The Haunted Tropics: Caribbean Ghost Stories

Every island of the Caribbean is the site of a deep haunting. Before Columbus, the various indigenous peoples - the Arawaks, the Caribs, the Tainos - lived in relative harmony with the land, the sea and each other. Everything changed in 1492: the Amerindian people quickly were decimated, their presence erased by disease, wars and overwork. These are the Caribbean’s oldest ghosts, almost invisible in history yet still present in the form of place names, fragments of language, ancient foods, and pockets of descendants speckling the islands… .

Given the history of the Caribbean, it is not surprising that much of the region’s literature bears a haunted quality: ghosts are everywhere, be they of the Amerindians, the African ancestors, the slaves, the planters, the indentured workers, the victims of dictatorships, foreign invasions and natural disasters, or the modern exiles. To a large extent, Caribbean fiction in general is a collection of ghost stories, tales of haunted people, memories and places… .

This book brings together some of the region’s leading contemporary authors, from the anglophone, francophone and hispanophone Caribbean, as well as the United States and Canada, and constitutes a unique, transcultural anthology in which living authors evoke the dead, the undead and the dying, the ghosts that haunt their experiences and their works as modern writers of the Caribbean. -From the introduction by Martin Munro