Baghio'o, Jean-Louis

London. 1984. Carcanet. 1st British Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0856354708. 142 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Bruce Wilson. keywords: Literature Caribbean Guadeloupe. FROM THE PUBLISHER - This is the story of three generations of a family. It begins with the legend of the folk-hero O'O, the black corsair who frees slaves from the slave ships and flays the slavers, making breeches from their skin. From legend we move to history, but a history into which fantasy and poetry flow naturally. Among the corsair's descendents there are twins in each generation, and they express the paradoxical nature of the changing black experience on the island of Guadeloupe and FRENCH Caribbean generally. The history of the O'O clan is one of marriages, of racial mixture and development. What remains is the island, its contours, its flora and fauna, and the sea that washes it, things which change in meaning but not in character with each generation. The social miracle at the heart of the story, the union of the black corsair's descendant to the last descendant of the white corsair, is marked by nature when the red flame-tree under which the marriage is solemnized miraculously turns blue. The tree remains throughout an emblem of possibility and of the deep complicity between nature and these people. Many passions are engaged in THE BLUE FLAME-TREE: political, sexual, cultural, religious. It is about race and about language, about possession of things and people, about the subjection of women and the egotism of success. But most of all it is the story of particular people in a particular place, wonderful and terrible, to which we come as strangers but which we leave with a sense of having been changed. inventory #1088 ISBN: 0856354708.