Moko is an online journal based in the Virgin Islands with a mission to provide “a space where both veteran and novice creators [can] share their work in the spirit of reciprocity and multiplicity.” The third issue is now available. [Artwork above and below by La Vaughn Belle (St. Croix) and Parris Jaru (U.S./Jamaica) respectively, who join Del Foxton (The Bahamas) and Imran Stephen (St. Lucia) in their art section.]

Description: For our third issue, we at Moko are proud to continue to offer a forum for the display of Caribbean art and literature in all of its diverse manifestations. The visual art and writing featured in this issue comes to us from everywhere from the Grenadines to the Virgin Islands and beyond, from Caribbean descendants living everywhere from Sweden to Australia. In our first published essay, entitled “Do Not Enter, Do Not Exit,” University of the West Indies student Genieve Ramrattan imagines a conceptual art installation in a manner that challenges our definitions of art, design, and literature.

Moko Issue 3′s poetry section continues to showcase the strength and range of poets working in the Caribbean and its diaspora, with new poems by Nigel Barto, Summer Edward, Joanne Hillhouse, Vanessa Simmons, and Lou Smith. The work of these poets investigates issues of selfhood, environment, and politics with a lyricism that we also find in the pacing and language of Issue 3′s two short stories: “Atomic Matter” – Monique McIntosh’s riveting imagining of the love, lives, and deaths of Skatalite trombonist Don Drummond and rhumba dancer Anita Mahfood – and “Evergreen” – Dawne Gowrie-Zetterstorm’s stirring study of nostalgia and memory.

This issue’s art section features abstract paintings by Parris Jaru, a Jamaican based in Brooklyn, and La Vaughn Belle, a contemporary artist from St. Croix. Where Belle explores the patterns found on fragments of pottery from the European colonial period, Jaru seeks to deliberately break the “heaviness” that often comes with abstraction in order to inject “an air of humor” into his work. Del Foxton of the Bahamas shares with us delicate but striking compositions using found, recycled, and discarded objects. And finally, we are pleased to feature a selection of photographs from St. Lucia-born Imran Stephen which captures everyday moments in the lives of the residents of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

For more information, see http://africanah.org/moko/