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Dead woman pickney : a memoir of childhood in Jamaica

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  • Contributor: Boon, Sonja
    Edition: Second edition
    Date:
    Created
    2022
    Summary:

    Dead Woman Pickney chronicles Yvonne Shorter Brown’s life growing up in Jamaica between 1943 and 1965 and teaching in Canada from 1969. Told with stridency and humour, the stories include both personal experience and history. Taking up the haunting memories of childhood, along with persistent racial marginalization of Black people, both globally and in Canada, the author sets out to construct a narrative that at once explains her own origins in the former slave society of Jamaica and traces the outsider status of Africa and its peoples. The author’s quest to understand the absence of her mother and her mother’s people from her life is at the heart of the narrative. The author struggles through life to discover the identity of her mother in the face of silence from her father’s brutal family. In this updated edition she adds a coda, “finding mother”, constructed from archives, genealogy, letters, and journals. Initially published in 2010, this second edition includes expanded text and a foreword by Sonja Boon, author of What the Oceans Remember.

    Contents:
    • Cover
    • Half Title
    • Title
    • Copyright
    • Dedication
    • Contents
    • Foreword to the Second Edition by Sonja Boon
    • Acknowledgements for the First Edition
    • Acknowledgements for the Second Edition
    • Introduction to the Second Edition
    • Prologue
    • One Early Childhood Memories, 1947-50
    • Two Louisiana Blues, circa 1950-54
    • Three Life and Schooling in May Pen, circa 1955-62
    • Four Clarendon College, Chapelton, January 1960-July 1989
    • Five Becoming a Teacher: Mico College, 1962-65
    • Epilogue
    • Family trees for Shorter, Reid, Goodwin
    • Coda to the Second Edition: Finding Mother Author's Note on Jamaican Patois and English Language Usage
    • Bibliography
    Original Publisher: Waterloo, Ontario, Wilfrid Laurier University Press
    Language(s): English
    ISBN: 9781771125482, 1771125489, 9781771125499, 1771125497, 9781771126298
    Collection(s)/Series: British Columbia Collection