Friends, colleagues, and former students of poet, author and university lecturer Jennifer Rahim continue to mourn her sudden death on March 13. They said her work and influence will continue to resonate with them.
The UWI St Augustine Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies joined the entire university community and the region in mourning the loss of this Caribbean literary scholar.
The department said Rahim joined the university as a lecturer in the Department of Liberal Arts in 1997 and was soon promoted to senior lecturer. She held a BA (1987) and PhD (1993) in literatures in English and an MA in theology (2016).
Rahim taught a wide range of courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including creative writing (poetry and prose), literary criticism and feminist theory.
Peepal Tree Press published Rahim’s work. Founder Jeremy Poynting, in a blog post on the company's website, described her as "one of the region’s very best writers."
He said despite her death at the too-early age of 60, Rahim had achieved much, but had much more to give.
“We must have exchanged over 1,000 e-mails just over the past two or three years, and many more before that.
"We published her first book in 2007, and I knew of her work long before that through the late Anson Gonzalez and her poetry in The New Voices, beginning in the early 1980s. The e-mails that arrived included the first sight of new poems, many still unpublished, followed by sequences of revisions; ideas about novels for the future; and the editorial to-and-fro with Jennifer over the past three or four years concerning revisions and rewrites of her novel, Goodbye Bay (due for release in July 2023).”
He said it was a privilege to be treated as a repository of the work in progress and as a sounding board.
“I have long thought that Jennifer was one of the region’s very best writers, but of all the writers we have worked with, no one was more self-critical, less confident, on the surface at least, of the value of what they did. Underneath, though, I think she had a determined hope that her writing could make a difference."
Poynting said what was most important to Rahim was to reflect the Caribbean back to itself in ways that enabled her readers to engage with issues of individual responsibility, of ethical values, in an utterly unpreachy way.
“But while, like many, I feel shock and sadness over this loss – and I think of how bereft her elderly parents must feel – and what we must have lost in important work to come, we must give thanks for what was achieved, the important academic work, the inspiration she offered to some younger writers who have been testifying about the support she gave them."
Former student and poet Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné said Rahim changed her life and was the first person to believe in her poetry. She took Rahim’s creative writing course as part of her undergraduate degree in 2009.
“Dr Rahim showed me through her own understand
