We Move Tonight: The Making of the Grenada Revolution 

by Joseph Ewart Layne
(CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform £8.09)

My Mother And I: The Epic Story Of Grenada 

by Kamau McBarnette
(CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform £12.37)

THE author of We Move Tonight, Joseph Ewart Layne — known as Headache — was released from prison in Grenada in September 2009 after 26 years of incarceration. 

A portion of those years were spent writing this account which, with lucidity and insight, recounts the years prior to the preparations and making of the Grenada revolution by the New Jewel Movement in 1979.

Although only 20 at the time, Layne was a major figure in these events — the struggle against the dictatorial rule of Eric Gairy and the brutality of his satraps, the building of the revolutionary party and the clandestine activity and training for the much-postponed final uprising. The epochal events which immediately anticipated the takeover are all described in compelling and realistic description and dialogue.

It is also a deeply reflective narrative, with its last section in particular concerned to take lessons from the disastrous and implosive events which destroyed the “revo” even before US troops invaded. 

Layne is not interested in allotting specific blame but criticises — and self-criticises — all those within the leadership for not seeking a peaceful solution to the internal conflict, rumour-mongering and paranoia. 

In the final analysis, he concludes, it was the confrontational instincts and not the democratic tendency within the Grenada revolution, and within all the revolutionary leaders, which prevailed.

Kamau McBarnette had been the Revos Junior Minister for Information and also manager of Radio Free Grenada. 

During his quarter century of confinement in Richmond Hill prison he not only became a literacy teacher to his fellow inmates but wrote an extraordinary and enigmatic novel called My Mother And I, also just published.

It tells the history of Grenada from the first colonisations and the resistance of the Carib and Arawak peoples, the slave revolts including the brave insurgency led by Julien Fedon in 1795, up to the revolution and its eventual downfall. 

Its manner of telling is fiercely original, with McBarnette employing a mysterious omniscient narrator guided by an all-seeing and omnipresent mother who becomes Grenada’s earthly griot and people’s historian.

This uncanny method of narrative is McBarnette’s way of externalising events deep in his psyche which sculpted and lacerated so much of his life. “My ears are hurting,” his narrator declares, from the innumerable sad stories of suffering and poverty before and even more so after the revolution, when backward-thinking politicians threw out the gold nuggets with the dust. Instead they cultivated a culture of lies, lawlessness, graft, get rich by any means and moral turpitude which have overrun every aspect of Grenadian life.

The impact of old powerlessness and venality are expressed with an astonishing ingenuity which, combined with a firm grasp of history and the present, makes this a Caribbean novel crying out to be read and considered carefully as the decades roll. 

Both books are available from Ludi Simpson, 23 Ashfield Road, Thornton, Bradford BD13 3PN at £19 including postage (£10 if you purchase a single copy). All proceeds go to to the Grenada Revolution Memorial Foundation. For more information, ring (01274) 426-846.