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Through luminescent light, ancestral paths, and a Caribbean spirit-inflected world, Naniki explores the musings and inner workings of the deep blue — the Caribbean Sea — and its shape-shifting sea beings.
As the sea mirrors the light from the blue skies, and its depths are exposed by daggers of sunlight, so too Naniki reveals and honours the Indigenous roots of the Caribbean and its people, whose destiny is tied to the sea, the vessel of collective memory.
Amana and Skelele are made of water and air, their essence intertwined with Taino and African ancestry. They evolved as elemental beings of the Anthropocene, and shape-shifting with their naniki (active spirits) or animal avatars, they begin an archipelagic journey throughout the Caribbean Basin to see the strange future they dreamed of. Until devastation erupts.
Tasked by their elders to go back in time to the source of the First People’s knowledge, they must surmount historical and mythological challenges alike. How can they navigate and overcome these obstacles to regenerate themselves, their love, their islands, and their seas?
A RARE MACHINES BOOK
Time-bending, world-bending, heart-bending, Naniki is truly luminous … a lyrical spiritual Afro-Indigenous epic set in a climate ravaged Caribbean. Kempadoo has outdone herself: this is what happens when a book becomes a spell.
This work is wonderful, brilliant, surreal and unlike anything I’ve read before in Caribbean Lit. Its plot has utopian and dystopian elements merging into each other, most times, without acknowledging differentiation. The work is a fable, a parable, and a mythic tale, spun together into a movement of sound and colour and form, but underpinned by abstraction, metaphor and a radical philosophy of being. A merging of land, sea and air into being that then creates a harmony where love exists on so many planes simultaneously that physical contact may or may not happen and/or it is happening all the time. Layer upon layer of ambiguity that transcends limitations because there is unspoken agreement about all things being possible.
Kempadoo’s engagement with Caribbean lore and mythology is spellbinding, magical, and wonderfully lyrical.