PREE – Active Voice

Linking to the second issue of PREE, an online portal of contemporary Caribbean writing started by a few colleagues and me. check it out! If I’ve stopped writing my Gleaner column, this is the reason. Not a multi-tasker so if i take on something new, something has to be dropped.

The second issue of PREE focuses on the theme ‘Pressure’. Pressure buss pipe, yes. But, pressure also creates diamonds. What does pressure do for us tethered to the Caribbean? Is there a pressure to be ‘Caribbean’, to perform Caribbeanness, to act St. Lucian, Grenadian, Trini or Jamaican for instance; a demand that we rigidly embody our culture(s)?

There is the financial pressure to turn coins into dollars and deflated dollars into meals and school fees. There is the cultural pressure to persist and the global pressure to give in. Economic pressure to expand tourism and environmental pressure to protect. The desire for freedom and pressure to remain ‘authentic’. There is social pressure, atmospheric pressure, population pressure, the pressure to achieve the impossible. Also, and sometimes fatally, for too many of us in the region and the diaspora, pressure builds in our blood. Pressure takes root in our hearts and manifests clinically as hypertension and the dangerous possibilities of stroke, heart attack, pulmonary embolism. Pressure underlies any number of presentations of mental illness. Pressure is not just a soul-killing thing, but a thing from which we can actually die. Whichever way you cut it, pressure exists as a powerful invisible force. These are just some of the possible launching points that we asked contributors to wrestle with in this sophomore issue. Via prose, poetry, essays, memoirs, videos, and artwork that explored the possibilities that exist for pressure, PREE contributors did not disappoint.