Blacka

“You have come,”
he said,
and I knew
there and then
that I was home.
I never went back
to my father’s house,
and he never came
to look for me.
And I knew
that he knew
where I was.

It is a sweltering day in a village in Guyana when a fourteen-year-old decides to journey to meet his grandfather, Blacka, for the first time. As he arrives in Buxton, the teen already knows that Blacka has been the source of his attorney father’s misery about his blackness for what seems an eternity. But it is not until the grandson and grandfather finally meet for the first time that the teen realizes he has arrived home.

In a collection of short tales shared in rap-like verse, Owen Ifill highlights the rhythms of a Guyana village as a teenager is mentored by his grandfather, Blacka, while learning lessons, confronting his fears, developing into his own person, and attempting to successfully navigate through a variety of challenges.

Blacka is a volume of rhythmically told stories that leads others down an imaginative path as a young man immerses himself in the culture of a village in Guyana.