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Author of Pleasantview, Celeste Mohammed, started writing her book to meet the demands of her MFA program. But as the collection began to take shape, Mohammed saw how ‘it could be used to provide a realistic microcosmic view of contemporary Trinidad and Tobago. In other words, a view which would challenge the narrow, exoticized portrayals of the Caribbean which are typical in popular culture.’
Gaining some measure of international success as an author has only made that dichotomy and the feeling of surrealness even more poignant.
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About the Author
is a Trinidadian lawyer-turned-writer and the author of Pleasantview (Ig, Jacaranda, 2021; Ouida, 2022) which in 2022 won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the UK Society of Authors McKitterick Prize for Fiction. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Her individual short stories have been widely published in literary journals and have won several awards, most notably a 2018 PEN/Robert J Dau Award for Emerging Writers. Celeste lives in Trinidad and Tobago.
Nigerian novelist, poet and author of Graceland, Chris Abani, does not believe ‘Nigerian literature’ exists as a category: ‘It is a common misconception that there is a fixed category that can be read as essentially “Nigerian literature”. Nigeria has 500 nations, 500 languages and about 2,000 dialects. While culture and language can overlap, the level of diversity is such that Nigerian literature cannot be easily narrowed down.’
For the co-founder and publishing director, of Cassava Republic Press, which marks its 20th anniversary this year, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, it is telling that African literature is often pronounced dead in recent years, when more women and queer voices are becoming more prominent: ‘The loudest obituary writers about African literature tend to be men. These elegies seem to come from a tacit sense of personal or generational displacement rather than from the actual state of the field.’
Nigerian poet, novelist and author of Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-Hearted, Ben Okri, argues that Nigerian literature doesn’t always have to be about Nigeria: ‘Nigerian literature limits itself to Nigeria and then limits even the ways in which the country can be written about. What we want is a vast literature, a great literature…that speaks to all humanity.’
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