Hardcover - 434 pages (March 10, 1998)
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.ca For an astounding "twenty-five friggin years on the job" 'Nancy shadows
the Edgecliff crew's stoic leader, Johnny Franklin, who secretly reviles
Canada as "an alien soil in so many ways." This "gift of being able to
read minds... can be a real curse, for true," 'Nancy whimpers, but he is
bound by his talent to impart the longing he sees beneath the bluster of
the workers, and the seething steeped in their years of self-preservation.
Between his tear-jerking, haranguing, and resignation, though, 'Nancy is
split-gut funny: "As everybody done know, my mouth ain't have no cover."
Foster's already conjured a lush rendering of a Jamaican woman's
immigrant odyssey in the novel Sleep On, Beloved, and this wild
treatise on the diasporic black man is a sweet debunking of the clichéd
pandering about the redemption to be wrought from misery.
--Sigcino
Moyo
In his
novel Slammin' Tar, Cecil Foster, himself a migrant from his native
Barbados to the fertile snow cover of Canada, unearths the raw deal
migrant workers harvest both at home and abroad. Foster is an esteemed
educator and a journalist who has left his footprints on all the important
Canadian media soapboxes. In Tar his message is succinctly slammed
home by Brer Anancy, a.k.a. 'Nancy--a chaffing, resilient, defiant
narrating madman who has been cursed by Mother Nyame, the possessor of all
stories, to tell the tale of humble Barbadian exiles at work for 10 months
a year on the lowly Edgecliff farm, near Toronto.
