’s Tree, ‘only a haphazard, almost a picaresque, approach can suggest the peculiar mood and tempo of the Caribbean and the turbulent past from which they spring.’

Island People, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s first book, is an academic picaresque. This unlikely hybrid might be the ideal vehicle for a trip around the ‘American lake’; the Caribbean’s cultures and peoples are also hybrids, legacies of unlikely crossings.

The masters, slaves, indentured labourers and merchant middlemen of the Caribbean were the first truly modern societies, drawn and dragged to a hellish paradise solely to serve a global economy. Since independence, their descendants have continued to serve and suffer for it, by making the modern Middle Passage as musicians, cocaine mules and migrant workers, or staying on their islands, indentured to tourism as barmen, maids and taxi drivers.

Island People, like its subject, is expansive and disorderly, a jumble of languages and nations with alternating moods of poetry and violence.

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