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Includes bibliographical references (leaf 123). / This collection of short stories explores how ordinary individuals in extraordinary situations negotiate issues of race, gender, sexuality, and longing for home. Set in New York, the Caribbean, and South Africa, they reflect the history and culture of Caribbean immigrants and their children. These stories are meant to entertain and shed light on routinely unexplored areas of human experience: those of women, girls, homosexuals, immigrants, and working class people. The title, This Man Country, refers to how Caribbean people in my grandparents' generation thought of America as "this man country," a place where they would stay temporarily to connect with their children, make money, escape from their lives at home, among other reasons.

This collection of essays investigate and define events that have been relegated to the margins of history. They use primary sources to create a narrative and cover the tragedy of Ethelbert- Portland's only whale, the burning of the Pomona Hotel and its absence in historical memory, certain events in the life of my great-grandfather Julius Schepps and the tumultuous biography of Chinese-American Arctic explorer Charles Tong Sing.

When I began writing this collection, it started off as a short story collection. As I continued to work with memory and recreation / re-vision, my stories began taking the shape of non-fiction. I have decided to include two non-fiction pieces, bookending the fictional stories. I have found something in my thesis, this collection of stories that crosses boundaries and often intersect with each other, speaking from different perspectives. So what you have is a collection of stories, blurring genres, striving for new boundaries. These stories explore and meditate on relationships, the costs of love and loving, loss, sexuality, and identity—my experiences, spanning the human experience. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.. / Summer Semester, 2005. / June 15, 2005. / Arkansas, Lesbian, Asian American, Nonfiction / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert Olen Butler, Professor Directing Thesis; Sheila Ortiz-Taylor, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member.

This is a woman's journey backwards to her people and her place, taking her into deep memory and reconstruction of memory; and yielding moments of darkness she knows she must face, though she is hardly able. It is focused on her need to know her grandmother, and to understand her father's suicide and be reconciled to it. The narrator/protagonist, Catrina, artist and poet, writes a poem raising questions about her family: her grandfather who 'wears his face like blank feathers, night in his throat', her khaki father, her grandmother silently kneading bread. Sensing the presence of her grandmother, Nella, Catrina, keeps receiving small prompts which, because she is open to suggestion, draw her always towards family and home. She is encouraged in this task by Flame, erstwhile TRC Councillor and psychologist practising in London - where Catrina is on a year's sabbatical - to respond to these calls from 'the ancestors', the import of which Flame is fully aware. 'Stories may not be literally or historically true but they could be emotionally true,' Flame tells her. Catrina resists going back, but Flame says that the struggle is now, the past continues in the present and what you do with it, how you use your history, is really about today, not yesterday.

Includes bibliographical references. / At sixteen, Alice, a gifted and highly sensitive teenager in her final year of school, has it all: perfect parents, loyal friends and big plans to attend university. She would never have imagined that in a week everything could vanish. After a party where things go horribly wrong, Alice has a dark secret, one she longs to tell her mother, Penelope, with whom she shares a close bond. But when Penelope is killed in a head-on collision on route to an unknown destination, Alice is bereft of both confidante and guardian.In the chaotic days following her mother's death, Alice discovers she was having an online affair. She fears that her mother's deception renders their whole life together a lie. As she delves into this mystery, she becomes obsessed with the secret life of Penelope and is torn between her pursuit of the lover's identity and an instinct to abandon the search. She is simultaneously embroiled in a series of scandals at school. Disillusioned, Alice risks everything to uncover a truth which she believes will miraculously solve her crisis. Her best friend, Theresa, is the constant voice of reason which Alice wilfully ignores. When she finally tracks her mother's lover to his home, her neat judgements disintegrate as they encounter a complex reality. The idea of Penelope as a sexual and emotional being, not simply a one-sided symbol of maternal care that sacrifices herself to the needs of her family, is, for Alice, deeply disturbing but ultimately redemptive. In this coming-of-age story, as Alice begins to relinquish her judgement of others, she is able to forgive herself for her own failings and accept ambiguity as part of life. It is her decision to move beyond prescribed roles as well as to identify and fulfil her own needs that constitutes her essential development into maturity. It is a story for young adults that acknowledges that childhood is the springboard from which we launch ourselves into the world, that the things we learn in adolescence and the ways in which we cope with adversity during that time determine to a large extent the adults we will become and that those youthful choices reverberate throughout our lives.

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This document is the result of work probably better suited to a psychologist than a literary scholar, so I make my apologies in advance if what follows seems at times inappropriately confessional, but I'm afraid that my interest in the subject is less academic than it is personal. Though it was never included as part of his academic work, the attached typescript for a graphic novel, Kariba, is the work of James C—, for a time one of my most promising students. Under my supervision for the MA within the Department of Language and Communication, he was engaged in writing a novel (the traditional kind, sans illustrations) of which, tragically, only fragments remain. James took his own life in late 2019 after a long struggle with depression. As his supervisor, I saw first-hand the progress of this terrible disease. Despite the encouragement I gave, James suffered from a lack of self-belief that many will recognise as symptomatic of our age—in which the good lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Includes bibliographical references. / This novel narrates the lives of the white working class in the years following 1950. It is a fictionalised autobiography which, as an ego document, narrates the experiences of a family of "padmakers" (road builders). These blue-collar workers built and maintained South Africa's roads in the years between 1951 and 1980 and lived transient lives, moving from town to town, unsettling their families. The author, being the child of one such a family, researched the craft of road building extensively and brings to the story the textures and living conditions of the nomadic, marginalized existences of families in the road camps of those years. The protagonist in the novel is an adult woman journeying through the countryside, researching her past, worrying about the veracity of memory, and trying to understand her own childhood trauma within her family. She remembers her father as the hardworking, approachable parent in whom she found comfort and solace. Despite his own burdens - especially an accident in which a child was killed with a road grader ~ he tried to lighten the household where his dysfunctional wife ruled. During her journey - both literal and figurative - the protagonist learns about the destructive and complicated condition - Munchaussen Syndrome - her mother had always suffered from. Learning more and more about herself and discovering the past and the influence it had on her as an adult, the protagonist comes to an understanding of her mother.

Includes bibliographical references. / The lure of gold in the great reefs of Johannesburg near the end of the 19th century not only attracted the famous mining barons such as Cecil John Rhodes, Alfred Beit and Barney Barnato: working men also came from far and wide to feed their families with their labour. Among them was my great-grandfather, the miner from the Isle of Man, William Cogeen. He arrived via the tin mines of Cornwall and the silver mines of Colorado, and was among those Uitlanders who flocked in those early days to the Transvaal as skilled artisans - wheelwrights, farriers, bricklayers and, especially, experienced hard-rock miners. It was their labour, as well as of black tribesmen from all over southern Africa, that laid the financial foundation for what became the rich city of Johannesburg. It was also their influx that was the excuse that precipitated the Anglo-Boer War. His wife and daughters joined him in what was still a rough boom town, and they stayed on, until forced to flee as refugees from Johannesburg at the start of the war in 1899. Intrigued by the stories my mother and grandmother told me as a child, I began to research my family’s history and travelled to the Isle of Man, Cornwall and Colorado to trace their origins - and my own. This is the remarkable story of what happened to an ordinary working-class family who lived in extraordinary times, and my journey in their footsteps.