LAND OF MANY COLORS and NANNA-YA

Two early (1985) novellas by the Guadeloupian author of The Children of Segu (1989) and other fiction explicitly devoted to the struggles of Third World populations against their colonizers and oppressors. “Land of Many Colors” explores the history of a family active in a Caribbean independence movement, in the wake of its militant son’s supposedly accidental death. “Nanna-Ya” compresses a history of racial injustice into the story of its eponymous heroine, an obeah woman who was a prime mover in the 18th-century slave riots in Jamaica. Both stories display narrative vigor and structural subtlety, but are argumentative and accusatory to a degree that severely limits their success in fictional terms.