BOTM Mar 2024 - Snapshots of Belize

[GailW]

Edited by Michael D. Phillips
121 pages, published 1995

"Belize's rich cultural diversity is brought to life in this new anthology of Belizean writers. Spanning a creative period of 40 years, the work is a wonderful sampler of the literary development and unique character of Belizean life, exploring the colorful tapestry of the region's most diverse country."

[Celia]

Thank you Gail for adding this synopsis

[Amanda]

I'm catching up on missed books and I read this one yesterday: it is short (128 pgs) and free through openlibrary. I gave it 3 stars overall. Some of the short stories were more compelling than others, and it seems like the majority are excerpts from bigger works, which may have worked better in that format.

But, some of the highlights were the mixture of works originally in Spanish, English, and creole. The creole bits, and one of the stories about rural crab fishers who speak in creole, was quite culturally/linguistically interesting. The more traditional lives of the rural village folk contrasted with the very modern lives of office working city folk was also a point of interest.

In fact, there was a story in here about an office Christmas party, full of people with Anglo names that surprised me in how similar to my experiences it was- until they mentioned paramilitaries being outside. It was a neat lesson to me about exoticizing countries I haven't been to, and how our experiences can be so the same and so far apart at the same time. It turns out the "Anglo-ness" of a lot of the stories are due to a large anglophone Afro-Caribbean presence in Belize. Which, geographically makes sense, but I had never considered this could be the case before. So some thing were definitely learned!