The unity is submarine

August 11, 2010

Government Cut, Miami. Photograph by Emilio Labrador, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license What is the Caribbean? is not an unanswerable question. But there isn’t — will never be — a single, definitive answer that can encompass the complications of the geographic region named for the Caribs of half a millennium ago, its [...]

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“Un grand écrivain”

August 9, 2010

Dany Laferrière Still life bathed in warm light: a porcelain bathtub with claw feet, sumptuous white towels draped over the edge, a table set with a stack of books and a glass of red wine. A Monday night in May, and 400 people fill the darkness of Montreal’s Place des Arts’ Cinquième Salle, waiting for [...]

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From the CRB archive: fiction by Phyllis Shand Allfrey

August 8, 2010

Phyllis Shand Allfrey. Photograph courtesy Papillote Press The 2010 Nature Island Literary Festival, which opened in Dominica on Friday, closes this evening, and one of today’s events is a tribute to three of Dominica’s literary pioneers, featuring readings from the work of Jean Rhys, J.R. Ralph Casimir, and Phyllis Shand Allfrey. So today’s excursion into [...]

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This week’s Twitter highlights

August 7, 2010

• “Decanting gold and silver from her wrists”: “Yarn Spinner”, a new poem by Pamela Mordecai, at Geoffrey Philp’s blog: http://bit.ly/9MS4ou • Writer and scholar Sylvia Wynter honoured in Jamaica independence national awards: http://bit.ly/9euwte • Charmaine Valere on Tanya Shirley’s She Who Sleeps With Bones: http://bit.ly/93M9hQ • “Grace Jones on Writing” (as it were), at [...]

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Looking: Alejandro Campíns

August 5, 2010

Un minuto antes de iluminarse (2009), by Alejandro Campíns; oil and acrylic on canvas; 120 x 100 cm. Image courtesy Servando Galeria de Arte We live a strange sort of anachronistic poetry in Cuba . . . Even if you don’t want it to, this poetry influences what any artist here produces. You live in [...]

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“The soul of positivity”

August 4, 2010

Portrait of Bob Marley on a t-shirt, Amsterdam; photograph by mdemon, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license You posit the theory that Peter Tosh was just as talented as Bob, but for various reasons would never achieve the kind of overall popularity he did. What was it about Marley that has made him [...]

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The future in the present

August 3, 2010

Enthroned Madonna (2010), by Marvin Bartley; digital print on archival paper; 109.2 x 241.3 cm. Image courtesy the National Gallery of Jamaica Regular Antilles readers may remember that nearly two months ago we posted a few images from and links to the Young Talent V exhibition at the National Gallery of Jamaica. The Young Talent [...]

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Listening: Frantz Casséus

August 2, 2010

Your Antilles blogger is spending the long Emancipation weekend at his desk, slogging away at CRB correspondence and copyediting, and kept company by the wistful, sometimes eerie melodies of the Haitian composer and musician Frantz Casséus. Specifically, I’m listening to the Haitiana album he made with the soprano Barbara Perlow, originally released in 1969 and [...]

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From the CRB archive: Archibald Monteath

August 1, 2010

The Attack of the Rebels on Montpelier Old Works Estate (1833), by Adolphe Duperly. Image courtesy the Yale Centre for British Art 1 August is Emancipation Day, a public holiday in many Caribbean territories, the day when we recall the long struggle to overcome legal slavery in the Caribbean, and the rich, complex history of [...]

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This week’s Twitter highlights

July 31, 2010

• Gabriel García Márquez wins the Cbn Philosophical Association’s Nicolás Guillén Award for philosophical literature: http://bit.ly/cQahU7 • Jean Soublin reviews a new French translation of Olive Senior’s short fiction, Zigzag et autres nouvelles, in Le Monde: http://bit.ly/dnS6KY • Andrea Levy’s novel The Long Song (set in 19th-century #Jamaica) longlisted for the #Booker Prize: http://bit.ly/ddGMg1 • [...]

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“Language has always been our playground”

July 30, 2010

Junot Díaz Junot Díaz: I have to tell you something: when I was young, I read Moby Dick and I always thought, “There is no English like this in the world.” It was a book that contained twenty-five Englishes. And I was like, “Could I write a book that contained every single one of the [...]

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