Novels, Short Stories
& Poetry
Ocean Stirrings
2023, Novel
A work of fiction written in tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, an activist who was also a mother of eight children including Malcolm X. My journey to research into the story of Louise Little began when I read the following in The Autobiography of Malcolm X:
“Louise Little, my mother, who was born in Grenada in the British West Indies, looked like a white woman. Her father was white. She had straight black hair, and her accent did not sound like a Negro’s. Of this white father of hers, I know nothing but her shame about it.
I remember hearing her say she was glad that she had never seen him.”
Ocean Stirrings, a work of fiction, re-creates the nineteenth century Grenada into which Louise Little was born and explores situations that may have had some influence on her life. The novel is an imaginative re-creation, using the historical scaffolding of the period.
Tired, but not Insane - from Ocean Stirrings (See Miami Book Fair presentation of writers and their work - SWIMM) Insane is something else. Insane is white sheets and long guns, breaking windows and lynching people, killing people because they are Black. The insane people that attack me and my family have no rhythm, no logic, no reason. That is insane. I am tired but I am not insane. About the poem: "Tired, but not insane" is taken from Ocean Stirrings: A tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings. The last part of the publication features poetry imaginatively creating the voice of Oseyan, a character invented to pay tribute to Louise Little. This is one of several poems created to find a voice for the character during parts of the 1940s and 1950s in Michigan, a period when she is confined to the spaces of a mental asylum.
2023 I 1995 , Novel
In an Introduction to the 2023 reissue, Canadian writer Douglas Glover writes:
“The novel is framed by two chapters, setup and coda, that feature the island prophet, a half-mad sybil named Carib, possibly descended from the vanished indigenes. She is the one with the gift; she can see the demons and foretell the future. She issues the blood prophecy that drives the novel toward its gaudy conclusion.“
Blood in the north, blood to come in the south, and the blue crying red in between.” Set on an island named Paz (Spanish for Peace), The Colour of Forgetting is not about peace. You might think it’s peaceful when you look at that calm blue, but it turns out to be anything but …
Angel
2011 I 1987 , Novel
“Angel covers the turbulent years during which Grenada both found and lost itself” (Peepal Tree Press).
The novel moves from 1951, when workers revolted against the power of estate owners, to 1983 when the US invasion gave the final blow to a revolutionary movement already in trouble.
The logic of the novel is largely driven by the characters Doodsie and her daughter Angel, whose hopes, dreams, personal and political disagreements and disappointments, mirror those of many on the island.
The Ladies are Upstairs
2011, Short Stories
From the 1930s to the new century, Doux Thibaut, one of Merle Collins’s most memorable characters, negotiates a hard life on the Caribbean island of Paz.
As a child there is the shame of poverty and illegitimacy, and there are the hazards of sectarianism in an island divided between Catholic and Protestant, the rigidity of a class and racial system where, if you are black, your white employer is always right – and only the ladies live upstairs.
Doux confronts all such challenges with style and hidden steel. (Peepal Tree Press).
Lady in a Boat
2003, Poetry
“Merle Collins weaves family history and memories of the Grenada revolution into haunting meditations on hope and disappointment, love and loneliness, beginning and ending.” (Caribbean Beat)
Sometimes in the Morning
2003, Poetry
Excerpt from “Sometimes in the Morning, a Sea Poem”
in Lady in a Boat by Merle Collins.
With apologies and thanks to Dr Edward Baugh.
Remembering his poem, "Sometimes in the Middle of the Story" Sandberry Press, 2000.
Cover art depicts Grenada’s nutmeg, the “lady in a boat with a red petticoat.”
Print publication. London, UK: Virago Books, 1992. Reprinted 1995.
Copyright now with the author.
No recordings, voiceprints or other reproductions may be made without the permission of the author.
Rotten Pomerack
1992, Poetry
A voice sampling of poems from a 1992 collection, written and published in London, UK.
Co-edited
(with Marva Buchanan) Inside Ant’s Belly: a collection of stories for Young People.
(York Publishing, UK. National Association for the Teaching of English, 1994).
A relatively short collection. Other writers in that collection were Simmone Miller, Joan Riley, Claudette Williams, Lemn Sisay, Aamar Hosein, Joyoti Grech, Maya Chowdhury, Mandla Langa, and Jacob Ross.