Archive:

Mervyn Morris is the outgoing Poet Laureate of Jamaica. His work as a poet, essayist and teacher has had an enduring impact on Caribbean literature. He is professor emeritus at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona, Jamaica, and lives in Kingston. In 1970, he began lecturing at UWI, where he later became a Reader in West Indian Literature. In 2009 he was awarded Jamaica’s Order of Merit. In 2014, he was appointed the first post-independence Poet Laureate of Jamaica.

Mama Can’t Raise No Man was recently reported to be the only fiction debut by a black male novelist to have been published in Britain this year. It is a dubious privilege for any first novel to bear, but beyond this woeful statistic, it is also an urban coming-of-age story about masculinity, fatherhood, crime, punishment and psychic rehabilitation by a young novelist who writes with insight into and compassion for the world he dramatises, as if from its inside. In this insider mentality, Mama Can’t Raise No Man poses questions about the value of authenticity in fiction and also, obliquely, the burden of representation.

Arifa Akbar reviews Marriage Material by  Sathnam Sanghera