The Colour of Forgetting

by Merle Collins

Set on the imaginary Caribbean island of Paz, reminiscent of Grenada, this book creates and occupies a space between epic poetry and the novel in the way its sequence of interludes bring into focus the lives of family and community through time. Moving from the days of slavery through to the 1980s, it conveys a powerful sense of place, of both attachment and confinement, of the meaning of land in relation to the island’ s smallness, and the ever-present danger of communal violence. Through the novel comes the voice of three generations of the women the islanders know as Carib, warner women, whose prophecies of disaster are dismissed as madness, but who have an unerring sense of what is to come. Signalled in her title, Merle Collins has much to say about the nature of memory and the fatal nature of amnesia when it comes to the lessons of the past.

220 pages, Paperback

Published June 8, 2023

About the author

Merle Collins (born 1950 in Aruba) is a Grenadian poet and short story writer.

Collins' parents are from Grenada, where they returned shortly after her birth. Her primary education was in St George's, Grenada. She later studied at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, earning degrees in English and Spanish in 1972. She then taught history and Spanish in Grenada for two years and subsequently in St Lucia. In 1980, she graduated from Georgetown University with a master's degree in Latin American Studies. She graduated from the London School of Economics with a Ph.D. in Government.

Collins was deeply involved in the Grenadian Revolution and served as a government coordinator for research on Latin America and the Caribbean. She left Grenada in 1983.

From 1984 to 1995, Collins taught at the University of North London. She is currently Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Maryland. Her critical works include "Themes and Trends in Caribbean Writing Today" in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World< (ed. Helen Carr, Pandora Press, 1989), and "To be Free is Very Sweet" in Slavery and Abolition (Vol.15, issue 3, 1994, pp. 96–103).

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Sally Whitehead · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'll admit right away that I did semi-rush to finish this as I was going away on holiday and didn't want to take an extra book with only about a quarter left to read (is that the Kindle Advocacy Brigade I hear?) so perhaps some of the lyrical poetic merit was slightly lost on me towards the end.

As a general rule I really enjoy women's writing from the Caribbean, but perhaps Collins' writing is a little TOO lyrical for me. I felt that the atmosphere of what could have been key scenes in the narrative(the violence of the Land Commission Meeting at the market place for example) were overlooked in favour of the pursuit of Carib's voice.

And Carib's voice IS central to the novel. Viewed by the islanders as a special, yet slightly insane, prophet, the reader comes to view her as some sort of spectral ageless omniscient narrator, possibly a symbolic personfication of the Island itself. This voice though becomes repetitive. Probably purposefully so as she echoes the ancestral oral history of the Caribbean, but nonetheless it begins to grate.

The relationship between Thunder and his parents, and the way in which they came to represent the generational differences and changes of the islanders, was on the other hand, very very good.

[John Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some excellent characters and incidents in this novel, as well as some vivid and sensual descriptions of the Caribbean - its climate and landscapes. However, a lot of the time its ensemble structure and large time-scale result in it reading more like a family soap opera than the psychological study of memory I was expecting from the alluring, synaesthetic title.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, this was fantastic! I loved the way the story jumped from generation to generation, held together by a strong sense of place. My favourites were Willive, mother of Thunder and an illegitimate descendant of the Malheureuse family, and Carib, the three-generations-in-one seer slash personification of … the Caribbean? Freedom? Truth?
“Blood in the north, blood to come in the south, and the blue crying red in between” is the prophecy - foretelling the revolution that overtakes the (fictional) island and ideologically splits Willive’s son Thunder from his parents, and ‘retro-telling’ the injustices done to the poor people, John Bull the slave, and the island.

The writing style was interesting with its use of vernacular in a thoroughly literary and poetic way. I found at times that it left the characters a little hollow, but the intense Carib chapter was well paced (and well spaced), not too overwhelming. I enjoyed the stories told within the story, and I wish it had contained a little more coming-of-age for Thunder. Thunder should’ve befriended Beka Lamb (from the novel Beka Lamb by Zee Edgell) that would’ve done him good!!!

All in all, a powerful and symbolic novel.