HAZEL SIMMONS-MCDONALD is a Saint Lucian who has lived and worked in Barbados for over thirty years. She is Professor Emerita of Applied Linguistics at the University of the West Indies and has published textbooks on language learning as well as several articles on educational issues in Creole and Creole-influenced vernacular contexts. Although in retirement, she continues to do research in this field and also devotes time to creative writing.
She has published poems in journals, including The Malahat Review, The Literary Review, The Atlanta Review, Poui, Pathways, Calabash, Bim, Acalabash.com, and selected anthologies. Her short fiction has been published in Bim, Poui, Thicker than Water (Peekash, 2018), and won top place in the Frank Collymore Literary Awards competition in 2018. Her first collection of poetry, Silk Cotton & other trees, was published by Ian Randle Publishers in 2004. Shabine and Other Stories was issued by UWI Press in 2021.
Many of these stories explore related themes of unrequited attractions, the disintegration of relationships under difficulties of communication, areas of a mental otherness, and emotional distress that manifests in other-worldly experiences as borders of consciousness are crossed. Simmons-McDonald imagines what I have called a Creole magical realism in which the boundaries between life and death, the real and imagined are very porous, and her characters pass through those thin veils at moments of high emotion or anxiety. Tragedy and death are interwoven into lives that have known betrayal, unplanned moral failure, loneliness, and redemption.
The stories are set in a recognizable Saint Lucia of an earlier generation. The author’s familiarity with the folklore of her native island allows her to draw on popular myths and beliefs of the supernatural realm that she makes a natural part of the lives of her characters and their stories. There I find the unique Creole magical realism of this short fiction, which is handled lightly, without self-conscious manipulation.
But while these are placed in a historical time, and within a certain Creole ethos, the stories and themes strike a very contemporary chord. The stresses of relationships that can lead to emotional and mental escape routes will be familiar and perhaps uncomfortably so. The unrequited affection of the title story evokes regret for past opportunities for love. “Mirror” raises the spectre of the recurrence within families of generational failures, with the possibilities of disastrous consequences. Class and colour issues of Caribbean life, with their related deep psychological ramifications, find a nightmarish end in several stories. Sexual frustration and sexual harassment (and this last within a church setting) are familiar topics today, and even more broadcast than in the period during which the stories unfold.
“Torn Pages,” a story of a husband’s twice unplanned unfaithfulness resulting in two children outside of his marriage, is compassionately and sensitively handled. The author does not carry a judgemental big stick, but leaves the facts of her fiction, which could be easily mirrored in our Caribbean world, to the evaluation of her readers.
In the final stories, “Dear Departed,” “Imogene” and “Boloms,” she travels the territory of death, grief and the realm of spirits, where ghosts of the unborn aborted, or boloms, become agents of redemption.
Simmons-McDonald has presented, in a meditative way, even-handedly, stories that are Creole in tenor, in theme, in the sense that they are rooted in her Caribbean, Saint Lucia in particular. A society with its African- and French-Creole-inspired folklore and language, its mid-twentieth century social life, recognizable human relationships, their disappointment, pain, emotional confusion, and, yes, psychological crossings into areas of mental otherness, which are often just outside the doors of “normal” perception.
Shabine and Other Stories is another contribution by one of our writers to the growing Caribbean literature that continues to expand its thematic and stylistic boundaries within and outside of our island archipelago world and its diasporas. Congratulations to her publisher, The University of the West Indies Press, which regularly brings us a variety of talents and thought-provoking writers in various academic and creative fields.
John Robert Lee is a Saint Lucian writer and contributing editor of ArtsEtc. His Belmont Portfolio: Poems is forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press in 2023. This review first appeared on Acalabash.com December 12, 2022.
