Reading list, Form 4 (and one novel for me)

I teach English at Alexandra School in Bridgetown. Sixth form literature and Form 4 comprehension. I have been doing this for nine years and I have opinions about the CSEC syllabus that I keep mostly to myself, except here. The YA novel I'm writing is set in Barbados, in a fictional secondary school somewhere in St. Philip. It follows a sixteen-year-old girl named Adanna whose family moved from St. Lucia two years before the story starts, which means she is almost local but not quite. The Bajan/Vincentian/Lucian distinctions are real and they matter at school in a way that adults tend to forget. Kamau Brathwaite is on my classroom wall, a photograph from a 1960s reading in London. Half my students do not know who he is and that is a genuine curriculum failure. I bring him in anyway, *Rights of Passage*, a few stanzas, because the rhythms are the thing, and fourteen-year-olds respond to rhythm before they respond to meaning. It works every time. What the novel is refusing to do: the American high school tropes. There is no prom. There is no quarterback. The social architecture of a Caribbean secondary school runs on seniority and examination performance and the particular drama of house systems. Adanna's problem is not fitting in. It is that she fits in well enough that nobody notices what she is carrying. I write on weekends, before the marking pile catches up with me.