Published in 2022 (first published 2010)
345 pages
Yvonne Shorter Brown is an Afro-Jamaican settler to Turtle Island. She is a distinguished educator with some 50 years’ experience in various roles. Her research and writing focuses on the social, political, and economic legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, plantation-chattel slavery, and post-emancipation in the Americas. She is currently working on a political biography of Charles Archibald Reid, her maternal grandfather and a former Member of the Legislative Assembly of Jamaica.
Sonja Boon is Professor of Gender Studies at Memorial University. An award-winning researcher, writer, teacher, and flutist, she is passionate abut life writing, archives, and identity. For six years, she was principal flutist of the Portland Baroque Orchestra (Oregon). In 2020, she was awarded the Royal Society of Canada’s Ursula Franklin Award in Gender Studies. What the Oceans Remember is her fourth book.
What is this book about?
Dead Woman Pickney chronicles Yvonne Shorter Brown’s life growing up in Jamaica between 1943 and 1965 and teaching in Canada from 1969. Told with stridency and humour, the stories include both personal experience and history.
Taking up the haunting memories of childhood, along with persistent racial marginalization of Black people, both globally and in Canada, the author sets out to construct a narrative that at once explains her own origins in the former slave society of Jamaica and traces the outsider status of Africa and its peoples. The author’s quest to understand the absence of her mother and her mother’s people from her life is at the heart of the narrative. The author struggles through life to discover the identity of her mother in the face of silence from her father’s brutal family. In this updated edition she adds a coda, “finding mother”, constructed from archives, genealogy, letters, and journals.
Initially published in 2010, this second edition includes expanded text and a foreword by Sonja Boon, author of What the Oceans Remember.
