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Christine Roseeta Walker, Coco Island

Eric Doumerc
Bibliographical reference

Christine Roseeta Walker, Coco Island, Manchester, Carcanet, 2024. ISBN : 978-1-80017-400-9

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1Christine Roseeta Walker is a Jamaican poet and novelist who lives near Manchester and studied Creative Writing at the University of Salford and at the University of Manchester. She organises reading workshops for people in care homes living with dementia.

2Her debut poetry collection, Coco Island, was published by Carcanet in 2024, and is based on her recollections of her childhood spent in Negril, on the west coast of Jamaica. Christine Roseeta Walker has spent most of her life outside of Jamaica, but her home island has provided the main inspiration for this collection.

3Childhood was a very important theme in the development of Caribbean literature, and many Caribbean novels, from George Lamming’s In The Castle of My Skin (1953) to Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando (1965) were basically recollections of Caribbean childhoods. Other examples that come to mind are of course Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey (1970) and V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street (1959).

4Walker’s first collection revisits the poet’s childhood in Negril and chronicles the daily life of a child who grows up in a small community in the Caribbean. But the usual tropes associated with childhood, like innocence or looking the world adults made through a child’s eyes, do not necessarily recur. Instead of these familiar tropes, we get to see the darker side of Jamaica and the slow decline of a small, rural community. Three major themes recur again and again in that first collection: violence as a constant threat in the children’s daily life, the erosion of values and the decline of a certain way of life, and the urge to escape, the need to leave the prison “Coco Island” has become.

5Violence as a constant threat in the children’s daily life is a recurring theme in that debut collection. In the poem entitled “Hot Oil”, a child is told by her grandmother to fry fish and, as she was never taught how to do it properly, inevitably spoils and burns the fish. The grandmother loses her temper and a “fork comes flying through the air” and then “bounces off the wall” (74). The grandmother then asks the girl to buy more fish. The clinical and matter-of-fact tone used to meticulously relate these events produces quite a chilling effect, particularly the last lines of the poem:

“The both glance at each other
without mentioning the fish
or the years of unprovided teaching” (74)

6In the poem entitled “My Father’s Mother”, the climax is reached when the reader learns that the persona in the poem is not afraid to crawl under the house to retrieve sick puppies or of the smell of dog faeces on her fingers. What she is most afraid of is the stick she will be beaten with. The last word of the poem (“submit”) hints at a whole pattern of constant violence which was part of the traditional way of bringing up and disciplining children if need be:

“Instead
it was
the stick
she used to
make me
submit” (76)

7In the poem entitled “Drunk Chaperone,” three girls are taken to town by an inebriated uncle who eventually lets them down and leaves them to their own devices, to finally incur the wrath of his wife who does not let him know that the girls finally made it back home in one piece. The mixture of dark humour and social commentary makes for an engaging, but deeply disturbing poem. The same approach is used in the poem entitled “Carnivorous” in which “Uncle Ben,” who was well-known for peeping under girls’ dresses, is finally given “the judicial axe” (107) by his wife.

8The disappearance of a traditional way of life and the erosion of certain values is another major theme in this collection. The poem entitled “The Music” chillingly chronicles the demise of certain key values like solidarity and selflessness, and their replacement by a spiritual void filled by drugs. It takes as its central focus a house which was owned by “Ms Bessie/a senior Jamaican living abroad” (88) who would invite the local children to take part in the bounties of her house, giving them liquorice and peanut butter sandwiches. As the years went by, Ms Bessie seems to have died abroad and the house went to rack and ruin, with “hallucinogens” replacing the sweets the children enjoyed.

9In the poem entitled “Yes” the persona becomes aware as a child of the harsh realities of life when one of her friends goes to the local prison with her to visit her mother, a local prostitute (“what else is an unqualified woman in Negril to do!”).

10The violence and erosion of certain values eventually mean that Coco Island is a prison from which the island’s inhabitants try to escape. Those left behind seem to live in the past and it is then best to leave. In the poem entitled “Winston,” the persona warns her brother about the dangers of moving to England where the food, local customs and climate are very different from what can be experienced in the Caribbean. In “Nostalgia” the pull of the past seems to be irresistible, and the persona is taken back to her home island. The poem entitled “The Birdman” movingly deals with that theme of those left behind through the story of a man who has been left by his wife, and who waits for her for twenty-five years before passing away. Contrary to the parakeets and the egrets he saw every day, that man could not fly away and join his “brown-skin wife” in Canada and had to “stay on the ground” (54). The subtle social connotations of the phrase “brown-skin wife” hint at the gulf which may have existed between this man and his wife, and which prevented him from flying out, symbolically or literally.

11There is, in this debut collection, a certain grittiness, a certain toughness which is reminiscent of Kei Miller’s In Nearby Bushes (Carcanet, 2019) and which augurs well for the future of Caribbean poetry. Christine Roseeta Walker’s second collection will surely be eagerly awaited.

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References

Electronic reference

Eric Doumerc, “Christine Roseeta Walker, Coco IslandMiranda [Online], 32 | 2025, Online since 14 October 2025, connection on 18 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/68432; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/14yon

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About the author

Eric Doumerc

Maître de Conférences
Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès
eric.doumerc@univ-tlse2.fr

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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