“I call them neighbours”

August 30, 2010

Rafael Ferrer c. 1969. Photograph courtesy Da Wire When a critic referred to his style as “faux primitivism,” Ferrer objected that the characterisation was based on a prejudice about the people he depicted rather than on his way of painting them. “They can call the people in the paintings natives or they can call them [...]

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Listening: Les Loups Noirs

August 26, 2010

It is a stuffy Thursday afternoon, thunder is rolling off in the distance, and your Antilles blogger is hunched at his desk, trying to clear through miscellaneous CRB paperwork, as we prepare to wrap up the current issue of the magazine and begin publication of the next. Les Loups Noirs are keeping me company. The [...]

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Blood-and-gutsy

August 24, 2010

Jean Rhys Today is the one hundred and twentieth birthday of Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams, better known to literature and posterity as Jean Rhys. A good opportunity to dip into the archive and read Marlon James’s essay on Rhys and the women in her fiction, published three years ago in the August 2007 CRB. “It [...]

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From the CRB archive: considering Eric Roach

August 22, 2010

Eric Roach. Photograph courtesy Laurence Breiner Today’s Stabroek News includes an essay by Al Creighton on the Tobagonian poet Eric Roach, one of Caribbean literature’s great tragic figures. Born in Tobago in 1915, educated at a grammar school in Scarborough, Roach began publishing his poems in the late 1930s in local newspapers. Over the next [...]

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“A lot of fans, not so many friends”

August 21, 2010

Lady Saw BLVR: Do you separate from the Lady Saw people see in the dancehall when you’re not onstage? LS: You know, a friend of mine recently told me how she saw me onstage one night, and I came down off the stage, and a man said something to me. And I told him: “Lady [...]

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R.I.P. Seya Parboosingh, 1925–2010

August 20, 2010

Sharing at the Table (1999), by Seya Parboosingh. Image courtesy the National Gallery of Jamaica Seya Parboosingh, American-born artist living in Jamaica since 1958, died on Friday 13 August in Kingston. The National Gallery of Jamaica blog published a short obituary: The painter and poet Seya Parboosingh, née Samila Joseph, was born in 1925, in [...]

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Something old, something new

August 18, 2010

Dust jacket of the first edition of Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement. Image from the H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Literature, University of Illinois at Chicago library This week, the CRB glances towards both the past and the future of Caribbean writing. First, Jonathan Ali considers Andrew Salkey’s 1960 novel Escape to an [...]

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“The dream is never too much to bear”

August 17, 2010

Marcus Garvey. Photograph courtesy Oxford University Press As I mentioned in the previous post, today is V.S. Naipaul’s birthday — which he shares, by [insert preferred adjective] coincidence, with Marcus Garvey. Geoffrey Philp is celebrating the latter over at his blog, with a poem (“Marcus, the dream is never too much to bear”) and a [...]

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Free man

August 16, 2010

V.S. Naipaul on BBC TV, 1994 “I’ve always been a writer. I’ve thought about it every day. There’s not been a day or part of a day when I’ve not thought about it . . . It has enabled me to be a free man . . . I’ve not written anything that I didn’t [...]

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This week’s Twitter highlights

August 14, 2010

• DaWire (@DaWireTweets) on the 2010 San Juan Feria de Arte Sonoro (Sound Art Fair): http://bit.ly/diKGrf • RT @georgiap: Mapping Haiti’s patrimony: the Mapping Haitian History Project: http://bit.ly/cB4Qmh • NPR on a new biography of Julio Lobo, “Sugar King of Havana” (link via Repeating Islands): http://n.pr/bAgxxe • James Bridle: do books still need covers?: http://bit.ly/djFSyH [...]

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R.I.P. Sesenne Descartes, 1914–2010

August 12, 2010

Sesenne Descartes. Photograph courtesy the St Lucia Folk Research Centre My country heart, I am not home till Sesenne sings, a voice with woodsmoke and ground-doves in it, that cracks like clay on a road whose tints are the dry season’s, whose cuatros tighten my heartstrings. The shac-shacs rattle like cicadas under the fur-leaved nettles [...]

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