Goodbye Bay - Jennifer Rahim

Goodbye Bay is simply among the very best Caribbean novels to have been written, and not just in recent years. It tells a gripping story with room for surprise, humour, tragedy and redemption. It offers us half a dozen brilliant characters, each drawn with exceptional psychological subtlety. And Anna herself – flawed, a little prickly and sometimes too ready to jump to conclusions – is a complex narrator whom we ultimately trust and care for, but who is created in such a way as to offer space for the reader’s perceptions. As an historical novel it asks probing questions about the nature of the means and ends of the project of Independence and its failures with respect to race, class, gender and sexuality. In the characters of Anna and Sam/Samantha, it offers a profoundly sensitive treatment of the fluidities of sexual identity. It is written in a seamless mix of sharply observed realism with moments of rich humour, an undercurrent of the kind of supernatural that flourishes in such a place as Macaima, and passages of numinous poetic intensity that cannot fail to bring prickles to the spine. Lorna Goodison described Jennifer Rahim’s Curfew Chronicles “as one of the most ambitious books ever attempted by a Caribbean writer”; Goodbye Bay takes that ambition another stage further. It dramatises its narrator's dissatisfaction with organised religion, but also explores the possibilities of transcendence through art and the experience of the numinous that can arise in the relationships between humans and the natural world and between each other.

About the Author

Jennifer Rahim (1963-2023) was an award winning Trinidadian writer of poetry, fiction and literary criticism. Her books of fiction include Curfew Chronicles: A Fiction (2017), which won the 2018 overall OCM Bocas prize for Caribbean Literature, and Songster and Other Stories (2007).

Jennifer Rahim's poems have appeared in several Caribbean and international journals and anthologies. Some of these include The Caribbean Writer, Small Axe, The Trinidad and Tobago Review, The Graham House Review, Mangrove, The Malahat Review, Crossing Water, Creation Fire, The Sisters of Caliban, Crab Orchard Review and Atlanta Review. Short stories have appeared in The New Voices, The Caribbean Writer and Caribbean Voices I.

Awards include The Gulf Insurance Writers Scholarship (1996) to attend the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute, Univ. of Miami; The New Voices Award of Merit (1993) for outstanding contributions to The New Voices journal; The Writers Union of Trinidad and Tobago Writer of the Year Award (1992) for the publication, Mothers Are Not The Only Linguists; the Casa de las Américas Prize 2010, where the jury said Approaching Sabbaths "captures a sense of the complexities of historical, social and cultural aspects of contemporary Caribbean"; and the 2018 OCM BOCAS prize for Caribbean Literature for Curfew Chronicles. Her revisions of the text of Goodbye Bay, her final novel, were delivered shortly before her sudden and unexpected death in January 2023. Peepal Tree Press will publish her collected poems in 2024, which will contain a substantial amount of recent work.