About: Vera Bell

Vera Bell or Vera Alberta or Albertha Bell (born 1906; date of death unknown) was a Jamaican poet, short-story writer and playwright. Her 1948 poem "Ancestor on the Auction Block" has been anthologized several times although a 2005 review of The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse says "some of the earlier poems survive only as amusing museum pieces, such as Vera Bell's "Ancestor on the Auction Block"". The poem is described by in his An Introduction to West Indian Poetry (1998) as "a poem whose crux is the poet's troubled relation to the poet's ancestral subject/object", and Breiner cites George Lamming as placing the poem "squarely at a liminal moment in the process of establishing contact with a previously objectified or fetishized Other".