Moving pictures

A portfolio of images from the painted minibuses of Suriname:

“Paramaribo’s wilde bussen — literally, ‘wild buses’ — have a distinctive iconography and their own pictorial conventions. The front panel below the windscreen usually features a graphic resembling a heraldic escutcheon: a main portrait — anyone from Sean Paul to Arnold Schwarzenegger to a Hindu deity — on a central shield or medallion, with two ‘supporters’ on either side — often scantily dressed young woman in come-hither poses.”

Image above: minibus painting, Paramaribo, June 2009; photograph by Nicholas Laughlin

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“I must make trouble for the nation”

Christian Campbell talks to Lisa Allen-Agostini about shaping a poetic voice and his debut book, Running the Dusk:

“I tried to write this book with a certain quality of light. The crossroads and crossing that is dusk. Dusk shapes the work spiritually and metaphorically, so whether I mention dusk or not, you end up asking (as a friend did), ‘Where is dusk in this poem?’”

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Also noted

Capsule reviews of other new and recent books by M. NourbeSe Philip, Marion Bethel, Luisa Capetillo, E.A. Markham, and others.

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Lonely Londoner

Jonathan Ali on the reissue of Andrew Salkey’s 1960 novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement:

“Set in London, Escape to an Autumn Pavement tells the story of a Caribbean immigrant of mixed race and middle-class background riven by his identity. That alone would be enough to make for a serious case against the book — the Tragic Mulatto has never been popular in Caribbean literature — but to crown things off, the character in question is also quite possibly gay.”

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History’s garden

Nicolette Bethel on Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations, by Sidney W. Mintz:

“For those of us who live in — or who are products in some way of — this fertile and complicated location, Mintz’s book serves to remind us of our significance in the world. And it is worth reminding ourselves of this. We who are children of this extended colonial history cannot take independence, self-determination, full personhood, and true sovereignty for granted.”

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Also in the current issue: Brendan de Caires on Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class, by Belinda Edmondson; John Gilmore on Edward Baugh’s Frank Collymore: A Biography; Ian Dieffenthaller on Artefacts of Presence: Collected Poems, by Anson Gonzalez; Nadia Ellis on How to Escape from a Leper Colony, by Tiphanie Yanique; Vanessa Spence on Eating Air, by Pauline Melville; Kelly Baker Josephs on You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James; a portfolio from Karyn Olivier’s ACA Foods Free Library public art project; Annie Paul on Young Talent V at the National Gallery of Jamaica; and more.

See the full contents of the July 2010 issue here.

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From the May 2010 issue

Jeremy Taylor on Conversations with Caryl Phillips; F.S.J. Ledgister on Picasso, I Want My Face Back, by Grace Nichols; Anu Lakhan on Crocodile, by Anthony C. Winkler; Jonathan Ali on The Island Quintet, by Raymond Ramcharitar; Joshua Jelly-Schapiro on Paule Marshall’s literary coming of age; Vahni Capildeo on visiting India for the first time; an interview with Jeremy Poynting of Peepal Tree Press; a portfolio of images from Dhiradj Ramsamoedj’s Adjie Gilas; poems by Kei Miller and Shara McCallum; and more.

See the full contents of the May 2010 issue here.

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The CRB’s new online archive includes the full contents of the last three issues, and selections from older editions. (You can still access the CRB’s entire back archive at our old website.) In the coming months, we will add the full contents of every past issue to the new archive and subject index.