Sometime in 1980, I attended a seminar held in one of the rooms in the social sciences block at the University of the West Indies, Mona, where Erna Brodber presented parts of her oral history research on early-twentieth-century Jamaica. It was a most unsettled time in the country politically; the atmosphere was overcast with foreboding. I am not sure whether the first of Brodber’s novels, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, had already been published, or whether it would appear later that year. Certainly, though, her social-psychological studies Abandonment of Children in Jamaica and Yards in the City of Kingston were well known to all of us.1 So there was a general sense of expectation in the seminar room that Brodber was in search of something not quite available in the existing repertoire of social-cultural-literary inquiry, not merely a not-yet-excavated underbelly of Jamaican life but one palpably...
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