“I’ve wasted a bit of myself”

October 24, 2010

V.S. Naipaul in his younger days NAIPAUL I’m unusual in that I have had a long career. Most people from limited backgrounds write one book. I’m a prose writer. A prose book contains many thousands of sentiments, observations, thoughts — it is a lot of work. The pattern for most people is to do a [...]

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“A dangerous balance between silence and art”

October 20, 2010

Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin (at left), moments before their execution; Port-au-Prince, November 1964 . . . on November 12, 1964, two pine poles are erected outside the national cemetery. A captive audience is gathered. Radio, print, and television journalists are summoned. Numa and Drouin are dressed in what on old black-and-white film seem to [...]

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“Tomorrow is not promised to beasts or men”

October 19, 2010

4 a.m., posted at Vimeo Muhammad Muwakil is one of the emerging stars of the Trinidadian poetry scene, and recent performances in other parts of the Caribbean are winning him a regional audience as well. (Your Antilles blogger was there when Muwakil brought down the house during one of the open-mike sessions at the Calabash [...]

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Our regularly scheduled programme

October 19, 2010

Dedication plaque inside the current C.L.R. James Library in London. Photograph by sarflondondunc, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license Antilles has been silent the past few weeks — not because there’s nothing going on, but rather the opposite: there’s been too much happening for your Antilles blogger to keep up. The Port of [...]

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Transformative reading

September 22, 2010

C.L.R. James . . . it is appalling to learn that the C.L.R. James Library in Hackney (a borough of London) is going to be renamed the Dalston Library and Archives, after the neighborhood in which it is located. James was there when the library was christened in his honour in 1985. The authorities insist [...]

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R.I.P. Dawn Scott, 1951–2010

September 21, 2010

Dawn Scott working on A Cultural Object in 1985. Photograph courtesy the National Gallery of Jamaica Dawn Scott, Jamaican artist, died on Tuesday 21 September in Kingston. The National Gallery of Jamaica posted an obituary: Figurative batik was Dawn Scott’s main medium for some twenty years, culminating in her solo exhibition Nature Vive (1994) at [...]

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Ciudad grande

September 18, 2010

Lithograph from Puck magazine (1898), advocating US intervention in Cuba. Image courtesy the New-York Historical Society In New York throughout the nineteenth century, new immigrant communities were formed. The numbers were still small — in the early 1860s, we learn, about 1,300 Spaniards and Latin Americans lived in New York — but they grew. Poets, [...]

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ttff/10: The art of adaptation

September 18, 2010

Caryl Phillips. Photograph courtesy Georgia Popplewell/Caribbean Free Photo The trinidad+tobago film festival/2010 programme offers a number of workshops for aspiring filmmakers, including a session on adapting literary works for the screen, led by Caryl Phillips. The ttff provides this information: The practice of turning a work of literature into a film is almost as old [...]

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In his time

September 16, 2010

Wayne Brown (1944–2009). Photograph courtesy Mariel Brown The Trinidadian writer Wayne Brown — who died a year ago this week, on 15 September, 2009 — first came to widespread attention as a poet. His debut book, On the Coast (1972), won him the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and a Gregory Fellowship at the University of Leeds. [...]

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R.I.P. Jenny Alpha, 1910–2010

September 9, 2010

Jenny Alpha, Martiniquan singer and “grande dame de la culture créole,” died on Wednesday 8 September in Paris. The RFI website posted a short obituary: A familiar figure in French jazz clubs, Alpha crossed paths with actress Josephine Baker and musician Duke Ellington. After the Second World War, she campaigned for recognition of Creole culture, [...]

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Orange, indigo, pink, green

September 7, 2010

The current issue of the CRB — September 2010 — begins publication today (and will continue for the next seven weeks, with new reviews and other pieces appearing every Tuesday). We open with reviews of two recent books of fiction — Melissa Richards on Anton Nimblett’s short story collection Sections of an Orange, and Robert [...]

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