Published in 2023
224 pages
Camille Hernández-Ramdwar is a multi-racial, multicultural, multilingual, and transnational writer and scholar. The veil between the corporeal and the incorporeal is very thin in her work, which explores the search for belonging; the collective violences of neo-colonialism, poverty, racism, sexism, and other injustices; and the important interrelationship between matter and spirit. She divides her time between Toronto and Trinidad and Tobago.
What is this book about?
Suite as Sugar is a testimony to the unseen forces, always vigilant, ever ready, imbuing the characters in this collection with both resilience and trauma.
From Winnipeg winterscapes to Toronto’s condo culture, from Havana’s haunted streets to Trinidad’s calamitous environs, the stories in Suite as Sugar are permeated with the violence of colonial histories, personal and intimate. The characters in this collection reclaim connection to ancestral earth in the absence of elders, reflecting legacies of abandonment and consequential loss. The veil between the living and the dead is obscured, chaos becomes panacea, and characters take drastic matters into their own hands.
In this poignant debut short story collection, survivors of all kinds seek strategy and solace: a group of homeless people organize an occupation of vacant condos, a new resident to a disturbing neighbourhood tries to make sense of madness, a dog investigates the sudden disappearance of his owner. The five intertwined vignettes that make up the title story are set in a Caribbean country where the spectre of the sugar plantation haunts everyone. The casual brutality of our everyday lives, whether seen through the eyes of animal, spirit, or human being, is the central thread tying this collection together.
