The Star Side of Bird Hill

"There’s much to admire about this book, but what I find especially compelling is the focus on return migration to the Caribbean, which we don’t read a lot about. What happens is that two young sisters move to Barbados from the US to live with their grandmother because their mother who is mentally ill is unable to care for them. The novel artfully explores mental illness in the Caribbean. My sense is that people in the Caribbean are still having conversations about mental illness as an illness that necessitates medical care. When I was a child, a mentally ill person was called “mad,” and sometimes I still hear this kind of language from family members. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As for the dissonance between Barbados and Brooklyn, it’s explored through the experiences of the sisters. There’s something about the way young people experience place that feels open-hearted and visceral, especially for the younger sister who feels more at home in Barbados. Both sisters’ experiences of Barbados are shaped in part by what their mother told them about her former home. And they were a part of the Caribbean diaspora in New York, which is its own kind of access. The sisters are young enough to get along, but old enough for there to be a distance. Phaedra is 10, and Dionne is 16. It’s true that the book is very interested in female relationships. The grandmother holds an important position in the community because she’s a midwife. There’s the church community, and she also does Obeah, a traditional spiritual practice. A lot of her clients are women and there’s this lovely scene where she gathers herbs to perform an abortion—this is a scene where, like in the rest of the novel, the men remain on the peripheries. The grandmother is at the centre of what is almost a communal voice, made up of all the women who live on Bird Hill. It’s really beautiful. That’s a beautiful line. It really encapsulates the moment when as a young girl you realise that your body attracts men, and how dangerous that is—the constant pressure of having to ward off the male gaze. It’s an integral part of being a woman, and I think especially so in the Caribbean. And yes, what you call an internalized inferiority does speak to a postcolonial imagination where girls like Thandi lighten their skin to fit a Eurocentric beauty standard."