This suite of essays, brought together by the Commonwealth Foundation, gathers four voices from four islands—each drawn, in their own way, to the restless dance between the corporeal and the ancestral. Their essays construct a scaffolding of thought and memory, letting us hear the echo of waves breaking on far-flung shores. Again and again, they return to the body: how it moves through space, how it is shaped by the gaze, how it might reclaim a quiet, insistent power. 

Across these pages, the writers map lines between home and metropole—Las Lomas and New York, Castries and Calcutta, Port Louis and London. There is MacDonald Dixon’s meditative reimagining of his grandmother Ramdulari’s departure from India, Shivanee Ramlochan’s luminous inquiry into the divine feminine, Muna Mohamed’s elegy to the Maldives of her childhood, and Joe-Ann Chavry’s unflinching portrait of colourism in the world of online dating. Dixon’s return to the kala pani begins with a father he barely knew. Ramlochan’s rediscovery of Mirabai is sparked by a Devata in the galleries of the Met. Mohamed’s reflections anchor themselves in memory and longing. Chavry’s Not a Match opens in Beau Bassin-Rose Hill and detours—brilliantly—through a 1990s romantic comedy. 

Mauritius. Trinidad. St. Lucia. Maldives. Each writer, in Brathwaite’s words, has “sojourned in stoniest cities.” Each turns us outward and inward, and outward again—like the tide. What they offer is a celebration of creative nonfiction and a reminder of what the form can hold: story, vision, memory, and truth.

Island Writings