Tag Archives: Guadeloupe
Expanding Translation Routes in the Caribbean: Music, Memory, and the Sea in Alecia McKenzie’s “Marins désarmés/Unarmed Mariners” and Daniel Thaly’s “Looting Hummingbirds”
The recent publication of Jamaican writer Alecia McKenzie’s Marins désarmés/Unarmed Mariners (Vieux-Habitants, Guadeloupe: Atlantiques déchaînés, 2025) alongside Dominican poet Daniel Thaly’s Looting Hummingbirds (London & Trafalgar, Dominica: Papillote Press, 2026) offers an opportunity to reflect on contemporary Caribbean poetry’s engagements with mobility, memory, and translation. While distinct in form and emphasis, both collections are bilingual, pairing each source text with a parallel translation: McKenzie’s collection presents English poems alongside French translations by C. and S. Renard, whereas Thaly’s selected poems present French texts alongside English translations by Mark Andrews and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, who also co-edited the volume.
A Review of “AfroTrans: Perspectives. Entretiens. Poésie. Fiction”
As the title indicates, this rich volume is entirely devoted to Afrodiasporic transgender experiences, but editor and contributor Michaëla Danjé specifies that it does not seek to construct a new, normative, monolithic, inalienable identity category. In fact, the Trans in AfroTrans is capacious and fluid enough to welcome transformation, transmigration, transoceanicity, and, germane to this special issue, translation. Conceived as an open space for trans artists, activists, and intellectuals from all corners of the African diaspora to constitute, bear witness to, and preserve their own archive, the volume organically stretches out like an archipelagic community with submarine ties connecting the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.