Caribbean People with Colin Rickards

Caribbean People with Colin Rickards

New novel from Bernadette Gabay Dyer

By Colin Rickards

Bernadette Gabay Dyer is a graduate of The Jamaica School of Art, which gave her the opportunity -- very rare for an author -- to create the illustration for the cover of Waltzes I Have Not Forgotten, her first novel.
Now she has been able to do so again with the cover of her second novel, Abductors, just released by the Burlington-based Rain Publishing, and given a public send-off at a book launch on Tuesday evening.
The book is Gabay Dyer’s first major venture into what most of us would call Science Fiction, but which -- to the cognoscenti -- is also known as Fantasy, Speculative or Fabulist Fiction.
A Fabulist, as defined by the Concise Oxford Dictionary, is “a composer of fables or apologues” -- meaning “moral fables.”
Gabay Dyer’s story takes place in Toronto and in Sussex, England, where her sister -- to whom the book is dedicated -- lives.
In a nutshell -- which is all a Reviewer should do with Fiction -- it is a story about three young friends: English immigrant Graeme Hulis, his Jamaica-born school friend, Norman, and Allison, “a Regular Canadian.”
Graeme’s father disappears in Toronto, and strange clues are found in writings by and about his long dead mother, who seemingly vanished off the face of the earth many years before.
This leads the three friends into some eerie detective work, where they are confronted by the unexplainable, and it seems to them that entities from alien lore and folklore have united to prevent them from learning the truth.
The book has been some time in the making.
“From the time I started it, until the time Rain decided to publish, I have written three novels,” Gabay Dyer told those attending her book launch.
She was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and attended Immaculate Conception High School and The Jamaica School of Art, where she specialized in Painting and Design, then migrated to Toronto in 1968.
Following training as a teacher, Gabay Dyer joined the Toronto Public Library in 1973. She is currently at the Parliament Street branch, but has worked at the High Park and College/Shaw branches.
She says that her “familial roots in Africa, India and Europe” have led her to “develop a keen literary interest in racial blending” and Multicultural storytelling.
She has published three chapbooks and Villa Fair, a collection of multi-ethnic short stories, was published by Beach Holme Press in 2000. Women’s Press published her novel Waltzes I Have Not Forgotten in 2004
The hero, John Moneague, child of a Black Jamaican country girl and a White sailor -- nationality unknown -- is raised by an old Hakka Chinese woman in impoverished Kingston in the years following World War One.
Befriended by a wealthy American woman, he loses track of her and becomes the adopted son of a Jewish couple involved in helping their co-religionists to escape from Second World War Hitler-dominated Europe.
Gabay Dyer is also a poet and storyteller. She has read from her own work at Harbourfront, among other places, and did so -- from Villa Fair -- at an event connected with last month’s Caribbean Canadian Literary Expo.
Some of her work has appeared in anthologies, and she has had stories published by magazines in Canada, England, the United States and France.
There aren’t too many Caribbean writers working in the Science Fiction --
in its widest sense -- genre.
Nalo Hopkinson, born in Jamaica, raised in Guyana and Trinidad, and now living in Toronto, is preeminent, the best known multi-award-winning author of four novels and a collection of short stories in the past nine years.
She has also edited two anthologies -- one called Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction -- and her latest novel, The New Moon’s Arms, set on a mythical Caribbean island, came out this year.
Tobias S. Bucknell -- “a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the United States and the British Virgin Islands,” now lives in Ohio. His first novel, Crystal Rain, was published last year.
Marcia Douglas, born in England to Jamaican parents, raised in the island, and now living in Colorado, is also a Fabulist. Her novels Madam Fate and Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells appeared in 1999 and 2005.
Gabay Dyer spoke interestingly to Montreal-based H. Nigel Thomas for his book Why WE Write -- subtitled “Conversations with African Canadian Poets and Novelists” released by TSAR Publications last year.
With Abductors, she bids fair for a place among the elite Caribbean-born SciFi coterie, making connections with fairies and space travellers, and providing an exciting and surprising read.
Rain Publishing describes the book as Young Adult Fiction, though I personally found it engrossing -- and I’ve not been a Young Adult for quite some years! -30-