The new novel by British Ghanaian author and performance poet Nii Ayikwei Parkes is set in a fictional Caribbean country called Fumaz, an island nation whose history is strikingly similar to that of Cuba. It has been under a US trade embargo ever since a leftwing revolution in 1959, and was for many years economically dependent on sugar exports to communist Russia; the collapse of the USSR in 1991 plunged the islanders into severe hardship. The primary protagonist, Yunior, is a talented crop scientist hired by the Fumaz government in the mid-90s to help diversify their agriculture. The novel recounts his early life as a child migrant from Ghana, his musical exploits with a popular salsa band, and his ill-fated romance with a local police officer. A second, parallel narrative concerns Emelina, the US-raised heiress of a wealthy Fumaz rice merchant, who leaves the North American “Sun Coast” (read: Miami) for her ancestral homeland when she inherits her grandfather’s estate.
Yunior’s life revolves around his twin passions: music and nature. When he isn’t playing guitar he is tending to his allotment: “Rotating peppers, spring onions, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and cabbages with assorted frijoles, okra … he prided himself on a garden that was both colourful and nutritious.” These two themes are often intertwined in the novel’s descriptive language: “Through [music] he blended with the countryside – its fertility, its undulating earth, its cycles, the muted music of its flora flourishing and fading, its temper when hurricanes flashed by.” On stage, he “oscillates his guitar in a pattern that mirrors the map-making loops of honey bees that have found nectar in a far flung patch of petals”.
