Bøker av Opal Palmer Adisa

"Miss Lou had the instinctive wisdom to relate language to identify. As a people who have long since lost our identity, we continue to search for it. There is an interrelationship between language - the words we use - and our identity. In that regard, Miss Lou helped us to remember who we are. However, mental slavery is still with us. While we continue to deny our own language, our way of expressing ourselves, there is no escaping the fact that our language is part of our identity as Jamaicans ... " Beverly Manley-Duncan - Page 4 of Cover.

"Opal Palmer Adisa has perfected a woman's grammar, and language rooted in the landscape of Jamaica, a landscape that she apprehends as compelling as a woman's body: complex, vibrant, dangerous and beautiful-and her poems emerge with a thick, sensual intensity. In these poems, Adisa brings her sharp eye and rich language to bear on her return to the Jamaica of beauty, sexual and physical violence, loss, and memory-a place where "no one feels safe", and yet a place where the arias of "maaanin-maanin" are restorative. Adisa summons the spirit of women to guide her through memory and the stories in poems that are vulnerable, fierce and revealing. Opal Palmer Adisa has been writing successfully for years, and yet in The Storyteller's Return, one has the sense of a first and complete voice, a way of seeing that is urgent and powerful. Adisa's grandmother tells her, "fi always have a good home/ dash you pee across you doorway". In the woman's grammar, transgression is liberation. This is an affirming and necessary meditation on the contradictory meaning of home by a gifted poet and storyteller. "Home," writes the storyteller, "will always remain unfinished". Kwame Dawes, author of The Mountain and the Sea.

Each piece in this dynamic poetic biography uses the voices of iconic figures past and present in a bold exploration of such hot topics as gender, race, and spirituality. The mode of presentation continually shifts--from dramatic monologue or prose poem, to prophetic rant--to provide fresh, moving viewpoints on subjects as various as the senility of a beloved grandmother and Michael Jackson's racial transformations.

This is a journey into and through womanhood-from preadolescence through menopause-and an exploration of women's relations with one another. In 4-Headed Woman, Adisa bravely explores and uncovers taboos about womanhood in a controlled and at times lyrical style laced with humour.