In Brotherhood of the Spurs, a collection of four short stories, Lasana M. Sekou continues his now familiar exploration of the ancestral memory of African Diasporas which have left their creative imprint on all corners of the Caribbean and the major cities of the American mainland. He can evoke with an astonishing intimacy the pastoral rhytms of an old Ashanti village, or trading city on the eve of European arrival which meant rape, pillage and tragic severance of a people from the veins of an ancient heritage. And it is all rendered without any trace of sentimentality or morbid indulgence.
It is his skillful interplay of memory and imagination which allows Sekou to take us across oceans and divers cultures, domestic turbulence and territorial rivalries, without any feeling of rupture or discontinuity in the central theme of the narrative, which is the discovery and collective self-realization of a Caribbean people, whether their acquired indentifications be with St. Martin, Aruba, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe, Haiti, St. Thomas, Trinidad, Antigua, Saba Anguilla. there is room for all in this imaginary family which has made of archipelago probably the first example of a global village.
Brotherhood of the Spurs brings a new dimension to the growing stature of Lasana M. Sekou as a St. Martin and Caribbean writer.
