Patterson, Sybil Agatha

Sybil Agatha Patterson—AA (July 9, 1924–December 5, 2017) was a Guyanese social work pioneer known across the Anglophone Caribbean region for her contributions to social work education, community development, and women’s rights activism. In 1986, the Government of Guyana awarded her the Golden Arrow of Achievement (AA) for her contributions to social work, women’s research studies, and women’s development programs. Sybil Patterson was also a scholar and an adviser on social development to governments, the region’s nongovernmental sector, and international organizations. Her noble contributions to social work education and practice in Guyana impacted many professionals, who resultantly called her the matriarch of social work.

Caribbean Faith-Based Organisations: Friend or Foe in the fight against the feminisation of HIV and AIDS in the Anglophone Caribbean

The feminisation of HIV and AIDS has become a worldwide phenomenon, and the Caribbean region has not been fortunate enough to be excluded. Caribbean females had 3-4 times higher infection rates than males up to a decade ago. Studies that focus on the contributing psychosocial factors to HIV risk in the Caribbean are limited. This narrative review showcases pivotal work which addresses the reciprocally connected responsibilities of patriarchy and religious practices and how they feed into the desolate reality of Anglophone Caribbean women. The relationship between these cultural issues in the Caribbean, using an anthropological lens, sets a platform for an investigation into HIV and AIDS. This paper seeks to encourage further research centred on the religious elements, which influence heterosexual relationships, and how these relationships are predisposed to potential HIV and AIDS risk. The ultimate goal of this study is to provide English- speaking Caribbean faith-based organisations, public health officials and policymakers a public stage to consider further policy implications for the staggering and disproportionate rates of HIV and AIDS between women and men.

Ventriloquism and translation: The translator’s voice in Caribbean literature

This article explores the concepts of voice and ventriloquism in translation through examining Finnish translations of Anglophone Caribbean novels. Four novels and their Finnish translations are discussed with focus on the translation of proverbs and references to Caribbean oral tradition. The translator’s own voice and the voices of other agents participating in the translation process become manifest both in the translation itself and in contextual materials related to the translation. The literary translator can be seen to act as the mouthpiece for a multitude of agents in addition to the author of the original work. The concept of ventriloquism can help shed light on the complex ways in which different voices can interact within the translation process and the ways in which translators must make choices on which voices to give precedence in the translated text.

Peter Abrahams’s Island Fictions for Freedom

When South African–born Peter Abrahams moved to Jamaica in 1956, he thought he had found a racial paradise. Over the next six decades as a Jamaican, his understanding of race in Jamaica was complicated after independence. His last two novels—This Island Now (1966) and The View from Coyaba (1985)—fictionalize the transition to independence in the anglophone Caribbean and how that transition related to the set of concerns unfolding across the rest of the black world. This essay traces Abrahams’s thought on questions of race and decolonization through a close reading of his Caribbean fiction and how he came to theorize the literal and conceptual space of the Caribbean—the island—as a strategy for freedom. In so doing, the author asks, What are the limits of the Caribbean novel of the era of decolonization (1960s–80s) in the anglophone Caribbean? What constitutes it? And how does it articulate liberation?

Honoring Languages: Review of Creole Composition: Academic Writing in the Anglophone Caribbean

In traditional Caribbean villages, the bell crier made important announcements from street to street. People listened and carried the news further. Like the proverbial bell crier, Milson-Whyte, Oenbring, and Jaquette, along with fourteen contributors announced “We are here. And we doin’ dis—‘write [ing] our way in” to academic spaces (Creole Composition, 2019, p. x). Creole Composition provides current perspectives on post-secondary composition pedagogy, academic literacies, and research across multiple academic disciplines. Indeed, this intersectionality addresses Browne’s (2013) argument that Caribbean vernacular orientations and practices fly beneath the radar of the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition. Caribbean institutions of higher learning must embrace Caribbean students’ creole-influenced languages.