Frank A. Collymore: A man of the threshold
Frank A. Collymore of Barbados, 1893–1980, was perhaps best known as the editor of Bim, the regional literary magazine in the English-speaking Caribbean. He was also a poet, short story writer, eminent amateur actor, school-teacher and artist. Between 1944 and 1971 Collymore published five collections of poetry and an often reprinted study of ‘Barbadian dialect’. In 1991, a collection of his short stories was published posthumously. In his later years he was often described as a ‘literary genius’ and as ‘The Grand Old Man of West Indian literature’. He won honorary awards and wide recognition in the English-speaking region for his role in the development of Caribbean literature. This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol26/iss1/17
“How You Mean?” Speech, Resistance, and the Contemporary Relevance of Paule Marshall
" This article centralizes Paule Marshall’s own conception of language and voice as vehicles of acculturation and resistance. Drawing from textual analyses of Brown Girls, Brownstones (1959), The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), her own reflections upon language, and literary scholarship, this article contends that Marshall’s use of language seeks to give voice to the marginalized, pay homage to the “mother poets” who influenced her, and offer a rebuke to a Fanonian “white gaze” in its unapologetic embrace of culture and history. With specific attention to intricacies of Bajan Creole and African American Vernacular English, I show how Marshall preserves the intricate tapestry and potency of black speech as a political instrument. Her embrace of the “beautiful/ugly” offers a framework for understanding the grittiness and grace of the language she employs, a language which reflects the world it describes. This framework can be applied to better understand, for example, the black vernacular’s place (or lack thereof) within political/juridical spaces in the twenty-first century – such as Rachel Jeantel’s testimony in defense of her friend Trayvon Martin –, and digital spaces, such as Black Twitter. I locate her continued relevance in her intentional deployment of language as both resistance and refuge. "
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.