Oh Witness Dey!

Overview

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.

Reviews

Author Biography

SHANI MOOTOO was born in Ireland and raised in Trinidad. Her poetry books include Oh Witness Dey!, Cane | Fire, and The Predicament of Or. She is the author of several novels, including Cereus Blooms at Night, now a Penguin Modern Classic and a Vintage Classics book, and Polar Vortex, both shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Mootoo's novels have been long and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Dublin Literary Award, among others. Her prose and poetry have been widely anthologized, including in Trinidad Noir, Trinidad Noir: The Classics, and The Haunted Tropics, and her poetry has appeared in Wasafiri, Poetry Magazine, Audemas, and Room Magazine, among other magazines and journals. She has been awarded the Doctor of Letters honoris causa degree from Western University and 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.