Description

The mother of the revolutionary firebrand Malcolm X was a Grenadian woman born at the turn of the 20th century in a small rural community in a deeply colonial society where access to education had only just begun for the children of working people. She emigrated to Canada and then the USA, where she became involved in the struggle for Black dignity and human rights then led by Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Malcolm X and others of his siblings have testified to their mother’s powerful influence on their lives. Within the sparse facts of Louise Langdon Norton Little’s biography, Merle Collins, the distinguished Grenadian novelist, has created a moving and deeply feminist work of fiction that gives vivid inwardness to both the heroism and tragedy of a life that involved fighting the Ku Klux Klan, discovering that male comrades in the struggle could be abusers at home, recognition of her skills as an organiser, but also a period of mental collapse that saw her incarcerated in a mental hospital until her family fought for her release. What Merle Collins dramatizes is the meeting of a collective struggle for equal rights with an individual life profoundly shaped by growing up with her forceful matriarchal grandmother and by her schooling. In the classroom she meets teachers who show Oseyan, Louise’s family name, how to turn the imperialist ideology of her schoolbooks on its head. These are the contexts of Oseyan’s life, but what Merle Collins most profoundly gives us is its breathing texture, through a mix of fictive narrative, letters and poetry, with episodes of great warmth, exuberant humour and drama, as well as the pathos of separation from community.