Both abandoned by their mothers to the care of their grandparents, Bajans Christopher Lucas and Stephanie King are life-long friends. Discord arrives in 1966 in the form of the predatory Mr. Lashley, who takes a disquieting interest in 14-year-old Stephanie, lavishing gifts and attention on the teenaged girl. Conversations Christopher is too inexperienced to understand...
Who owns a country? This is one of the burning questions that confront us daily as modern individuals and even as nations and states. It is a question that is never far below the surface in any discussion, among others, about Quebec, Scotland, Catalonia, Sri Lanka, England, Germany, or as we are witnessing these days via...
Desmond has returned to the island because the prime minister has asked those who went abroad to help rebuild the nation, now that it has gained its independence.
Harper Collins Publishers, 2014
Cecil Foster’s experience is not unlike Desmond’s, but Independence is rooted in the...
Independence
Growing up in, Bridgetown, Barbados, where he was born in 1954, Cecil Foster much preferred cricket to reading. Nevertheless, once a week his...
I look forward to February as Black History month. This is when regardless of ethnicity and racialization we can all as citizens reflect on the struggles by so many to create an inclusive society; when readers seem to really appreciate my book Read more
Featured Post by Heman Silochan
The Caribbean Camera Newspaper - Thursday February 6th, 2014
Among the Toronto literati in the past decade or so, many asked around, where was Cecil Foster? What was he doing? Will we ever see another book? His very fine novel launched in 1992, “No Man in the House”, made him a household...
Journalist and author, Cecil Foster joins us to discuss his latest book, "Independence", a story about a boy and a country coming of age, set in Barbados' as it gains its independence from Britain.
Fourteen-year-old Christopher Lucas and Stephanie King have been...
On the long bus ride home, when I usually revise my "to-do" list of the day, I pushed "get a set of letter stock and envelopes to write home" to the top of my list for the next day. Even with all the carry over from the days before, at the moment nothing is more important than writing back home. Somewhere between going to school, dreading getting out of bed to go to work, and bundling up against each cold day, it's as if I've forgotten about my family. The calypso I play at the bus stop and warmth I remember radiating off of the sand in Barbados are lifelines up north, but I can't remember the last time I called them. Even from the preface of Independence, the first few pages that I usually blatantly disregard, I felt guilty.
Christopher, the novel's protagonist, and Stephanie are God siblings, neighbours, and best friends. They are also coming of age in the time of Barbados' independence from England (1966) while their single mothers have gone "over n' away" to North America for work. While Stephanie has already slipped into the assumption that she is more mature than she actually is, Christopher is focused on getting back in contact with his mother. During post-independence Barbados, many of the island's young adults who went away to work slowly began to stream back in, and that's where the bacchanal begins.
A few years ago my wife Sharon and I were driving along the island roads of Barbados, windows down, radio turned up. I remembered vividly the same scenes from when I was a little boy: sugar cane fields, outcrops of limestone, stands of mahogany trees, pastures where I played cricket, in the distance white sand beaches and fading blue waters. But there was also change, lots of it — a major highway, housing estates, a spanking new seaport where Oprah, Tiger Woods, and other billionaires dock their yachts.
Dr. Foster divides his time between research, writing, and teaching, and he is a professor of sociology at the University of Guelph. For this month’s featured Oral History, he joins Paul Watkins, PhD student in English Literature, ICASP Graduate Fellow, and Toronto-based sound poet, for an informal public interview (during the 2011 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium) about jazz, improvisation, the writing process, and multiculturalism.
It is said values make societies. They are the cement that binds people together. And at the same time these values are produced by society, for it is society that instills values in us. It is the society that teaches us what is valuable about values.
Values are very much in vogue in the societies I...
Independence is the touching story of the coming of age of a country and two teenagers in it, at the time of Barbados’ independence from Britain in 1966.
A provocative look at why multiculturalism could only have originated in the Americas.
While many modern societies are noted for their diversity, the resulting challenge is to determine how citizens from different backgrounds and cultures can see themselves and each other as equals, and be treated equally. In Genuine Multiculturalism, Cecil Foster shows that a society's failure to bridge these differences is the tragedy of modern living and that pretending it is possible to mechanically develop fraternity and solidarity among diverse groups is akin to seeking out comedy.
Harper Collins Publishers, 2014
Cecil Foster’s experience is not unlike Desmond’s, but Independence is rooted in the...
Aired on February 24, 2014
Independence
Growing up in, Bridgetown, Barbados, where he was born in 1954, Cecil Foster much preferred cricket to reading. Nevertheless, once a week his...
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