Witchbroom returns

This “rare and magical” novel, as Sam Selvon described Scott’s Witchbroom, is now re-published for a new generation of readers who might have otherwise been deprived of an extraordinary work of fiction that tackles subject matter in a tone and style unknown in Caribbean writing quarter of a century ago, and even today, a media release said.

Witchbroom is the saga of a French/Spanish Creole family’s life and demise, told by its last surviving member, the shape-shifting hermaphrodite, Lavren, whose memories evoke a multilayered Caribbean magical reality down the centuries that is lush, seductive, harsh, full of hysterical parrots, the noise of pan, mas, calypso and robbertalk, and of passions and nightmares.

It is a colonial society built on exploitation and in decay as witchbroom, the parasite that destroys cocoa plants, spreads and takes hold.

Since the novel first appeared in 1992 it has attracted international attention, and was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book. It has drawn plaudits from Salman Rushdie, Fay Weldon and from Kwame Dawes.

Academics praise the novel’s valuing of the relationship between Trinidad’s colonial past and today’s reality and that Scott revives the lives of those left out of the mainstream: Amerindians, black slaves, indentured servants as well as all women – the colonisers’ wives, mistresses and daughters.

Scott has authored three other novels. The new edition of Witchbroom, published by Papillote Press is available at Paperbased bookshop at The Normandie where it is to be launched as a 2017 NGC Bocas Lit Fest pre-festival event on Saturday. Reservations are necessary as space is limited.