Karl and Other Stories

In his own wry, pungent and sometimes bitter words, Karl tells how in winning the world, he loses his soul. The child of an unmarried higgler mother who invests all her love in him, Karl’s intelligence wins him a scholarship, a university education and a prestigious job high up in a bank, but the further he ascends the ladder of success the more he remembers the warning of Ras I: “You gwine to Babylon school man.”

In writing a tragicomedy of the two Jamaicas, Velma Pollard uses the folk-wisdom of the one to critique the other. The comedy is in the merciless satire of the acquisitive middle-class world of cocktail parties and shopping. The tragedy is in Karl’s separation from his home community, and from himself.

With an incisive introduction by Velma Pollard’s long-term friend Daryl Cumber Dance, and seven further stories of women’s lives in Jamaica, the wit and righteous anger of this classic reissue remains wholly pertinent thirty years later, and reminds us what a sterling contribution Velma Pollard made to Caribbean literature.

Velma Pollard (1937–2025) was a distinguished Jamaican poet, fiction writer, and scholar of language. She dedicated her career to literature and education, retiring as Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of the West Indies.