Author Description

The four stories in this collection are about contemporary Jamaican women. Not the ones seen in TV travel ads, but women who must struggle to maintain their integrity, as much as their physical survival, in a society plagued for centuries by slavery, colonialism and poverty. These women are descendants of African slaves, and the reality of their lives has been camouflaged by the perennial image the Caribbean evokes for outsiders—an image that merges, paradoxically, paradise and servitude. In writing about her sisters who still live in the Jamaican countryside, Adisa gives voice to their pleasures, conflicts and feelings as few Jamaican writers before her have done. Her stories are about a plantation worker, a domestic, a village wife, and a fisherman's wife, women who constitute the majority of Jamaican women but who seldom appear as central in even their countrymen's works.