I published A Patch of Bare Earth (APOBE) under the Grenada National Museum Press in 2013. Visual artist Fernanda Steele, PhD in Spanish American Literature—whose Italian translation of Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain was published in Milan, Italy by Adelphi—graciously wrote the foreword.
APOBE arose from my inclusion in the list of 25 winners of the 2010 Commonwealth Short Story Competition; our stories were broadcast widely across the Commonwealth. A Whiff of Bleach was one of two Highly Commended stories from Grenada; the other was Lydia Vonwyler’s Sister Rose. In 2011, Macarena García-Avello, researcher in the English Department at the University of Oviedo in Spain, translated A Whiff of Bleach for the magazine Revolución y Cultura, aimed at making writers from a foreign language known to the Spanish-speaking community.
In June 2013, APOBE, my first collection of short stories, launched at the Grenada National Museum, as part of the Dr James D Pitt Voices of Grenada Lecture Series, the first publication from the Grenada National Museum Press.
Cover: A Patch of Bare Earth 2013. Photo: SLCT
APOBE was reviewed in 2014 for Caribbean Quarterly by Jamaican academic philosopher, poet, short story writer, essayist, novelist, painter, educator, and Silver Musgrave Medal recipient for outstanding merit in the field of literature, St Hope Earl McKenzie. He wrote that APOBE “is an extraordinary work of prose, one that is not easily described, classified, or compared,” and suggested that “if Henry David Thoreau had been a 40-odd-year-old Grenadian female artist, instead of a male American naturalist, he may have produced a work such as this instead of his famous Walden.”
McKenzie noted that “like Thoreau, she is a close observer of the world around her—her living and working space, landscapes, seascapes, flora and fauna, rain, drought, techniques of food preparation—and seems to take a special delight in describing the artifacts of her island’s material culture.” In his last paragraph, McKenzie wrote: “Suelin’s “human Grenadian landscape” is no tourist postcard. This is a place of severe and destructive climatic conditions, hard lives of people who know loneliness, the trials of old age, homelessness, toil, bureaucracy, heartbreak, and failed human relationships. The Grenadian condition is the human condition. Suelin chronicles it with sensitivity, honesty, determination, and admirable tough-mindedness. I think this is a voice to be welcomed into the Caribbean conversation.”
Review of A Patch of Bare Earth by St Hope Earl McKenzie in Caribbean Quarterly, Dr Kim Robinson-Walcott, Editor. ISSN 0254-8038, 03/2014, Volume 60, Issue 1 (Mar 2014), p. 136-139,168.
Monday, 6 May marks 162 years since the death of Thoreau in 1862, American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher, best known for Walden, a memoir of his 3 years living alone in a cabin by a lake in Massachusetts, USA. That I should have the thinnest connection to his work, is motivation enough to keep writing towards a second collection.
To say that I was humbled by McKenzie’s review is not strong enough; I jumped up and down like a mad thing for a good few minutes. In response to my email thanking him for his thoughtful review and for the Thoreau compliment, he asked for my reading list. At that time, piled on the floor next to my bed were:
- Collected Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Fear of Stones and other stories by Kei Miller
- Guerrillas by VS Naipaul
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
- Mr Potter by Jamaica Kincaid
- Pynter Bender by Jacob Ross
- The Zahir by Paulo Coelho
- Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Only lately, I realised that challenges and opportunities of life and death on an island—whether in the Caribbean, or a boat in the middle of the ocean, or an individual surrounded by forces they cannot control—summarise the themes in that pile of books.
It’s been over 10 years since APOBE. In that time, I’ve experienced more, travelling mostly in solitude and carrying my critical belongings in my backpack, observing human conditions and comparing them always, to home, Grenada. My house, physically close to the capital Town of St George, is far, far away from the noise and complications of city life, and once there, I am, like Thoreau, alone in my cabin—but surrounded by bush and iguanas—grateful for what I have.
NB: Today I republished A Patch of Bare Earth with McKenzie’s full review (with permission from him and Caribbean Quarterly), in Kindle and print formats.
Review of A Patch of Bare Earth by St Hope Earl McKenzie. Caribbean Quarterly, ISSN 0254-8038, 03/2014, Volume 60, Issue 1 (Mar 2014), p. 136-139,168. … Suelin M. Low Chew Tung, A Patch of Bare Earth. St George’s, Grenada: Grenada National Museum Press, 2013. 101 pp.