For more than two centuries, Denmark ruled St Thomas, St John, and St Croix—the Danish West Indies. St. Thomas came under Danish control in 1671, St. John in 1718, and St. Croix was purchased from France in 1733. Their economies depended on the transatlantic slave trade and the export of sugar, rum, and molasses, with enslaved Africans far outnumbering Europeans. Resistance was constant, including the 1733 St John revolt, which was violently suppressed.
Emancipation in 1848, won after a major labour rebellion, ended slavery but not inequality: most freed people remained tied to plantations under restrictive laws. By the late 19th century, the sugar economy had collapsed, and Copenhagen faced criticism for neglect and poverty on the islands.
The United States had long eyed the territory as a strategic naval base. Early purchase talks in the 1860s went nowhere, but the First World War revived negotiations. Fearing German expansion in the Caribbean, Washington moved quickly. The 1916 treaty set the price at $25 million in gold, approved by a Danish referendum in which islanders had no say. On March 31, 1917—Transfer Day—the Danish flag came down and the Stars and Stripes went up. US citizenship followed in 1927, without full political rights.
That layered history—of conquest, commerce, emancipation without full freedom, and sovereignty decided in distant capitals—courses through the fiction and poetry of Tiphanie Yanique.
Born in 1978 on St Thomas, Yanique was raised in Hospital Ground by her grandparents: her grandmother, a librarian; her grandfather, a fireman and taxi dispatcher. From them, she inherited a love of storytelling and an ear for rhythm. After All Saints Cathedral School, Yanique attended Tufts University in 1996 and, in 2000, received a Fulbright scholarship to the University of the West Indies, studying Caribbean women writers such as Merle Hodge and Erna Brodber. She earned her MFA from the University of Houston in 2006 under the Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship—melding Caribbean oral traditions, feminist study, and creative writing practice that gave her the space to write stories Virgin Islanders could own.
Yanique’s debut novel, Land of Love and Drowning (2014, Riverhead Books), is a sweeping multigenerational saga set on St. Thomas between 1916 and the 1970s. It follows the Bradshaw family—particularly sisters Eeona and Anette and their half-brother Jacob—as they weather the political, social, and spiritual upheavals of life in the US Virgin Islands. The novel opens amid the transition from Danish to American rule and an early tragedy—a shipwreck that orphans the siblings, setting off a half-century of intimate struggle and cultural transformation.
Yanique’s characters are vivid, presenting pain with raw, almost plaintive pathos:
“Denmark decide it don’t want we. America decide it do. America decide we absolutely necessary because they backside sitting on the Caribbean.”
This is Anette’s voice—colonial power dynamics laid bare through her vernacular rhythm and repetition, revealing how the island’s inhabitants are cast as strategic afterthoughts by empires.
At its core, the novel explores how identity, heritage, and empire intertwine. The sisters—one prized for her otherworldly beauty, the other gifted with foresight—navigate love, loss, and the slow erosion of ancestral traditions amid shifting political tides:
“Family will always kill you—some bit by bit, others all at once. It is the love that does it.”
“The idea that people who guarded you could also be the people that you needed guarding from was nothing anyone should have to learn.”
Critics lauded its ambition and lyricism. The Common described it as “magical realism that calls to mind García Márquez, yet is all its own territory.” Publishers Weekly praised its vivid sense of place and emotional pulse. The novel is often read as a corrective to Herman Wouk’s Don’t Stop the Carnival, reimagining island characters with authenticity and complexity.
Blending history with what Yanique terms “mythical realism,” the narrative infuses ordinary and extraordinary elements—love, curses, siren-like beauty, and prophetic dreams—with the lived realities of colonialism and tourism, creating a Caribbean world rooted in both memory and magic.
Her earlier short fiction collection, How to Escape from a Leper Colony (2010), explores isolation and diaspora with symbol-rich stories. The poetry collection Wife (2015)—winner of the Forward/Felix Dennis Prize and OCM Bocas Prize—examines marriage through lenses of history, economy, intimacy, and politics.
Yanique’s debut novel won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Phillis Wheatley Award, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was an NPR Best Book of 2014. It was also a finalist for the Orion and Hurston-Wright Legacy Awards. She was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honouree, and her early work earned acclaim from Rona Jaffe, the Pushcart Prize, and the Boston Review Fiction Prize.
Her second novel, Monster in the Middle (2021), extends her reach globally—from Ghana to New York to St Thomas—exploring migration, historical wounds, and romance across borders. Critics praised its form and emotional depth, noting its treatment of intergenerational trauma with precision and lyricism.
In her story “God’s Caravan,” published in The New Yorker, Yanique explores spiritual belief among Black communities, connecting survival, scepticism, and religious conviction. Raised Catholic, she has said she understands fiction and faith as parallel forms of storytelling.
As a Caribbean feminist, Yanique addresses how womanhood, place, and history shape one another. In 2015, she appeared with Jamaica Kincaid—whose writing challenges post-colonial complacency—to discuss feminism and diaspora. The conversation underscored a theme central to Yanique’s work: inheritance is land, blood, and stories alive in language, in the cadences of Virgin Islands speech, and in the pull between past and present.
In Land of Love and Drowning, she writes:
“They felt ancient and natural… alive in a time before Americanness. A time before any kind of ness.”
“Yes, we believe in the beach… But we did not consider the sea itself.”
It is a reminder that beneath the surface, currents of history pull us, whether we see them or not.
Yanique serves as an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, after teaching at The New School, Wesleyan, and Rice. Beyond genre, her work appears in Callaloo, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, and Transition Magazine.
