Barbara Jenkins. Photograph by Arnaldo James, courtesy Caribbean Beat
Two days ago, the CRB published “Flood”, a new piece of fiction by Trinidadian writer Barbara Jenkins, excerpted from her novel-in-progress De Rightest Place. Jenkins, past winner of the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize (among other awards), published her debut short story collection Sic Transit Wagon in 2013. CRB deputy editor Shivanee Ramlochan engaged her in a short email interview about her current writing, the impact of the Hollick Arvon Prize, and how everyday concerns filter into her fiction.
•
Shivanee Ramlochan: This excerpt from De Rightest Place whets the appetite, much as the characters it highlights find themselves drawn towards certain kinds of hunger. How far towards the novel’s completion are you, and are you enjoying the process of building this world?
Barbara Jenkins: The first part of your question is difficult. It’s a novel experience for me to be growing a novel, and I’m doing so guided by raw instinct. I feel I ought to be drawing it to a close soon: things have come to a head, and while not falling apart are certainly showing signs of fracture and reorientation — some things have become dominant in unexpected ways, others seem a little underdeveloped. So, to return to your question, how far am I? Well, maybe near to finding a resolution of sorts, but then I need to go back to what’s already there and do some massive reworking — pruning and thinning and chopping down and weeding and maybe even sowing some new select seeds in strategic locations. And am I enjoying building this world? You bet I am. I get lost in the place, the people, their motives, their sayings and doings. It’s a parallel world to escape to.
SR: The Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize, which you won in 2013, offered significant boons towards the completion of a novel, including a literary mentor and a spot on a prestigious Arvon writing course. How would you say the prize has helped De Rightest Place come into its own space?
BJ: Without a doubt, I owe where I am with this novel to the Bocas Lit Fest and the Hollick Arvon Prize. I left it to Arvon to find me a mentor, and they got me Bernardine Evaristo. What a mentor! What a writer! Our book club was reading her Mr Loverman at the time, and I thought that her style, her touch were just so much what I felt about what I was writing and what I would like to see in my novel.
It was a “marriage made in Arvon” and consummated over a period of a year through email. I’d send Bernardine work by a deadline of her choosing; she’d reply with reflections, questions, suggestions; and I’d answer — a real conversation that helped me refine what I was doing. Really basic stuff like plot outline, character map, stuff I hadn’t thought about, that made my focus sharper, my thinking clearer. It was brilliant. Totally new to me. And so necessary. That mentorship, which ended in June 2014, got me to where I am now, and I’ve hardly moved on — eyesight issues now resolved and other “life matters” always ongoing, but she left me in a place where I know where I’m going and I’ve just got to do the one-foot-in-front-the-other thing to get there.
SR: It’s no secret that, as far as Trinidadian letters are concerned, you’re the veritable doyenne of the short story form. What has the transition been like, from crafting short stories to working on a full-length novel?
BJ: It won’t be false modesty to deny the label “doyenne” — I’m learning and learning still. I’ve learned a lot lately from reading other Trinidadian short story collections — notably Rhoda Bharath’s The Ten Days Executive and Sharon Millar’s The Whale House. I was recently the inaugural British Council International Writer in Residence at the Small Wonder Short Story Festival at Charleston House in Sussex, and there I was exposed to dozens of short story writers and hundreds of short stories — and what all of that showed is how new, how raw, how unformed my craft still is. I would love to write lots more short stories and better ones.
A novel is entirely different. It’s not just size and scale. With a short story, you take one thread and examine it minutely and deal with the essence of it. With a novel, it’s holding dozens of threads of different colours and weights and textures to weave a tapestry whose design must change and morph and unfold over a period of time, while having some sort of cohesive weft and warp to hold it together.
SR: Is De Rightest Place being primarily written in Trinidad? If so, what are the benefits or effects of working on a creative fiction manuscript, while being ensconced in local space?
BJ: Oh yes. De Rightest Place is set right here. There are a couple of flashbacks to other locations, but here IS De Rightest Place. I like being embedded here — the immediacy of sensation — heat, light, rain, mosquitoes, noise, police sirens, birdsong, plants, wind, bamboo creaking, human voices influence how you feel, are feeling, noticing, as you’re writing. I don’t use air-conditioning in my writing space. I want to be in touch through all my senses with here, with now. It could be that I lack imagination and must feel to know, but that’s OK with me. I’m a grounded, practical sort of person, I think.
SR: Political furor, environmental scandal, human rights violations: so much goes awry with the world, on both a regional and international scale, while a writer works on shaping her very specific acreage in print. To what extent do you think external events filter into the day-to-day, page-by-page production of the novel? Is there a chance that, on some miniature level, almost everything gets written in?
BJ: For sure. The stuff of life, of human relations, of people’s priorities, of their desires — what else is there to tap into? How people behave in specific circumstances of ease or challenge, what people value, these vary from country to country. While they are not fixed, the priorities, the values, I mean, they do say something about a place at a moment in time. And capturing that in one’s characters and situations gives authenticity to the story that you’re telling. To write about the 1990s in T&T, for example, and not have the long shadow of the attempted coup and its aftermath cast over a character’s approach to life, is to write fantasy — which is OK if your character lives in a bubble or a cocoon, but even then the character would meet people whose values and philosophy have been affected.
We have a national amnesia about that traumatic event that I didn’t understand until I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant, where in a mythical post-Arthurian Britain a spell was cast that brought a mist of forgetfulness over the people, so that they could live in a false peace, forgetting wrongs lest the attempts at righting them brought discord. I think we have a collective amnesia about the hundreds of years of enslavement of African people, and about lots of other things. It may bring peace, but the aftereffects are there, shaping who we are and how we relate to one another. Guilt, shame, there as undercurrents in our relations. Claiming what’s around us, examining them, understanding them, seeking truth, not “moving on,” that’s how to avoid repeating mistakes, human errors, of the past. I feel that any writer here, now, cannot help but hold a mirror to us as we are, and seek through storytelling to find buried truths about how we came to be as we are — and perhaps tell or hint of a way to make us better.
]]>Kelly Baker Josephs reports on Legacies of Aimé Césaire, an event co-hosted by Columbia University and Barnard College in New York City to mark the centenary of the Martiniquan poet
The Aimé Césaire researchathon in progress. Image by Alex Gill (@elotroalex), posted on Twitter
While new media are understood in terms of the older media that precede them, they are nonetheless freed, at least to some extent, from traditional constraints. Having to figure out how new tools work necessitates innovation and encourages a kind of beginner’s mind. New media attract innovators, iconoclasts, and risk-takers.
— Mark Tribe, foreword to The Language of New Media (2001),
by Lev Manovich
November 2013 was a busy — one might say explosive — month in Caribbean and Caribbean-related new media. There were several publications of online periodicals connected to the Caribbean — indeed, the CRB itself published its much-awaited first issue after a year-plus hiatus — as well as various live-streams of conferences and events relevant to the African diaspora. It was a bit overwhelming to see this embrace of technology, especially in the academy, but much of it was quite close to older familiar forms, albeit with key differences in delivery and access.
In addition, there have also been several events this year celebrating the centenary of Aimé Césaire’s birth. These events have taken place mostly in academic and cultural spaces, with much digital announcement, but dependent largely on face-to-face interaction limited to the time and place of the event.
The Legacies of Aimé Césaire event managed to combine both the digital activity taking place in November and the yearlong celebration of Césaire. The event was designed collaboratively by Columbia University and Barnard College faculty: Kaiama L. Glover, Alex Gil, Brent Hayes Edwards, and David Scott. Along with a website launched in mid-November, the physical portion of the event spanned two days, with a “researchathon” on 5 December and a live forum the following day. The site itself went live in mid-November with pieces from the invited scholars, paired along four routes of conversation: “The revolutionary Afro-Americas”, with Millery Polyné and Anne Eller; “Trans-Atlantic networks and contexts”, with Christopher Winks and Carrie Noland; “Whither or whether postcolonial sovereignty?”, with Gary Wilder and Yarimar Bonilla; and “The present-day poetic imagination”, with Erica Hunt and Brent Hayes Edwards. Both the site and the two-day event were in their own way innovative academically and digitally, and presented ways in which the Internet could facilitate collaborative scholarship.
I confess I know little, if any, more than the next person about Césaire or his legacies. But I followed this event closely because of the “new tools” to be applied to Caribbean scholarship. First, the researchathon — a word that seems self-explanatory, but on second glance requires some clarification. The Studio @ Butler space at Columbia University defines it thus: “A researchathon, or research sprint, is akin to a hackathon but focused on research results rather than software or code.” It involves “a research question that a group of ten or more students, librarians, faculty, and technologists could answer working together” over a short period of time, and generally results in a useful online resource for research on the topic.
The primary objective of the Césaire researchathon was to “compile the largest online bibliography of primary and secondary sources related to Césaire.” I was not able to attend the researchathon in person, but like others I could participate online via the research tool Zotero. It was exciting to watch the bibliography grow over the course of the day as dedicated scholars the world over contributed citations. In the end, the researchathon met its objective, compiling a bibliography of over two thousand sources, and growing.
The organisers indicated that the “Césaire researchathon is the first major attempt to bring the researchathon model to research in the humanities at Columbia — or elsewhere, for that matter.” While I find this model inspirational, I remain confused as to how to use the produced bibliography. In its current form, it’s overwhelming. The tagging is inconsistent at best, and so the most viable view is alphabetically by title. Having no experience with this model, I don’t know if this is a useful method of organisation for other disciplines, but it remains less so for the humanities. It’s possible that this is more a fault of less-digitally facile Césaireans than of the method itself. But either way, some revisions are necessary to make this bibliography useful for research on various aspects of Césaire’s work. This certainly does not render this model less exciting as a tool. Instead, it merely indicates that this is the first stage in the development of both the tool and its users for future similar collaborations. (I am already working to convince Alex Gil, the mastermind behind the Césaire researchathon, to help me organise one for Kamau Brathwaite.)
The second day of the event featured panels with the pairs of scholars who had written pieces for the website. (The schedule of panels can be found here.) This was the more familiar part of the event; the “old media” so to speak. At least, that is what I expected it to be. I expected something similar to a seminar style conference with pre-circulated papers. The difference, I came to understand, was in the conversation that had already occurred online prior to the live forum. Because these early written thoughts were public, and because they were open to comments, more attendees were ready to discuss the concepts than is generally the case for a traditional seminar, even one with pre-circulated material. More importantly, the writers themselves came with some idea of how their work was already being received and questioned by their readers, far and near. In the room itself, this led to the type of engaged participatory experience that, at best, only happens on the fringes of traditional conferences: for five minutes during Q&A, or in a small group afterward, as attendees clear out of the room; or perhaps in a post-event social gathering. In this way, I would say, the event was an unqualified success. What Gil calls the “hybrid model” of scholarly presentation allowed for a more useful form of discussion about Césaire’s work.
All the online participants took a risk with this hybrid model. The organisers’ vision depended upon both the bloggers and the commenters making their ideas — ideas essentially still at the draft stage — publically vulnerable to criticism and, worse, indifference. In Kaiama Glover’s post-event summation, one hears echoes of the risk as well as the rewards of such a model:
“The event was quite amazing. It did what I’d dreamed it would from the beginning — put people into real conversation and generate new ways of thinking across disciplines. I was quite astounded at the level of engagement, both online and live, and impressed by people’s willingness to work within a format that was — for so many — out of their comfort zone. It seemed that the participants, myself included, came away from the experience somehow re-charged. Open to possibility …”
In most respects, the gamble paid off, and we now have two new Césaire research resources online. Both continue to grow, as the posts remain open to comments (indeed, the conversation continued online beyond the live forum), and the bibliography remains open to additions. While the results may still look familiar, the process has been, as Tribe notes in the epigraph above, “freed, at least to some extent, from traditional constraints.” In closing the two-day event, Gil requested that we “reflect on the material realities of our new memory machines” and ask: “What does it mean to build scholarly discourses online as opposed to paper? How does the nature of the digital change how we engage with that knowledge?”
Appropriate questions for a celebration of the innovator, iconoclast, and risk-taker who gave us his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Césaire’s legacies indeed.
•••
Kelly Baker Josephs is an associate professor of English at York College, City University of New York, editor of sx salon, and author of Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (2013).
]]>“Footnotes” is a series of occasional blog posts giving further information about books reviewed in the CRB
The November 2013 CRB includes a review by Ishion Hutchinson of Edward Baugh’s Black Sand: New and Selected Poems. “Baugh’s brand of poetry,” writes Hutchinson, “has given the quotidian Caribbean experience, and often the unexamined Caribbean life, an exhilarating poetic presence.”
Emeritus professor of the University of the West Indies, Baugh is a leading authority on the work of Derek Walcott — and one of the best readers of Walcott’s poems your Antilles blogger has ever heard. He published the first book-length study of Walcott (Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision, 1978), edited the St Lucian Nobel laureate’s 2007 Selected Poems, and has written copiously on Walcott’s poetry and his influence on Caribbean literature.
Baugh spent much of his career at UWI’s Mona campus, where — with colleagues like Kenneth Ramchand and Mervyn Morris — he helped lay the foundations for serious scholarly consideration of West Indian literature. In particular, Baugh’s 1977 essay “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History” has been recognised by a subsequent generation of scholars as a seminal contribution to Caribbean literary criticism.
At UWI-Mona, Baugh also served as the campus’s public orator. His addresses delivered in this role, detailing the achievements of the university’s honorary graduands, are collected in Chancellor, I Present … (1998), which you can read in part at Google Books.
As Hutchinson notes in his review, though Baugh has been writing poems for five decades, he has not been the most prolific of poets. Nonetheless, “Baugh has patiently created an important oeuvre that is indelible.” His previous books of poems, A Tale from the Rainforest (1988) and It Was the Singing (2000), share with Black Sand the quality Hutchinson describes as “the fluid way in which he moves beyond expression into comprehension, articulating with superb intimacy those echolocations outside of the verbal framework.”
Baugh is also a longtime CRB contributor — for example, reviewing Walcott’s book The Prodigal, Lorna Goodison’s Controlling the Silver, and more recently Vahni Capildeo’s Undraining Sea. The CRB archive also includes an essay by Baugh on Frank Collymore, excerpted from his biography of the late Barbadian writer and editor (which was in turn reviewed in the CRB by John Gilmore).
“For most of my life,” Baugh said in a 2006 Caribbean Beat interview, “people knew me simply as a critic. I was writing poems, getting the odd poem published here and there, but here and abroad, except for a few people who were into poetry, people knew me as a critic.
“I always used to say, half in jest, but only half, that the thing I would most have liked to be in the world is a poet. So the fact that sometimes now people refer to me as poet first is a kind of great thrill to me.”
Listen to Edward Baugh reading several of his poems at The Poetry Archive.
]]>Still from Touch (video, 2002), by Janine Antoni, included in the exhibition Into the Mix
Twenty-two months later, the CRB is back. Our November 2013 issue, published today, includes reviews of recent books of poems by Edward Baugh, Loretta Collins Klobah, and Sasenarine Persaud; recent fiction by Merle Collins and Keith Jardim; as well as a critical study of the late John Hearne by his daughter Shivaun; a collection of the little-known later writings of Eric Walrond; and a study of “Caribbean–US crosscurrents in literature and culture.” You’ll also find two new poems by Trinidadian writer Shivanee Ramlochan; a review of the recent film The Stuart Hall Project (directed by John Akomfrah); and your Antilles blogger’s own notes on a 2012 exhibition that raised questions about the geographical balancing acts required of artists from certain parts of the world.
There’s a lagniappe to look forward to: later this month we’ll publish a long interview with writer Oonya Kempadoo, talking about her new book, All Decent Animals; and an “Also noted” column rounding up the most significant books we missed during the CRB’s 2012–2013 hiatus.
And keep an eye on Antilles in the coming weeks, where we plan to run a new series of blog posts called “Footnotes”, giving further information on books reviewed in the current issue of the CRB.
Happy reading!
]]>douen, duende, douaine, done, dwen, duegne n A folklore character, the spirit of a child who died before baptism. Douens wear large hats, have backward-pointing feet, utter a soft hooting cry, and often lead children to wander off.
— Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad and Tobago, ed. Lise Winer
Announced (by no coincidence) on 31 October, All Hallows’ Eve, Douen Islands is a collaborative project by writer Andre Bagoo (author of the poetry collection Trick Vessels), graphic designer Kriston Chen, artists Rodell Warner and Brianna McCarthy, and musician Sharda Patasar. Its first manifestation is an e-book (downloadable here) of eleven poems by Bagoo, designed by Chen, and incorporating a series of brief texts by Warner (drawn from his Twitter account). Accompanying the e-book is Chen’s video adaptation of Bagoo’s poem “In Forest and Wild Skies”. Further online publications, videos, and live performances involving all five collaborators are in the works.
For many Trinidadians, douens — like other folklore characters — belong to another era. More amusing than sinister, they suggest a pre-electric time, rural life, tales to frighten children. But traditional folklore has also proved a rich resource for contemporary artists and writers. In the 1970s, artist Leroy Clarke produced a massive cycle of paintings, drawings, and poems called Douens, portraying a post-Independence society of “giddy and lost people.” A decade later, Peter Minshall’s 1988 mas band Jumbie released hordes of blank-faced spirits in the streets of Port of Spain, their empty, staring eyes suggesting a marauding hollowness all too apt in a time of political cynicism. More recently, poets James Christopher Aboud (Lagahoo Poems) and Fawzia Kane (Tantie Diablesse) and Trinidadian-Canadian novelist David Chariandy (Soucouyant) have re-imagined other supernatural folklore characters as metaphors for personal and cultural loss, the displacements of history, and the uneasiness of self-definition.
Douen Islands, whose creators describe the project as “a devious remixing of traditional Douen culture,” suggests that the old folklore stories and images remain relevant in the wired age — still offering insights into personal and collective fears. Though the poems’ voice is introspective and many of the references idiosyncratic, numerous co-options of nationalist rhetoric — such as Trinidad and Tobago’s national motto and “watchwords” — and the e-book’s (blood-)red-white-black colour scheme unsubtly indicate an allegorical intent. A prefatory note reads:
(a) Remove the straw hats. (b) Invite them inside. (c) Straighten their feet.
Invited in from the wilderness and dark, with supernatural deformities erased, the douen looks more and more like any Trinidadian of the post-Independence generation: mischievous but bewildered, uncertain of his social birthright, possibly hapless, possibly not helpless.
Soon after Douen Islands made its online debut, I asked its lead collaborators, Andre Bagoo and Kriston Chen, some questions about the project via email.
•
Nicholas Laughlin: Andre, which came first, the poems or the collaborative? Had you written the pieces before you started working with your colleagues, or did they emerge from the collaboration itself?
Andre Bagoo: I entered the collaboration with a loose idea of something I wanted to express. But it was during the collaboration that the ideas crystallised and words and forms came. I had been drawn to myths surrounding the undead, such as the zombie, which has clear roots in the Caribbean. I entered the collaboration wanting to write a curse poem in the manner of Ovid’s Ibis, aimed at Trinidad and Tobago and modelled after the 1968 film The Night of the Living Dead. Then Kriston specifically raised the figure of the douen one day over coffee. From that moment came Douen Islands. The poems flowed and flowed.
NL: How exactly did this group of creative collaborators form — who or what was the catalyst?
AB: Kriston reached out to me on Tumblr after he was assigned to do a layout for my poem “The Tourist” in [the art and design e-magazine] Draconian Switch. I was struck by the rigour of his practice as a graphic designer, as well as his appreciation of — and obvious talent for — language. We met, and he asked if there was anything else I had on which we could collaborate. I suggested a zine/e-book.
That was in March [2013]. Thereafter, we had several meetings and excursions over which we began formulating. It soon became clear that we also had our sights on including an element of performance in the project down the line, and wanted even more people involved. I reached out to sitarist Sharda Patasar, whom I had never met before. We reached out to Brianna McCarthy and to Rodell Warner, both of whom we already knew. We have more in store.
Kriston Chen: “The Tourist”, if I may interject, is a brilliant poem — heavy and light at the same time. Apparently there’s thirty more pages out there somewhere. I hope to revisit it at some point. My favourite line:
Silence: the wind is not certain.
What to make of this now?
I’m a fan of Andre’s work first. As a graphic designer, it begins with words. I put great faith in good writers. Andre mentions Sharda, Brianna, and Rodell as collaborators — they’re also good writers, in their own ways. There’s an attraction to that, and of course a good concept will go a long way.
NL: Does the idea of a group of collaborators change the way you work?
AB: You could say the process of writing is not changed by collaboration. The writer must still sit down in isolation and let the words come, or find the words and forms, invoking their own processes. This is really a personal exercise which, I imagine, differs from writer to writer.
However, it is clear to me that things done during the collaboration — comments over coffee, shared outings to see films, plays, concerts, and art shows, trips to scenic trails — all begin to inform, inspire, and move the writing. If we include the process of formulating ideas and being inspired within the process of writing, then perhaps a collaboration creates a greater wealth of discourse from which to draw at the moment when the words need to materialise.
In this way, each collaboration changes the way I write, because it changes me. W.H. Auden said of collaboration, “you can only do it with people whose basic ideas you share — each can then sort of excite the other. When a collaboration works, the two people concerned become a third person, who is different from either of them in isolation.”
KC: Well said. The same applies, I think, to designers. I saw an interview recently with the musician Sting, where he describes collaboration as “surrounding yourself with confidence.” When it comes to writing, Andre is prolific and brilliant. I don’t know if he sleeps, but I do know that the words always show up. The biggest question or concern is usually, “Where do we meet for coffee?” The unspoken confidence with those you collaborate with creates possibilities and moves the work along.
NL: Traditional folklore always draws on collective anxieties, hopes, questions of being. What can the figure of the douen, the spirit as lost child, say about (or say to) contemporary Trinidad and Tobago?
AB: Like most folklore and myth, the douen figure is at once simple yet complex. The douen is the undead: the child who dies after never being baptised and who haunts the forest thereafter. It has no face, its feet are backwards, so that hunters following its tracks go in the wrong direction. The nature of the douen alone transmits complexity: it engages questions of religion, of mortality and age, of physical deformity or difference. This makes it an ideal mirror for contemporary Trinidad and Tobago.
The douen tells us about the marginalised and the abandoned, and this is the area where I wanted to give voice to something. The douen is a nightmare figure of youth, and the story of a new generation has to be told, even if that story, in some respects, is an old one. Douen Islands is about growing up in a world while coming to terms with injustice in all its forms: violence and crime, racism, homophobia, religious bigotry, classism, stigmatisation. It is about moving from a place of blind rage to a place approaching knowledge.
The douen is both anodyne yet powerful — it embodies a subversive power relationship that is the key to so much. It is at first seen as monster but then made hero through love, and the real Bogey-man is left at large. I found using the folklore in this manner to be irresistible, because of how we, as Trinidadians, immediately recognise it, but also because of how it telegraphs and taps into wider collective anxieties, as you say, such as the fact that each of us is destined to die.
KC: During the course of the project, Andre had sent me an essay about folklore by Gerard Besson. It’s a great read. The douen is revealed as a vehicle for disciplining the parent, and not the child.
Duenn did not haunt children, “No, not at all, the Duenn is haunt the parent.”
“How you mean?”
“Well, she didn’t have time for the boy. She too busy wid she business. Then the night come, she ent see the boy, she gone outside, she calling calling, she standing up in the road under the street lamp, alone, everyone inside, she calling him, ‘Robie, Robie!’ She going mad with fear. The boy loose, he dead, the Duenn take him, somewhere. ‘Robie,’ she bawl, running inside, ‘Robie!’ She crying now, she can hardly breathe. ‘Robie! What you doing there? You eh hear me calling you, come here!’ She was so glad to see him that she cut his tail good.”
This intrigues me — the idea of well-behaved adults. “She was so glad to see him that she cut his tail good”: what a sentence. Lots of tension and vulnerability here. Why hasn’t the narrative around the douen reached further? Why are we still at straw hats and backwards feet?
NL: Do the poems draw on any particular literary inspirations or models, other than Ovid?
AB: They draw from a diverse range of materials. There are references to the love duet in Act II of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, John Donne’s “La Corona”, and Hamlet. There are also references to Anand Gandhi’s film Ship of Theseus and to Grizzly Bear’s pop single “Yet Again”. Several aesthetic forces were also operating in the background as I wrote, particularly Neval Chatelal’s rendition of “O Re Piya” from the Bollywood film Aaja Nachle, Bunji Garlin’s “Carnival Tabanca”, and the sitar music of Sharda Patasar. And I’ve also stolen from Trinidad and Tobago’s national anthem, the national watchwords, as well as common sayings in Trinidad and Tobago dialogue, which, when rendered in this context, hopefully take on new meanings.
NL: What about Leroy Clarke’s Douens?
AB: We did not have these in mind. Another collection of poems, however, was operating in the background: Lagahoo Poems, by James Aboud.
NL: Why publish the project as an e-book? How important is the online aspect?
AB: Perhaps because of the realities of the markets, we do not have many indigenous poetry book publishers. Most Caribbean writers are published by foreign publishers, which is not itself a bad thing, and which certainly has its place in relation to the important process of reaching an international audience. But I wonder if the Internet, while often seen to be in animus with publishing, is not also an opportunity for post-colonial countries like ours, to publish our own stories in our own ways, using cyberspace’s breath of tools and its reach.
I wanted to use the internet as a forum for sharing this particular work. I wanted to do something compelling online, in a way that we might not expect, given the subject matter, or given our idea of Caribbean poetry.
NL: Kriston, how did you approach the design elements of the project?
KC: Many of the design decisions for the e-book are in keeping with those of a traditional poetry book. The poems themselves are set in a serif typeface, called Requiem, ideal for reading but also a remnant of a long history of literature as both colonial and a printed medium — lettering from the Renaissance period is the basis of these particular letterforms.
I took a few liberties, however, to push this e-book into the twenty-first century. The use of illustration (found images, photographs, typography, etc) is dangerous ground, but used heavily. It imposes imagery into the reader’s mind. And like a film adaptation that tends to be not as good as the book itself, [images] can kill it for the poet’s readers. Designers-as-authors was another break in tradition. It went way beyond the covers and interiors: from conceptualisation to editing to copywriting. This, I think, helped create an e-book that feels consistent and complete.
As for the video, again the onus was to keep it literary — not let the images get in the way of the text. This was achieved through the use of fewer, simpler, but more powerful elements: captions, sound, moon, and vintage footage (from Carnival 1932). The viewer completes the piece by engaging with all elements, but primarily the text or captions.
In terms of references, much of my aesthetic and type treatment is influenced by contemporary designers such as Peter Mendelsund, John Gall, Jason Booher, Meg Wilson — much of the Knopf/Vintage book cover department. Several spreads reference John Gall’s beautiful and clever Nabokov series (published by Vintage in the US). There’s also reference to artist Barbara Kruger’s propaganda messages. The video contains references to Jean-Luc Godard’s film Une Femme est une femme (1961), and a more contemporary version, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009).
•
“We hope to attract even more collaborators,” Bagoo writes. You can get in touch with the collaborative at douenislands@gmail.com.
]]>Hannah Lowe. Photograph courtesy Tim Ridley
Despite the swell of her belly, Hannah Lowe is perched, apparently comfortably, on a wide bench at the British Library in London. The child who is coming will bear her father’s name, she says. “It’s important for me not to lose the name, because the child won’t feel the connection to the Caribbean that I do.”
In the November/December Caribbean Beat, Melissa Richards profiles British writer Hannah Lowe, whose debut book Chick is both named for and inspired by her Jamaican father, a professional gambler. Lowe talks about her “childhood full of contradictions,” growing up “within the façade of white middle-class family life” with a mixed-race immigrant father.
“I was always having to explain him to other people,” she says, “but it wasn’t just the fact that he was black and I was white. It was the fact that he was so old. He looked like a grandfather, and often he’d just got out of bed because he’d been playing cards all night, so he was this old dishevelled man with his hair stood on end.”
The resulting questions about personal history and ethnic identity — “what is race, what does ‘black’ look like?” — are the meat of both Chick and Lowe’s forthcoming memoir (due in 2014). And Lowe herself raises fascinating questions about how we can or should define what it means to be a Caribbean writer.
•
Hannah Lowe reading from Chick at the 2012 Norwich Showcase (your Antilles blogger was in the audience!):
]]>It happens (and has happened before): a pause for breath, a short break to clear the head, a temporary halt under the world’s pressures becomes a more lingering withdrawal. Even if the hours seem to drag, days are fugitive and weeks speed by. Before you really grasp it, months have disappeared. In the case of Antilles, nineteen months — that’s how long it’s been since our previous post.
The CRB has been on a sustained hiatus since early 2012. In November 2013, at long last, we resume regular online publication, thanks to the support of the Bocas Lit Fest. We’re returning to the quarterly timetable of our original print edition, with new issues appearing in November, February, May, and August, mid-month. And Antilles is returning as well, to supplement the magazine’s literary and cultural coverage with news, links to and excerpts from interesting writing published elsewhere, and the occasional musings of the CRB editor (your Antilles blogger). The usual miscellany, in other words — on a frequent but irregular schedule, and with the enduring aim of provoking conversation about literature and the arts, and their role in the evolution of (lofty concept!) Caribbean civilisation. Or something like that.
]]>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.
•
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.
•
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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>