Dominoes at the Crossroads
Published February 1st 2020 by Esplanade Books, Paperback 180 pages
In Dominoes at the Crossroads Kaie Kellough maps an alternate nation—one populated by Caribbean Canadians who hopscotch across the country. The characters navigate race, class, and coming-of-age. Seeking opportunity, some fade into the world around them, even as their minds hitchhike, dream, and soar. Some appear in different times and hemispheres, whether as student radicals, secret agents, historians, fugitive slaves, or jazz musicians.
From the cobblestones of Montreal’s Old Port through the foliage of a South American rainforest; from a basement in wartime Paris to a metro in Montreal during the October Crisis; Kellough’s fierce imagination reconciles the personal and ancestral experience with the present moment, grappling with the abiding feeling of being elsewhere, even when here.
User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
A collection of short stories with characters that reappear in subsequent sections and protagonists that tend to sound remarkably similar - which might explain why a writer named Kaie Kellough occasionally pops up as if to remind the reader that it is in fact someone else telling the story.
It is the Caribbean diaspora and how it has long insinuated itself as part of the larger narrative that is Canada.
Rating: really liked it
This is a solid collection of stories, some I enjoyed and others I thought, "a wah gwan yasso?" The ones that were good were
really good and the ones I did not like I really did not like. I love how the author wrote about Caribbean history, being displace, identity and finding community.
I do recommend reading this over a period of a month because going through all at once may not be the best bet.
Solid collection.
Rating: really liked it
An excellent collection of stories. Different topics, different times and different locales... all engaging and the well drawn places and scenarios very relatable.
Rating: really liked it
3.5 although some stories were solid 4s. An interesting array of short stories about displacement, race, and coming-of-age with a bit of sci-fi and music thrown into the mix.
Rating: really liked it
started off strong, but the narrator got more and more aggravating. i enjoyed the emphasis on the fact that a story doesn't necessarily need a main character, and the focus of readers on this aspect can result in losing the primary focus of the author's message or intent. some of this did get lost in certain stories, specifically those that required lots of background knowledge the author did not provide. overall a strong novel, beautiful writing.
Rating: really liked it
3.5/4 stars
'If you are afraid to shoot the general, you are afraid to be free.'
Kellough's stories ring with history, a speculative future, and an understanding of how we have existed in places that have always abused, appropriated, and alienated us.
What compelled me most though each story was how Kellough found ways to entwine his characters' dreams, journeys, and ultimate choices to the existence, endurance, and spirit of our ancestors. He uses music, family, inheritance, ambition, and academics to link past to present, to envision a future that is built on the indomitable spirit of those who came before, fighting for their place in the world.
He delves into generational evolution and inheritance, the desire for each generation to be able to reach further than those who came before; the search for identity and self in connection to the land of our ancestors passed and our parents and grandparents; coming of age in a society that has already categorized you; the expression of our bonds in revolutionary acts and arts.
The opening story was also impactful as it postulated a present that we are currently living, where the landscapes of cities and societies have changed so much yet remain the same in terms of barriers and expectations. A very insightful collection of stories that speaks to Kellough's observance and understanding.
Kellough did a great job of weaving the existence of Black individuals in spaces and places that were not necessarily welcoming, but where they persevered, were aware and thrived.
Rating: really liked it
I grappled with this linked collection of stories by poet-performer-writer Kaie Kellough, as it grapples with issues of class and privilege, of time and displacement, of culture and transmission, of growing up mestizo; metis; mixed-race. Or should I say black belonging. It's too easy to fall into the trap of appropriation maybe, just because one -- the reader, whatever me I happen to be in the moment of writing -- is also mixed. But this feeling of difference is what helps a reader, whomever she may be, relate. And Dominoes grapples gamely with the question of becoming. Who we are at birth is outside of our control. But it's by becoming and finding our elected kin that we build our community; ... outside of the old boys and girls clubs that have a way of dictating who wields power in any country. Power is a tricky, slippery thing. New powers and new networks emerge slowly and quickly, sometimes as fast as you can say "Milieu."
The author of the stories, and his homonym in the stories, as well as the many variants of this character have powers of their own: grace, style, intelligence, wit, humour, riddim. The chief hero of Dominoes at the Crossroads is the storytelling itself, which glows and flows as the stories unfold. It's a psycho-somatic labyrinth, and the laboratory is society. (But the stage is history.) One of the strengths of the writing is its texture. Flaky and feuillete as the crust of a good Jamaican patty. Makes me hanker for Toronto in the 70s and 80s! The Caribbean diaspora in my hometown Toronto.
Kellough has reach, and his narratives enfold and penetrate a wide range of Canadian realities. It's the Carib-Canad-Aspora. But, and. It feels like the main, the focal laboratory is Montreal history, while the drama is that of a living thinking series of threaded needles that is picking and nitting, nitpicking and carefully tearing at its hegemonic sameness. Rewriting the tapestry.
What more can I say in the space of the few minutes before I turn away? Besides that I carry dominoes in my genetic memory, that this is a moving and necessary read, that Kaie's is an exciting and vibrant voice that carries like an enchanted saxophone. That I've always been attracted to crossroads; it's a kind of archetype in my thinking-feeling. That I look forward to following this, vibe, this our literary trajectory into the future.
Rating: really liked it
If you haven’t heard me sing the praises of Kaie Kellough’s short story collection, you haven’t been close enough. OK, maybe it’s that social distancing thing keeping us apart…
IMHO, this collection could be called, “The Hidden History of Black Canadians”. I kept Google at the ready while reading Kellough’s stories as he drops names (Paul Bogle), snippets of news (the Nubian statues in a Montreal hotel), and the name of a town just past Dundalk, first settled by African-Americans before the community disappeared. (I’m not going to tell you the name; you’ll just have to read the story.) For me, the most resonant stories are those infused with the possibilities of Afrofuturism, where Marie-Joseph Angélique is a hero and where the marginalized become society’s saviours.
Rating: really liked it
4 1/2 stars
"I try not to emphasize that the story is going anywhere specific. It is simply moving, when it wants to - or is it just the world that is moving, and people are caught in that movement - and my job, as amanuensis, is to allow the world to move through me ..."
Kellough has performed that job exquisitely. Characters and communities intersect in revealing ways, borders are crossed and re-crossed, worlds collide - and we learn so much, in sometimes unexpected and frequently beautiful ways.
Rating: really liked it
DOMINOES AT THE CROSSROADS by Kaie Kellough
This smooth paperback book feels good in my hands. The stories are told in first person, and the writing and rich details make it easy to visualize the scenes.
I expect that there are deeper meanings buried in the prose.
Although this collection of stories is labelled fiction, I believe that Kaie Kellough uncovers and lays bare some
undeniable truths.
3 stars
Rating: really liked it
"I wanted to stand on the mezzanine and play – not a melody, but a stream of expletive notes, ones that would crack the stones of Parliament, sunder the foundations from the earth. The buildings would tremble, lean, and in a blurred streak of color, slide into the canal."
Rating: really liked it
This is a worthwhile collection of short stories. The various characters all pretty much speak with the same voice and for the most part share overlapping experiences as African or Caribbean immigrants in Canada. Nonetheless that voice is interesting, thoughtful and expressed clearly and poetically.
The author himself appears in occasional cameos that are a tad distracting and sometimes feel like a self-conscious attempt to define his own legacy.
Rating: really liked it
A good collection of short stories that was on the Giller Prize Longlist this year. The stories centre around the Caribbean diaspora here in Canada, focusing on the revolutionary / Marxist leanings of several Caribbean independence struggles (including Haiti, Cuba, and Guyana).
Rating: really liked it
2.5 stars* “without that anonymous service there would be no narrative movement. there would be no consciousness. there would be no world”
=> some stories i liked, hard to keep track of stories because of how each each narrative lacked a unique voice, they all kinda of blended together
Rating: really liked it
“I had outlived that memory, that nostalgia.”
Was confusing with the timelines and a little too descriptive. My favourite short story was Shooting the General!
