Event

The University of the West Indies Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) Regional Coordinating Office, and The Alma Jordan Library (AJL) hosts the Book Launch of Love’s Promise and Interviewing the Caribbean by Professor Opal Palmer-Adisa, University Director of IGDS. 

The launch takes place on June 11 from 6 to 9pm at The AJL, 3^rd Floor, Audio-Visual (AV) Room.

To RSVP, please email igdsrco@gmail.com.

About Love’s Promise

After writing Bake-Face and Other Grava Stories in 1985, I did not think that I would be revisiting this topic of the plight of women and girls in the Caribbean. I had hoped that conditions would have sufficiently improved, and that I would not have to go down this road again.   

But sadly, the statistics indicate that the conditions have not improved; there has been a dramatic escalation and worsening of threats to women and girls’ embodied security.

In Love’s Promise, Professor Palmer-Adisa looks at the notion of love and the promises we make when we are in love, what happens to those promises and how they get broken, discarded or forgotten as our lives develop.  

That is the central theme, but she also examines women’s lives and their socio-cultural realities. Professor Palmer-Adisa surveys feminist themes, sexual exploitation of young girls by older, often married men who entice them with gifts and the illusion of freedom. 

She directly confronts and wrestles with the spectres of child sexual abuse and domestic violence, while celebrating the essence and innate power of the African Woman’s spirituality, which is misunderstood and consequently, denigrated. 

But Love’s Promise also lingers over a sweeter side - idyllic love is explored in at least three stories, where the couples were childhood friends, suffered separation and were reunited in the end. 

Love’s Promise is sometimes somber and painful, but also celebratory and hopeful – it willingly offers a story for everyone.

About Interviewing the Caribbean (IC)

Birthed in 2015, IC is a journal for teachers of literature and visual creatives – giving precedence to the dexterity of Caribbean culture and its delicious literary fruits.  Ultimately, this labour of love is an ideal journal for everyone with a taste for excellence and it now claims its seventh issue – embracing and releasing the substance of a decade of ideas and reworkings.  In her effort to breathe bold life into this publication, she sought support, while also endeavouring to articulate, a different kind of journal – one that provides a dynamic space for Caribbean writers, artists at home and throughout the Diaspora.  It is a welcoming forum for diverse artists to freely explore their creative imaginations, share and critique their work in relation to what it means to be Caribbean.  Letters and visuals are the primary media for channelling the stories, and each issue explores a deliberate theme.  It features stunning interviews with Earl Lovelace, Leroy Clarke, Brian Copeland, Eudine Barriteau, Eintou Springer, Carole Boyce Davies, poets and visual artists such as Andre Bogoo, Christopher Cozier, Danielle Boodoo-Fortune-, Angelique Nixon, Amilcar Sanatan, among others. 

About Prof. Opal Palmer Adisa

Opal Palmer Adisa, PhD, is nurtured on cane-sap and the oceanic breeze of the Caribbean. Writer of both poetry and prose, Adisa is an educator and cultural activist, as well as a playwright and theatre director. Adisa has lectured and read her work throughout the Caribbean, United States, South Africa, East and West Africa as well as throughout Europe. An award-winning poet and prose writer, Adisa has more than twenty titles to her credit, including Look! A Moko Jumbie, CaribbeanReads, 2016; 4-Headed Woman, Tia Chucha Press, 2013; and Painting Away Regrets, novel, Peepal Tree Press, 2011.

She has been a resident artist in internationally acclaimed residencies such as Arte Studio Ginestrelle (Assis, Italy), El Gouna (Egypt), Sacatar Institute (Brazil) and McColl Center, (North Carolina) and Headlines Center for the Arts (California, USA). Opal Palmer Adisa's work has been reviewed by Ishmael Reed, Al Young, and Alice Walker (Color Purple), who described her work as "solid, visceral, important stories written with integrity and love." A Distinguished professor of creative writing and literature in the MFA program at California College of the Arts, where she teaches in the Fall.

She has been a visiting professor at several universities including, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley and University of the Virgin Islands. Her poetry, stories, essays and articles on a wide range of subjects have been collected in over 400 journals, anthologies and other publications, including Essence Magazine. Adisa is the founder and editor of Interviewing the Caribbean (to view, please click here), an annual journal of poetry, prose art and interviews. For more, please visit: https://opalpalmeradisa.com/.