Foreign Body

I WANT TO LIVE are Bee’s first words, spoken to the reader from the “woumd” in an infectious West Indian vernacular—and in bold-faced defiance of her mother’s own affronts. These words become Bee’s battle cry in her fiercely patriarchal village; in the falling-down board-house she shares with her stalwart grandmother; on the red-gravel track where she defends her record in the 100-yard-dash; at Mistress Nelson’s Needleworks for the end-of-term speed-sew-off; in the sugarcane fields where she gains employment by disguising herself as a “cutterman”; and atop the mausoleum in the wealthy white-people’s cemetery where she has sex with the local bad-John, Cherry.

I want to live is Bee’s mantra against all the adversities of an impoverished and isolated colonial existence, against Cherry’s irrepressible violence when his brute-side inevitably surfaces, and she deposits her two children with her granny and escapes to Brooklyn, New York, as the caretaker of an Orthodox Jewish family. It’s her mantra when—despite herself, against her own obstinate will—a chance encounter compels her to discover new names for family and love.

With echoes of Marlon James and Edwidge Danticat, and with soaring prose unmistakably his own, Robert Antoni further cements his reputation as one of the Caribbean diaspora’s greatest authors.