Andre Bagoo. The Undiscovered Country

Abstract

This is a review of Andre Bagoo's essay collection The Undiscovered Country. The collction won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean non-fiction in the year 2021. Bagoo writes about Trinidad and Tobago’s politics and culture, including doubles, soca, and board games, Caribbean writers like V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and Ishion Hutchinson, as well as Anglophone poets, such as, Dylan Thomas, Thom Gunn, and Langston Hughes among others. He intervenes in a wide array of themes, addressing race, gender, nation, disability, colonisation, as well as sexuality, and how these affect the author’s physical body. In this way, the essays are not just experiments—the Old French meaning of essai—but also experiments in talking about the self.