Black Irish White Jamaican

Black Irish White Jamaican
Author: Niamh O'Brien
Publisher: Author House
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2013-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1481770772

O'Brien documents the true story of her family's move in 1951 from their native homeland in search of adventure and opportunity on the shores of exotic Jamaica. The political climate in Jamaica through the 1970s and 1980s eventually forces them to escape and seek safety in the United States.

Black Irish White Jamaican

Black Irish White Jamaican
Author: Niamh O'Brien
Publisher: Author House
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2013-07-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1481770764

After many years of watching peoples disbelief when recounting her personal adventures, tragedies, and survival about life in Jamaica, the author was inspired to write them down and mold them into a book for readers to enjoy. The story begins in 1951 when Tom OBrien, the authors father, leaves his native Ireland with his pregnant wife Maeve and two year old son Peter to start a new life in their adopted home of Jamaica. The book recounts their interesting stories and miraculous survival during Jamaicas violent, dangerous years of the seventies and eighties. The authors personal stories of her Jamaican upbringing in a completely dysfunctional yet loving family are strewn with amusing highs and unnerving lows, but it is her mothers journey of bravery and growth that is mostly highlighted in the book. Maeves painful personal challenges are hard enough to endure, but it is in later years, when she and the family are surrounded by corrupt politics, barbaric crimes and hateful racial turmoil, that her survival story becomes only more incredulous. Amazingly, in spite of these challenges, she only grows stronger and wiser as the years go by. The unbearable politics and crime forces the family to flee Jamaica in the late seventies. The book details the immigration journey that eventually leads to safety in the United States of America. Maeve always remained proud of the brave choices she made in her life, difficult choices, but ones that ultimately empowered her to find independence and peace. She was a true survivor.

The Tide Between Us

The Tide Between Us
Author: Olive Collins
Publisher: O'Neill Trilogy
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-12-27
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9781838530563

"1821: After the landlord of Lugdale Estate in Kerry is assassinated, young Art O'Neill's innocent father is hanged and Art is deported to the cane fields of Jamaica as an indentured servant. On Mangrove Plantation he gradually acclimates to the exotic country and unfamiliar customs of the African slaves, and achieves a kind of contentment. Then the new plantation heirs arrive. His new owner is Colonel Stratford-Rice from Lugdale Estate, the man who hanged his father. Art must overcome his hatred to survive the harsh life of a slave and live to see the eventual emancipation which liberates his coloured children. Eventually he is promised seven gold coins when he finishes his service, but doubts his master will part with the coins."--back cover.

The Book of Night Women

The Book of Night Women
Author: Marlon James
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2009-02-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101011319

From the author of the National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf and the WINNER of the 2015 Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings "An undeniable success.” — The New York Times Book Review A true triumph of voice and storytelling, The Book of Night Women rings with both profound authenticity and a distinctly contemporary energy. It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they- and she-will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings, desires, and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman, and risks becoming the conspiracy's weak link. But the real revelation of the book-the secret to the stirring imagery and insistent prose-is Marlon James himself, a young writer at once breath­takingly daring and wholly in command of his craft.

To Hell or Barbados

To Hell or Barbados
Author: Sean O'Callaghan
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2013-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1847175961

A vivid account of the Irish slave trade: the previously untold story of over 50,000 Irish men, women and children who were transported to Barbados and Virginia.

Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race

Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race
Author: Bruce Nelson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2013-12-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691161968

This is a book about Irish nationalism and how Irish nationalists developed their own conception of the Irish race. Bruce Nelson begins with an exploration of the discourse of race--from the nineteenth--century belief that "race is everything" to the more recent argument that there are no races. He focuses on how English observers constructed the "native" and Catholic Irish as uncivilized and savage, and on the racialization of the Irish in the nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States, where Irish immigrants were often portrayed in terms that had been applied mainly to enslaved Africans and their descendants. Most of the book focuses on how the Irish created their own identity--in the context of slavery and abolition, empire, and revolution. Since the Irish were a dispersed people, this process unfolded not only in Ireland, but in the United States, Britain, Australia, South Africa, and other countries. Many nationalists were determined to repudiate anything that could interfere with the goal of building a united movement aimed at achieving full independence for Ireland. But others, including men and women who are at the heart of this study, believed that the Irish struggle must create a more inclusive sense of Irish nationhood and stand for freedom everywhere. Nelson pays close attention to this argument within Irish nationalism, and to the ways it resonated with nationalists worldwide, from India to the Caribbean.

Dead Woman Pickney

Dead Woman Pickney
Author: Yvonne Shorter Brown
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2022-04-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1771125489

Dead Woman Pickney chronicles Yvonne Shorter Brown’s life growing up in Jamaica between 1943 and 1965 and teaching in Canada from 1969. Told with stridency and humour, the stories include both personal experience and history. Taking up the haunting memories of childhood, along with persistent racial marginalization of Black people, both globally and in Canada, the author sets out to construct a narrative that at once explains her own origins in the former slave society of Jamaica and traces the outsider status of Africa and its peoples. The author’s quest to understand the absence of her mother and her mother’s people from her life is at the heart of the narrative. The author struggles through life to discover the identity of her mother in the face of silence from her father’s brutal family. In this updated edition she adds a coda, “finding mother”, constructed from archives, genealogy, letters, and journals. Initially published in 2010, this second edition includes expanded text and a foreword by Sonja Boon, author of What the Oceans Remember.

These Ghosts Are Family

These Ghosts Are Family
Author: Maisy Card
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-01-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1982117443

PEN/Hemingway Award For Debut Novel Finalist​ Shortlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A “rich, ambitious debut novel” (The New York Times Book Review) that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations, in the tradition of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Stanford Solomon’s shocking, thirty-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley. And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead. These Ghosts Are Family revolves around the consequences of Abel’s decision and tells the story of the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present-day Harlem. There is Vera, whose widowhood forced her into the role of a single mother. There are two daughters and a granddaughter who have never known they are related. And there are others, like the houseboy who loved Vera, whose lives might have taken different courses if not for Abel Paisley’s actions. This “rich and layered story” (Kirkus Reviews) explores the ways each character wrestles with their ghosts and struggles to forge independent identities outside of the family and their trauma. The result is a “beguiling…vividly drawn, and compelling” (BookPage, starred review) portrait of a family and individuals caught in the sweep of history, slavery, migration, and the more personal dramas of infidelity, lost love, and regret.

Nanny, Ma and me

Nanny, Ma and me
Author: Jade Jordan
Publisher: Hachette Books Ireland
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2021-09-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1529365015

'This story is the result of long hours of delving into the pasts of my nanny and my ma. I hope it will give some insight into the experiences of one family of colour in Ireland today. Most of all, I just want to start a conversation, because once people come together to talk, the possibilities are endless.' Jade Jordan Jade Jordan's grandmother, Kathleen, left Ireland for England in the late 1950s to train as a nurse. While there, she fell in love and married a Jamaican man. They had two sons and a daughter, Dominique, and settled in London's diverse Walthamstow. But when Kathleen decided to return home to Dublin, she discovered that the colour of her children's skin set them apart - and that their new lives would be very different to the ones they had known. Here, in this honest, warm-hearted and often humorous multi-generational memoir, Kathleen, Dominique and her daughter Jade each tell their story. From Kathleen's determination to raise her children with love and security in inner-city Dublin, to Dominique's struggle to figure out how she fit in as a young Black teenager, to Jade's own experiences as a Black woman growing up in twenty-first-century Ireland, Nanny, Ma & Me is a story about race in a country of contradictions. At its heart lies a tale of the power of community, love and three women for whom family is everything.