Untangled

Untangled takes the reader on a swirling tour of some of the most beautiful places in the Caribbean but also of the region’s gruesome history. The eye of love searches the landscape in the wake of colonialism and the grim traffic of bodies and souls across the Middle Passage. Evoking everything from birdcalls to colorful festivals, missionaries’ blunders to tasty traditional feasts, Joy Rudder is intimately knowledgeable of her home, which spans the entire Caribbean. She voices heartbreaking questions that most do not venture to ask. But her pain is transformed into poetry, her outrage into prayer. She finds that Christ has preceded her and is very present in her multi-ethnic, multi-religious native Trinidad. Christ is also present in her adopted home, politically correct and trendy Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada. She discovers love in unusual places, delights in friendships with strangers, and kneels to worship in a frat house bathroom. She muses on the grandeur of natural places she has been privileged to see in North America and the Caribbean, yet she unearths disturbing visions. In the end, she finds peace at the last, beyond her troubled quests, in the lived reality of hope.