Bee, a resilient young woman with an infectious narrative voice, travels from her Caribbean home to Brooklyn, in search of safety, employment, and a truly rewarding partnership

IN FOREIGN BODY, BEE TELLS HER STORY IN THE LILTING VERNACULAR voice of a young Black West Indian woman—wise, humorous, resourceful, and resilient. She is the victim of multiple assaults in her brutally patriarchal village, with the sole support of a stalwart grandmother. In spite of this, Bee becomes a record-winning sprinter, expert seamstress, trusted housekeeper, a successful “cutterman” in the sugarcane fields, and a voracious reader. 

Along the way, Bee falls in love with Cherry, a beguiling character equal parts tender and violent. With Cherry, she discovers another side of sex: their pleasures heightened to ecstasy by their custom of cross-dressing. But, eventually, Cherry’s tender qualities are subsumed by the violent ones and Bee flees; she leaves their son and daughter with her grandmother and escapes to Brooklyn, New York to take a job as the caretaker of an Orthodox Jewish family. In Brooklyn, she forms a special bond with Mistress Kuchinski—particularly after an attempted assault on Bee by Kuchinski’s rabbi-husband that ends up resulting in Bee’s own imprisonment. 

After she is released with Mistress Kuchinski’s help, Bee starts a lucrative sewing business and sends for her two children. Despite herself, Bee falls deeply in love with Pastor Amy, the Jamaican-American minister of an Anglican church—and an outspoken lesbian. Pastor Amy moves into the brownstone with Bee and her children, and together they take a mortgage as joint owners. Bee feels the longing to become a mother again—in vitro, the child to be raised with Pastor Amy—with a rehabilitated Cherry, freshly arrived from the West Indies, as the donor-father. In the final pages it becomes clear that it is this unborn child, along with the reader, to whom Bee tells her unforgettable story.

About the Author: 

ROBERT ANTONI is equal parts Trinbagonian, Bahamian, and US citizen. His fictional world is the British West Indies—the region’s history, geography, mythology, folklore, and above all its vernacular languages. His books have garnered a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, an NEA grant, the Bocas Prize for Best Book from the Caribbean, the Aga Kahn Prize from the Paris Review, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Trinidad & Tobago National Library. Antoni’s work has been translated into five languages. He holds an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and an MFA and PhD from the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. Antoni has taught in writing programs across the United States, and he presently teaches in the Pan-European MFA for Creative Writing, with alternating residencies in Barcelona, Vienna, and Dublin.