Sequins for a Ragged Hem
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  • Published: 3 February 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241995761
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
Categories:

Sequins for a Ragged Hem

Formats & editions
EBook
3 Feb 2022
Audiobook
3 Feb 2022
Paperback
3 May 2022
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A beautifully atmospheric memoir and travelogue from poet Amryl Johnson depicting her journey from the UK to Trinidad in the 1980s

Sequins for a Ragged Hem narrates Johnson's return tour to Trinidad as a spiritual homecoming made problematic, among other reasons, by the fact that the house where she was born had been demolished.

Amryl Johnson came to England from Trinidad when she was eleven. In 1983 she set off for a six month journey in the Caribbean. From the moment she steps off the plane into 'carnival fever', we are caught up in the excitement of her journey: her reunion with her mother, the exhilaration of dancing all night to calypso on the streets of Port-of-Spain . . . But she cannot escape, nor wants to, from the inheritance of colonialism.

Her time in the Caribbean is also a journey of the self. The quest for memory is as powerful as the desire to escape. As her trip draws to a close, she describes with courage and eloquence her attempts to reunite the selves that have been separated by different cultures.
  • Published: 3 February 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241995761
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
Categories:

About the author

Amryl Johnson

Amryl Johnson was a poet, author and performer born in Trinidad. She was brought up by her grandparents until the age of 11, when she moved to Britain to join her parents. She attended secondary school in London and went on to study British, African and Caribbean literature at the University of Kent. She taught at the University of Warwick. Johnson's work was included in several anthologies, including News for Babylon: The Chatto Book of Westindian-British Poetry, Let It Be Told: Essays by Black Women in Britain, Watchers & Seekers: Creative Writing by Black Women in Britain, The New British Poetry and Daughters of Africa.

Praise for Sequins for a Ragged Hem

Sequins is a powerful and unusual book, in that it combines the familiar traveller's tales with an account of another kind of journey and process of discovery, as Johnson confronts the 'ghost who was haunting herself' in order that she might come to terms with her sense of a fragmented identity

Guardian

Euphoric and infused with the pulsing bassline of calypso . . . a revelatory discovery of the shattering yet necessary inheritance of colonialism

Wasafiri
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