Abake Mensah’s Armageddon With a Soundtrack: Caribbean Poems of Sorrel and Salt celebrates the
ordinary places where Caribbean memory is made and preserved.
The collection returns to Tobago Sundays, long family tables, bush tea, school fairs, market stalls,
cricket fields, food vendors, and neighborhood conversations. These familiar settings become archives of
sound, taste, humor, work, and belonging.
In ‘Tobago Things,’ family members pass bowls, stories, and laughter across a table while Mama’s
bush tea is offered for every ailment. ‘School Fair Days’ recalls steelpan, coconut ice cream, doubles, games,
teachers in costume, and the careful spending of a single blue note.
‘Favorite Tourist on Market Day’ captures bargaining, handmade island crafts, curry, pepper sauce,
and the tradition of adding lagniappe. The exchange becomes more than a sale because hospitality and
story travel with the purchased object.
Mensah’s poetry shows that cultural heritage does not survive only through official monuments.
It remains alive when people cook inherited recipes, repeat family sayings, serve food, organize community
events, and remember the small details that shaped childhood.
The collection also acknowledges grief. Mensah dedicates the work to people who carry weight
with light and remembers family members whose voices continue shaping the writing. Domestic memory
becomes a way of keeping love present.
Blending warmth, humor, history, and rhythmic language, Armageddon With a Soundtrack is
written for readers interested in Caribbean identity, family memory, island life, and poetry that finds
significance in everyday experience.
Through kitchens, school yards, markets, and tables, Mensah offers a vivid reminder that culture
is sustained one shared meal, story, and song at a time.
