“This question of place”: a conversation with Kelly Baker Josephs

by Nicholas Laughlin on March 3, 2011

sx salon home page

Founded in 1997 in Jamaica, currently based in New York, Small Axe is one of the Caribbean’s leading intellectual journals, devoted to “fashioning a criticism that works through our intellectual tradition.” Or, as editor-in-chief David Scott put it in a November 2008 CRB interview:

concerned with intervening in debates about the Caribbean in such a way as to be critical of the conventional paradigms in relation to which, or through which, the Caribbean was conceived, argued about, engaged —
to try to open up conceptual intellectual space for revisioning the Caribbean . . .

The Small Axe Project — driven by a collective of scholars and thinkers — now includes several web-based initiatives that complement the work of the print journal. The most recent of these is sx salon, a bimonthly online platform “for the convergence of expressions and discussions of the literary,” edited by Small Axe managing editor Kelly Baker Josephs (a literary scholar with roots in Jamaica, and regular CRB contributor) and writer-scholar Andrea Shaw. Launched in October 2010, sx salon publishes book reviews, interviews, discussions of literary and cultural topics, and new fiction and poems.

I recently asked Kelly a few questions about sx salon via email; even before she sent her replies, she returned the favour by interviewing me for a special discussion section on “Caribbean arts and culture online,” published in the February 2011 sx salon . You can read my answers to her questions here, and Kelly’s answers to my questions below.

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Nicholas Laughlin: Where and how does sx salon fit into the larger Small Axe Project — the Small Axe ecosystem, as it were?

Kelly Baker Josephs: sx salon is part of our decision to focus some of our energies on literary production. In the overall Small Axe Project, it’s one of two online platforms — the other being sx space, which focuses on visual art — and it houses another recent literary venture, the Small Axe Literary Competition. So, to sort of chart out the ecosystem a bit: there’s the journal Small Axe, which, with fourteen years of publishing, is the oldest and most visible component of the Small Axe Project; sx space, which has been up for close to four years, and is managed by Christopher Cozier; the literary competition, now in its third year; and the seedling, sx salon: a small axe literary platform.

NL: Between sx salon and the annual literary competition, it seems that Small Axe is paying new and closer attention to Caribbean literature. Why this shift, and what other fresh directions might the collective be moving in?

KBJ: Well, I’m not sure I’d say “new,” since the Small Axe Project has a long-standing reputation for supporting creative and critical work in Caribbean literature. But “closer,” yes, we are paying more particular attention to literary arts with these two projects.

The Small Axe Literary Competition was David Scott’s brainchild. He noted that there weren’t any similar literary prize competitions, and wanted to establish some form of institutional support for emerging Caribbean writers. The existing competitions were (and to some extent still are) either too international, eclipsing the Caribbean; or nationally based, like the Guyana Prize; or closed to new and as-yet-unpublished writers. Although it’s still in its early years, the competition has received so much positive support from writers and the Caribbean community at large that it seems it does fill a long-neglected need. (By the way, the deadline for this year has been extended to May 31. Interested writers can find information here.)

sx salon sprang in part out of that positive response to the literary competition, in part out of our concern when CRB paused publishing [between May 2009 and May 2010] and, more generally, out of our desire to provide a vital resource and virtual gateway for students and scholars of Caribbean literature. We’re in the embryonic stages of this yet, but growing towards it. I’m particularly excited about the newly expanded discussion section, which moves the project closer to its given designation as a salon.

Two other new projects concern the visual arts. We recently received a three-year grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to commission original artwork and scholarly essays for a project called “The Visual Life of Catastrophic History”. The project statement will be in the March 2011 issue of Small Axe. Also in that issue is the first folio of photographic work in a yearlong collaboration between the Small Axe Project and the London-based Autograph ABP.

Along with the ongoing work of the print journal, the Small Axe Project has quite a few new irons in the fire, but those above are the ones that are top of mind for me right now.

NL: Where and how do you think sx salon will fit into the broad and growing network of online resources (journals, blogs, archives) for Caribbean literature? And which of these other resources do you pay closest attention to?

KBJ: I’ll answer the easier question first: The Caribbean Review of Books, of course! I like to check out a few blogs that I think of as literary, even though they often cover culture more generally — Geoffrey Philp, Signifyin’ Woman, PLEASURE, Caribbean Book Blog — but I am not as regular with those as I would like to be. I have gotten into the (perhaps bad) habit of relying on my Twitter stream to remind me to check. I also regularly “go by” Repeating Islands, Latineos, and Active Voice because, at this point, how else would I know anything? Lately I have been following Tobias Buckell’s blog, because I am working up to an interview with him, and it’s been interesting to approach the Caribbean science fiction/fantasy world from this angle.

Now, as to how sx salon will fit into this particular ecosystem . . . I think one of the best responses I got when I was announcing the launch of the salon was at an event in New York last spring. Geoffrey Philp happened to be in the audience, and he got up and made a short speech about the importance of the new venture as institutional support for Caribbean literary arts. I hadn’t formed the idea in my head quite that way, but now I always think of it when I try to situate sx salon in the online network you reference. It is, like the print journal, based in academia, and bound to be heavily influenced by that. Our content is not exclusive, or even “gated,” but it will have an academic “flavour” because both myself and Andrea Shaw (who primarily manages the creative end of sx salon) are based in academia and approach the project from this background.

NL: A question I got asked just the other day, and found hard to answer: from your particular vantage point, how would you describe the current state of Caribbean literature?

KBJ: By the time this is published I am sure I will regret my answer, and wish I had been more informed and clairvoyant, but let me give it a shot. Like many people interested in Caribbean Literature, I am excited about the introduction of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and I have been paying close attention to the developments during their first year. I think the introduction of this prize, and the more regional Guyana Prize and the Small Axe Literary Competition, evidences a desire to own the means of valuing and rewarding Caribbean cultural production.

Of course, these prizes raise the inevitable question of how to define “Caribbean” when discussing cultural production. For example, the OCM Bocas Prize requires that the writer be born in the Caribbean or hold Caribbean citizenship. While I think I can guess at the impetus for such a rule, I don’t think the question is that easily answered. That excludes a large portion of writers that I think make significant contributions to the shape of our literature.

I’m not sure I’m answering your question, but I would say that this tension, this question of place, of citizenship, of (yes, the word is necessary) diaspora, is growing increasingly urgent. I don’t have any answers to this question, I’m still working on the right words to even phrase it, but I do know that it is a new question (different, say, to that of “exiled” writers), and I would venture to say that it most defines the current state of Caribbean literature.

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Read Kelly Baker Josephs’s most recent contribution to the CRB: a review of You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James, ed. David Austin, from our July 2010 issue.

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2011 OCM Bocas Prize longlist

by Nicholas Laughlin on February 28, 2011

The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature — which will be awarded for the first time this year — has announced its 2011 longlist of ten books, in three genre categories:

Poetry

= Elegguas, by Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados) — Wesleyan
= A Light Song of Light, by Kei Miller (Jamaica) — Carcanet
= White Egrets, by Derek Walcott (St. Lucia) — Faber

Fiction

= The Loneliness of Angels, by Myriam Chancy (Haiti/Canada) — Peepal Tree
= Redemption in Indigo, by Karen Lord (Barbados) — Small Beer
= The Amazing Absorbing Boy, by Rabindranath Maharaj (Trinidad and Tobago/Canada) — Knopf Canada
= How to Escape a Leper Colony, by Tiphanie Yanique (US Virgin Islands) — Graywolf

Non-fiction

= Beauty and Sadness, by Andre Alexis (Trinidad and Tobago/Canada) — House of Anansi
= Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, by Edwidge Danticat (Haiti/USA) — Princeton
= The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, by V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad and Tobago/UK) — Picador

As I’ve mentioned before, your Antilles blogger is on the organising committee for the OCM Bocas Prize, so it gives me much satisfaction to report that we’ve reached this stage in the judging process. I’m also pleased it’s such a diverse list, with writers representing six Caribbean countries, and ranging from two Nobel laureates (Walcott and Naipaul, of course) to two debut authors (Lord and Yanique).

There’s more information about the longlist here, and full details of the prize here. The three genre category winners — making up the shortlist for the overall prize — will be announced on 28 March, and the OCM Bocas Prize ceremony will be one of the highlights of the Bocas Lit Fest at the end of April.

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Making the list

by Nicholas Laughlin on February 11, 2011

Two stacks of books next to each other

Photograph by Horia Varlan, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

It’s shortlist time — for at least a couple of literary awards.

Yesterday the Warwick Prize for Writing announced its 2011 shortlist; Derek Walcott’s White Egrets has advanced to the final six (after winning the T.S. Eliot Prize a couple weeks back). The Warwick Prize is a biennial cross-genre award, open to writing in any form, on a theme which changes with each cycle. This time around, the theme is colour.

Also announced yesterday: the regional shortlists for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. For purposes of the award, the fifty-odd nations of the Commonwealth are divided into four regions: Africa, Canada and the Caribbean, South Asia and Europe, and South East Asia and the Pacific. Each region has its own panel of judges, who name regional shortlists for best book and best first book. The regional winners (to be announced on 3 March) then vie for the overall prizes in the two categories.

In Caribbean literary circles, at least in recent years, the CWP’s regional shortlist announcements have often triggered a flurry of discussion and concern about the scarcity of Caribbean books making the semi-final cut. In 2010, only one Caribbean book made it onto the Canada/Caribbean best book/best first book shortlists (out of twelve titles total). In 2009 — when your Antilles blogger was a regional CWP judge — it was one out of thirteen. This year, the twelve shortlisted books from our region are all Canadian:

Canada and Caribbean Best Book

The Sky is Falling by Caroline Adderson (Canada)
Room by Emma Donahue (Canada)
The Master of Happy Endings by Jack Hodgins (Canada)
In the Fabled East by Adam Lewis Schroeder (Canada)
The Death of Donna Whalen by Michael Winter (Canada)
Mr Shakespeare’s Bastard by Richard B. Wright (Canada)

Canada and Caribbean Best First Book

Bird Eat Bird by Katrina Best (Canada)
Doing Dangerously Well by Carole Enahoro (Canada)
Mennonites Don’t Dance by Darcie Friesen Hossack (Canada)
Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod (Canada)
The Cake Is for the Party by Sarah Selecky (Canada)
Illustrado by Miguel Syjuco (Canada)

(Perhaps Caribbean readers can take some consolation from the presence of Andrea Levy’s novel The Long Song on the South Asia/Europe shortlist.)

As a Caribbean reader and writer, I’m disappointed that no Caribbean books are in the running for the 2011 CWP. But at the same time I’m disinclined to second-guess the judges’ decisions. If the 2009 round was anything to go by, they read something like a hundred books of fiction in the space of four months, and agonised over the shortlisting process. And it’s worth remembering the facts of demographics: Canada has a population more than five times the size of the Commonwealth Caribbean’s, and Canadian writers publish many more works of fiction each year than do Caribbean writers. (In the middle of the 2009 CWP judging period, I scribbled some thoughts about this.)

Around the time of last year’s CWP shortlist announcement, I participated in a sort of debate on the Caribbean “shortfall” which started when a writer friend made a comment on Facebook. Eleven people weighed in, most of them writers (but because the exchange happened in Facebook’s semi-private zone, I won’t mention names or quote anyone, except myself). There was a rough consensus that the CWP judging system — specifically, the way eligible books are sorted into regions, usually dominated by one or two big countries — systematically disadvantages writers from parts of the world like the Caribbean. The discussion thread covered demographics, the possibility of cultural bias, and the motives of the judges — and of course several people named the Caribbean books they felt should have been shortlisted for the 2010 prize, but weren’t.

I ended my own contribution to the debate with this point:

Isn’t it obvious we need a very well-funded and well-managed set of Anglophone Caribbean literary prizes with substantial cash awards? Anybody with US$5 million to donate to the cause, message me directly and we’ll start setting it up.

Whereupon my writer friend who started the thread promised to buy a lotto ticket.

I assume he didn’t win the jackpot, but the remarkable good news is that, a year later, there are not one but two new Caribbean literary prizes that will be awarded for the first time in 2011. The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, announced last November, is an annual award for books of poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction by Caribbean writers, with prize money of US$10,000. It is organised by the Bocas Lit Fest, sponsored by One Caribbean Media, and the inaugural winner will be announced at the end of April. (Your Antilles blogger is a member of the organising committee.)

Meanwhile, the Guyana Prize for Literature — established in 1987 to recognise outstanding books by Guyanese writers, and funded by the government of Guyana — has announced a new biennial Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award. It is open to writers from across the region, with a US$5,000 prize for the winners in three categories: fiction, poetry, and drama. (More information here.) The 2011 entry deadline is 28 February, and winners will be announced in May.

These two new awards don’t replace the CWP, which offers a different kind of recognition. Many Caribbean writers are actually eligible for numerous awards of different sorts and sizes and degrees of fame, depending on where they live or publish — and quite often win them. But there is surely immense potential value in literary awards that focus on the particular diversity of Caribbean writing — organised, funded, and judged by Caribbean people with Caribbean sensibilities, with the immediate aim of promoting Caribbean books, and as rigorous a concern for aesthetic merit as any literary awards anywhere in the world.

I believe these new awards are important acts of self-determination and self-confidence. Of course, it is the quality of the winning books in the years to come that will determine the awards’ credibility and their real value (prize money aside). I’m eagerly looking forward to the announcement of the first shortlists and winners, and to the fresh debates they will provoke.

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R.I.P. Keith Smith, 1945–2011

by Nicholas Laughlin on February 10, 2011

Keith Smith

The photograph of Keith Smith that long accompanied his Express column

Keith Smith, Trinidadian journalist, died early in the morning of Tuesday 8 February, at the age of 65.

Over his forty-five-year career, which started at the now-defunct Daily Mirror and ended at the Trinidad Express, the newspaper he helped found in 1967, Smith was a reporter and editor, and a beloved mentor to scores of younger journalists. But to the reading population of Trinidad and Tobago he was best known as a columnist, in the most expansive possible sense. (And anyone who met him knew that “expansive” referred not only to his mind, his talent, and his personality, but also his physique.) The Keith Smith column, which for years ran daily in the Express, mixed personal anecdote and humour with social and political observation, street smarts and folk wisdom, delivered in a prose style his regular readers could recognise sometimes by a mere sentence.

The classic Keith Smith sentence seemed effortlessly endless, a stream of consciousness unto itself, rolling and eddying. A single Keith Smith sentence could contain assertion, qualification, question, disquisition on human folly, epiphany, moral lesson, and pun. And then, with barely a pause for breath, he would dash off another.

Kim Johnson, Smith’s former Express colleague, writes:

Keith Smith was one of the most remarkable men I’ll ever meet. He was certainly the most gifted writer I’ve known, and that based on the most lightweight of literary forms, the newspaper column. His are the only columns I’ve ever cut out to file away.

Column-writing is exhausting. Composing one weekly, in which you mine your own life’s experiences for things to say, drains the most talented in a few months, after which they produce dull, tasteless mud, usually uninspired opinions on whatever is the most recent political bacchanal. Yet Keith was able to churn out a personal column daily for years — decades! — and still regularly produce gems of prose, even the occasional diamond. And that without the shameless self-promotion that is so common among columnists . . .

And as he was vast in his talents so too, I felt — and told him so — that he squandered them with equal prodigality. Although Keith was quite aware of his talents he didn’t ponder on it or labour at honing them, as did other writers of lesser gifts but larger ambition — and I count myself in that group . . .

Now that I see the source of Keith’s brilliance was his capacity for wonder. He never became jaded or cynical but rather could be surprised over and over and over by the small things we encounter every day, both negative and positive, and that we take for granted.

From Judy Raymond, another of his colleagues:

At their best, Keith’s columns were like the most brilliant extempo calypsoes. They were dashed off at great speed, but they had their own poetry and they contained nuggets of great wisdom. Nobody could hope to imitate them, but they were an influence and inspiration for other writers nevertheless because of their depth and sharpness and the easy way they showed Keith’s huge understanding of the time and the place he lived in. Perhaps he should have written something grander or bigger or more lasting. But as it is he turned the newspaper column into an art form.

Keith wasn’t always easy to work with, because he was the last person who should have been put to manage anything. He should have been chained to a desk and made to write. That’s what he was born for.

He was a character. Everyone who knew him has their own Keith stories, not all of them printable. The Express newsroom and the world will be a duller place without him.

In a column published last October, when news got around that Smith was hospitalised, B.C. Pires — yet another onetime Express colleague — wrote a column parodying — which is to say, paying high tribute to — his style:

If Keith wasn’t in a hospital bed, was at his desk, instead, eating his hands, chewing his way to inspiration via his knuckles — the whole newsroom watching through the all-glass office wall understood that his concentration was deepest when his fist disappeared into his mouth — if Keith was working on yet another column that would touch the length and breadth of Trinidad & Tobago, from Belmont to Brooklyn and Brixton, would make them laugh, or make them angry, or make them smile, or make them weep, or — at his best — make them do them all at the same time in the same column — if Keith was in the black of health (because don’t ever think Keith “Laventy Rhythm Section” Smith would claim he was in the pink of health), if Keith was firing on all cylinders, I know I coulda send Keith to deal with bmobile for me . . .

Anu Lakhan, who knew Smith first at the Express and later persuaded him to write for the food column at Caribbean Beat — food and columns being two things he knew better than almost anyone — sends this note:

It is a small claim to fame, but it is mine, and I guard it as I would the mango vert once so hilariously and bizarrely defended by Keith Smith in a Caribbean Beat feature. The fame to which I refer is getting Keith to write for Caribbean Beat’s growing food section.

It was not his fine prose nor star byline that made his contributions such an honour. No. It was the fact that he agreed at all to do a piece. Then another. Then he startled the universe by submitting the actual written product for review. And then, unfathomably, each piece was on time. My agnosticism shuddered in the face of such miracles.

No one would deny this as one of Keith’s finer moments (triumph over sloth is no small achievement), but I know of one finer still.

There’s little risk of happening upon excessive displays of humanity in our time. I saw one once, though. It channeled through this man who always seemed to exist just beyond anything that could be defined. Through Keith, directly to me, then, in a far bigger and more extraordinary way, to all that might be considered civilised and good.

It was over a news story. The kind of story that can turn provincial tragedies into world news. He absolved me of a tiny but hideous mission to relate some instructions from a higher-up. “You told me,” he said. Just that.

There was nothing dramatic like silencing anyone or burying the story on an obscure page. But Keith — uninterested in gore glory — let a few survivors think, for a short while, that the world was not entirely barbaric. It was a beautiful elision. The media had not, in fact, offered any gesture of empathy. Keith Smith offered decency and humanity.

I met Keith Smith only once or twice, and I knew him neither as a colleague nor as a friend. (Though I had the privilege a single time, six years ago, of being his editor.) I knew him as one of his readers, starting when I was eleven or twelve and first taking the newspapers seriously. For what seems like always, his column was simply a fact of life, a fixed point in the universe. I’d even say it was one of the things that made Trinidad Trinidad.

Life, the universe, and Trinidad are a little less than they were, now that he’s gone.

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R.I.P. Édouard Glissant, 1928–2011

by Nicholas Laughlin on February 3, 2011

Édouard Glissant

Édouard Glissant, Martiniquan poet, novelist, essayist, and thinker, one of the Caribbean’s towering literary figures, died this morning in Paris, at the age of 82.

Described by Le Monde as “the champion of métissage and exchange” — “le chantre du métissage et de l’échange” — Glissant was a major proponent of the Antillanité movement, articulating a unique Caribbean identity created in the collisions of cultural elements from many continents in the matrix of the Antilles. He wrote: “La Caraïbe est une réalité culturelle . . . toujours ouverte sur les autres cultures” — “The Caribbean is a cultural reality . . . always open to other cultures.”

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From the hill direction a whole expanse suddenly shoves its cart into dizzying splendour
In the factories’ mill my poverty smiles over powers of the earth
In the cane scars in shins forever black
The water so often called for reddens to my caressing voice
Rebel now from irascible depths of embrace my leap into the standstill.

Like the hougans leafed out in patience
ah the sole evidence I desire is the last voyage of my lassitude among the dry leaves of a monsoon
the flowering of islands the frothy geography of islands on eviscerated seas
our hymns our brows barred from sources our feet crammed with storms . . .

— Édouard Glissant, from “Wild Reading”, trans. Betsy Wing

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“You are involved”

February 2, 2011

I really wish al-jazeera could call on CLR James right now. That was a comment made on Twitter three days ago by The Public Archive, a small collective of historians based at Vanderbilt University. Like them, like many people, I’ve spent much of the past week observing from afar the astonishing events in Egypt, where [...]

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Looking: Wrestling with the Image

January 25, 2011

Detail of I Am Not Afraid to Fight a Perfect Stranger, by John Cox (2009, acrylic on canvas). Image courtesy Nadia Huggins Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions, an exhibition of contemporary Caribbean art, curated by Christopher Cozier and Tatiana Flores, opened on 21 January, 2011, at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, [...]

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“Blessing instead of complaining”

January 24, 2011

Derek Walcott He has won almost every other poetry award he’s eligible for, and this evening in London it was announced that Derek Walcott has won the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize for his latest book, White Egrets. From the UK Guardian’s report: The winning collection . . . was described by the chair of judges, [...]

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“Up, out, and beyond”: talking about ARC

January 20, 2011

Cover of the first issue of ARC; image courtesy the publishers Creative work can’t thrive in isolation. Every artist, writer, musician, performer, or filmmaker needs contact with creative peers, a creative tradition, and an attentive audience, but also access to a critical space, a forum for sharing and discussing ideas. To put it more simply, [...]

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Calabash farewell

January 18, 2011

The 2007 Calabash International Literary Festival winds down with a reggae jam session. Photograph by Georgia Popplewell/Caribbean Free Photo Between its founding in 2000 and its tenth anniversary in 2010, the Calabash International Literary Festival — based in Treasure Beach, on the south coast of Jamaica — grew into one of the major events on [...]

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The CRB in 2010: your favourites

January 4, 2011

“The Wake”, photograph by David Spinks, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license Happy new year, dear readers, from your Antilles blogger. I hope 2011 is pleasant, productive, prosperous, and provocative (in the best way) for all of us. The CRB’s most recent issue, November 2010, wrapped up just before Christmas, and the magazine [...]

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