Decolonizing the Mind: Recent Grenadian Literature

This essay will examine and compare three little known but powerful examples of resistance literature in arecent Grenadian fiction: Merle Collins’ The Color of Forgetting, Lawton Pierre’s Tears From Home, and David Omowale’s A Season of Waiting. Although each text is stylistically different, and each author writes from a different ideological position, the Grenada revolution is a significant trope in all three novels. Each writer, I will argue, mobilizes the concept of ‘roots culture’ and its attendant epistemes in different fastion in order to inform varying critiques, not only of imperialism, but also of Grenadian history, the revolution, the PRG era and local development issues. My paper will explore the dialogic formations which illuminate each text, and will show how each author depicts roots culture not only as a point of access to Grenada’s submerged past, bust also as a force for empowerment in the lives of ordinary people.