Four Taxis Facing North (Paperback)

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw

ISBN 10: 1845233476 / ISBN 13: 9781845233471

Published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd, Yorkshire, 2017

About this Item

Paperback. In Trinidad, oil wealth supported the growth of probably the most prosperous and conspicuously consuming middle-class in the Caribbean. But there was a price to pay for the deepened social inequalities that resulted: a deep paranoia rooted in the fear of crime and social upheaval.The recent plunge in world oil prices has left these people in a double bind. Travel and education overseas have given them tastes that weaken their attachment to Trinidad, yet they know that their privileges of race and class would disappear in North America. As one narrator acknowledges, in the US shes the only black girl in most of her classes, though at home no one would call me black.Four Taxis Facing North presents us with an intimate, human face to what it is like to be one of those middle class Trinidadians. These stories focus on characters from both sides of the social divide and their infrequent and often uncomfortable interactions. Even as they are beset by fears about the future, the Walcott-Hackshaws women are also busy with their responsibilities, their relationships with husbands, partners, children, friends and foes. They deal with absent, unfaithful or abusive husbands and display differing degrees of self and social awareness.Four Taxis Facing North offers few comforting illusions. Hackshaw explores characters who are not always sympathetic and the title story imagines a Trinidad after a great social upheaval in which survival means life of the bleakest kind. But the twelve stories in this collection offer great clarity and a deeply satisfying exactness of language in the creation of characters across the divisions of Trinidadian society.This collection presents us with a moral vision that is both necessary and bracing, prophetic but not preachy.With an introduction by Lawrence Scott. The stories that comprise Four Taxis Facing North reveal the contrasts of contemporary Trinidad, through the lives of the rich and the poor. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781845233471

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Four Taxis Facing North (Paperback)
• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press Ltd, Yorkshire
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1845233476
• ISBN 13: 9781845233471
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: 2nd Edition
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

The stories that comprise Four Taxis Facing North reveal the contrasts of contemporary Trinidad. Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw explores the lives of rich and poor Trinidadian families in anguish: a world of abandonment, unmet expectations and untenable secrets. In these landscapes, it is the women who suffer most, theirs an especially lonely position from which they look for escape. Like any other nation, Trinidad faces the threats of violence, drug abuse and corruption. But these issues become magnified in a small island setting. Named for the the title story, which envisions the island's problems exploding into anarchy, this collection offers a finely nuanced view of Trinidadian society where the legacy of colonialism echoes alongside the tensions of a nation at a crucial point in its history.

About the Author

Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Literatures in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. Her publications include a novel, Mrs. B, Border Crossings: A Trilingual Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers (2012), co-edited with Nicole Roberts, Echoes of the Haitian Revolution 1804-2004 (2008) and Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and its Cultural Aftershocks (1804-2004) (2006) co-edited with Martin Munro.