Oh Witness Dey!

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Shani Mootoo’s great-great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad as indentured labourers by the British. There is no record of where they were from in India or whether it was kidnapping, trickery, or false promises of wealth that took them to the Caribbean.

In Oh Witness Dey! Mootoo expands the question of origins, from ancestry percentages and journey narratives, through memory, story, and lyric fragments. These vibrant poems transcend the tropes of colonial violence through saints and spices, rebellion and joy, to reimagine tensions and solidarities among various diasporas. They circumvent traditional conventions of style to find new routes toward understanding. They invite the reader to witness history, displacements, and the legacies of our inheritance.

AUTHOR

Shani Mootoo

SHANI MOOTOO was born in Ireland and raised in Trinidad. Mootoo’s highly acclaimed writing includes the novels Cereus Blooms at Night and Polar Vortex, a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, as well as the poetry collections Cane | Fire and Oh Witness Dey!. Her poetry has appeared in Wasafiri, Poetry Magazine, and Room Magazine. She has been awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa from Western University, is a recipient of Lambda Literary’s James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award. She lives in Southern Ontario, Canada.

Reviews

In addition to an invigorating use of documentary poetics Mootoo uses linguistic maximalism to propel and punctuate the text One such example is a listshe repeats throughout the book and it functions to draw connections between disparate peoples experiences across the vast scope of the text melaniebrannagan frederiksen ltem gtWinnipeg Free Press

Biting and gritty each poem is a snapshot of the flotsam and jetsam of the world the origins of you and me In the crucible of nuclear reactionltem gtOh Witness Deyconfronts the politics of belonging and reflects on how individual experiencesthose crucial umbilical cordsconnect us to our common historyltem gtLiterary Review of Canada