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.

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.

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.

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

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 hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of citizens have been protesting against President Hosni Mubarak and his government, calling for freedom and democracy. Like many people, I’ve been constantly refreshing websites and blogs, watching the stream of commentary and information (and misinformation) on Twitter, and watching Al Jazeera’s TV coverage via their website. I’ve watched — witnessed — as an optimistic, upbeat mass movement took a violent turn today, when pro-Mubarak protestors — hired thugs, according to many people on the ground in Cairo — attacked the main body of peaceful demonstrators in Tahrir Square.

And I’ve reached for Martin Carter. I’ve been reading his early poems of the 1950s — the poems, in particular, of The Hill of Fire Glows Red and Poems of Resistance. Their ferocity seems recharged by the images and stories from Cairo — “I will make my shirt / a banner / for the revolution,” “Wherever you fall comrade I shall arise” — but also their moral imperative, and their hope.

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You Are Involved

This I have learnt:
today a speck
tomorrow a hero
hero or monster
you are consumed!

Like a jig
shakes the loom.
Like a web
is spun the pattern
all are involved!
all are consumed!

— Martin Carter,
from Poems of Resistance from British Guiana

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, DC, and runs until 10 March. It includes work by thirty-six artists from twelve Caribbean countries and the international diaspora.

In his catalogue essay, Cozier writes:

I got the idea for the name of this exhibition while looking at a series of images by John Cox, with titles such as I Am Not Afraid to Fight a Perfect Stranger. We see the artist rendering himself in training, at the starting block, as a runner, as a boxer or sometimes as a wrestler. He presents himself, in various combative postures and sequences, as a contender, but with an image of himself. This entanglement or engagement of the other-self, a shadow or mirror image, is an ongoing story. Will these selves ever merge and find cohesion, or will one be split asunder in the search for “true” self-consciousness and awareness? The Caribbean artist is always in competition with a long history of expedient labelling of their world and their very selves — externally and also internally.

You can download the exhibition’s e-catalogue here, and a review of Wrestling with the Image will appear in the CRB in the coming weeks.

Gallery visitor looking at Cape Town, by Sheena Rose (2010, digital video). Image courtesy Nadia Huggins

Detail of Fragment Kbi Wi Kani, by Marcel Pinas (2007, bottles and cloth). Image courtesy Nadia Huggins

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, poet Anne Stevenson, as “moving and technically flawless”.

“It took us not very long to decide that this collection was the yardstick by which all the others were to be measured. These are beautiful lines; beautiful poetry,” she said . . .

She praised Walcott’s technical mastery, saying: “It is a complete book from first to last; each poem belongs completely.” She added: “He is a very great poet — one of the finest poets writing in English.” . . . According to Stevenson, the collection “sees a return to his Caribbean setting after sojourns in England and America and he is, as it were, blessing the world instead of complaining about it”.

A nice birthday present for a poet who just turned eighty-one.

Jane King reviewed White Egrets in the November 2010 CRB; you can find more of our coverage plus links to other useful resources at the CRB’s special Walcott page.

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, an artist needs not only working time and the tools of her craft, but venues in which her work can be encountered, documented, and evaluated: galleries and museums, catalogues and magazines. For Caribbean visual artists, the latter are in short supply. In the Anglophone Caribbean particularly, visual art publications produced to international standards are rare.

ARC is a bold and brave intervention into this circumstance. Published by two young artists from St Vincent and the Grenadines, ARC defines itself as “a Caribbean art and culture magazine dedicated to highlighting emerging and established artists.” Holly Bynoe, ARC’s editor in chief, and Nadia Huggins, the magazine’s creative director, both work in the medium of photography. ARC is an ambitious extension of their creative practice, and a decisive engagement with the work of their contemporaries in the Caribbean and its diasporas.

The magazine’s website went live this week, and the first quarterly print edition of ARC will be launched later this month (find out how you can get a copy here). It features work by the Jamaican photographer Radcliffe Roye, the British filmmaker (with St Lucian roots) Isaac Julien, and the young Barbadian Sheena Rose, among other artists. Via email, Bynoe and Huggins answered a few questions about the project’s inspiration and intent.

Nicholas Laughlin: ARC is an acronym (“Art. Recognition. Culture”), but it also suggests, among other things, the geographical arc of the Antilles and the sense of a creative trajectory. What else?

Holly Bynoe: ARC, to me, informs and starts to discuss a projected motion — up, out, and beyond — into a space and a place of curiosity, where some things are defined and structured, and others are akin to the human condition — i.e., existing in an unsure and ambiguous space. ARC attempts to record and take stock of the individual processes that allow for creativity.

It is a play off the archipelago; one of the first shapes embedded in our collective unconscious, and the shape of the “first recorded boat” and the last boat my father worked on. In many ways, the word and its shift are deeply personal and related to my history. I think it is funny that the two mirror each other, especially when we consider the waters, boundaries, and motions of people across the region, and the way we have come to know each other through our similar experiences informed by this movement — their geographic dispersal and how this shape in many ways references a starting point, but never a final destination. And the lack of a destination or a defined position when considering a container or a contained space for art brings up wild ideas about form, structure, directions, and narratives.

Nadia Huggins: I really wanted a name that could roll off the tongue easily. A word that would be indelible in people’s minds. I’ve had a few people refer to it as “The Ark.” I find this really interesting, given the sort of history we come from. I love the way people make their own connections with the word: Arc, Arch, Ark, Art. The play on the archipelago is a really important aspect — I feel as though we are running a common thread through all of the islands and pulling each other closer.

From a visual standpoint, I wanted the name to have impact. The first element to a successful masthead is your name. Once the name functions in speech, it can then be translated into design and have varying effects. The letters function very symmetrically; there is something about a connection between the letters, each flowing seamlessly into the others, the same way a curve functions. Regarding the acronym, the letter R is the most important, because I wanted to give young artists the opportunity to be recognised for their work. If you dissect the logo, the R has a unique personality to it, whereas the other letters stand at an end. It is about creating that connection.

NL: What was the spark of inspiration or provocation that made you decide to start the magazine, and how does it fit into the continuum of your respective creative practices?

HB: Nadia and I have been discussing the possibility of working on something of ours for a long time. With our backgrounds in photography and our versatile growth over the past three years, it seemed a ripe time to consider it. I turned thirty, finished my MFA, and lost my father in the space of a week. I think when you go through such drastic shifts and change, you come out of it understanding what risks are, and above all what is important. It was time for me to figure out how I was going to fulfill that urge to create and be a part of something that would have a collective and necessary impact on my social space and geography.

I have an intensive photographic background, and I have been thinking about images — their culture, format, composition, history, and their interaction within spaces, be they formal, dictated, or arbitrary — for a good part of seven years, the last three with a strict academic focus. Being involved in a project like ARC forces me to first engage myself with dialogues and mediums that begin as being peripheral, only to realise that we all share a common “language” and code when we create. I have been looking at the work coming out of the region, and I think it can only benefit my personal practice.

I am interested in opening a space and discussion about how contemporary photographic practices are changing in the region. I want to find artists who are involving themselves in a global dialogue while remaining true to the dynamism and context of their lived experience.

NH: Honestly, I was feeling stifled with the commercial work I was creating. I felt as though I didn’t have an outlet to do the things I enjoyed most. I wanted a design project to explore type and images and to pour all of my meticulousness into — hence ARC. I also really love sharing information and ideas with people. I don’t think there is enough exposure given to what is going on around the region. I spend a lot of time on the Internet exploring and exposing myself to as much as possible. It has opened up my mind immensely.

I never had the opportunity to expand my horizons by going to college or travelling, so the Internet has always been my teacher. I think there are a lot of artists out there without this opportunity as well, who aren’t sure where to find the right kind of information to help them grow. Artists want to know what other artists in the region are doing. They want to explore and compare each other’s process and outcome. I wanted to create a central space for them to explore other people’s creations, ideas, and struggles. Exposure is crucial to growth.

Spread from the first issue of ARC, featuring photography by Radcliffe Roye; image courtesy the publishers

NL: What are ARC’s defining characteristics, and how do you imagine it fitting into the wider context of critical attention to visual art in the Caribbean?

HB: I see ARC as a playground, a space for experimentation and the unlikely. Our definition will ring through by the fact that we pay a great deal of attention to our artists and writers, their individual concerns and thoughts about reproduction, structure, and presentation of work. We don’t presume that ARC will fill a space in every artist’s household, but we want it to become a part of the way people come to understand how creativity is no longer a contained or static force. Everything is affected by it, from the way we communicate to the way we expose and represent ourselves to each other; one look at Facebook and you can see the way photography has changed how we understand the world around us. It is now a ubiquitous medium.

I also want ARC to enforce the fact that the artist is no longer a strictly autonomous or insular being. I want to have ARC interact with the culture of individuals and have them come to understand why it is important to start having a discourse set up around supporting and harnessing the potential of art. I don’t see its space as solely critical. While I think it is important to have fully fleshed out studies and explorations, I also think the way we are going to separate ourselves is to treat its presentation like an art piece, keeping in mind the way we all subjectively interpret and come to understand ideas, concepts, and visuals that relate, contradict, or support each other.

We are hoping to engage and enable the current generation of emerging artists who are formulating new ways of presenting themselves. Most of them are unsure about what they are creating and are working with process, spontaneity, and modernity in a visceral and reactive way. There are a lot of risks being taken now, and we want to explore how seasoned artists are in discourse with the emerging creators.

NH: When I first envisioned the magazine, I felt we had to ensure the design was clean, classic, and sleek. What we’ve done with the design isn’t unique, but I think it meets a certain standard in the way art magazines are done. I dislike publications where you feel as though you are being bombarded with information and you are unable to absorb what is necessary. There’s already a circus going on in an artist’s head, why overwhelm them with more clutter? I think there needs to be a rhythm and space to breathe when browsing pages. There is a reason why you go into a gallery and there are white walls — this is so you can focus on the central elements in the space. In our case it’s the text and images. That was one of the most important factors to me, creating and maintaining a particular aesthetic.

Also, I envision ARC as a place to exchange ideas. One of the most important things is to have that interaction; we want people to give feedback on the work that is being presented and share their ideas and frustrations too.

We also want to use the space to educate artists, which is why we are incorporating tutorials and tips on different processes, especially of how to move forward in promoting and cataloguing their work. I think a lot of people underestimate the power of the Internet, and they don’t have a handle on how it works and how it can improve your craft. That is why a lot of places like deviantART and Behance succeed in helping artists — there is a lot of interaction between the artists and their peers. I think this is crucial in moving forward. Artists need constructive criticism and positive feedback to improve. It’s time for us to start supporting each other.

NL: What’s been the most surprising discovery in the process of founding and launching the magazine?

NH: The demand for a publication of this nature is what surprised me the most. People are really excited about the project, because they want to have an uncensored space to see work, and have their work be seen. I get complaints that most of the spaces available to artists are pretentious and cater to only certain types of work. I believe it’s mainly the younger artists who share this sentiment — they feel excluded and they are intimidated by the current system’s set-up. This is why they gravitate to a lot of international spaces. There is that anonymity and that feeling of acceptance and open-mindedness. You have to be producing a certain type of work and moving within a certain circle of artists, you have to learn to speak a certain way.

I understand the importance of presenting yourself as an artist in a certain way, but I don’t think this approach gets through to the younger artists. They are not interested in this way of doing things. They like to think of themselves as rebellious and progressive, and they want a space like that where they can express themselves without feeling judged. There are a lot of stifled young people and artists in the Caribbean; we want to provide a space for them.

I want to help in the process of breaking down these walls in the region. I want our artists to be fearless when approaching us, regardless of the content of their artwork, but still maintain a high standard in the quality of work presented.

HB: I am most surprised by how amorphous ARC is. Even in its becoming, it changes every day. In this very premature stage we are coming to terms with how little we know. The learning curve gets steeper and we push on to create a space for it in order to honour its intention and merit. I think ambition and resources often clash. We have had a lot of support from our various networks and families. Without that, ARC would still be an idea.

The importance of envisioning your dreams can’t be overstated. When we started thinking about the project, it was in a neat container. Now it is free, without a lot of ideological judgments. I am not so naïve as to say we don’t have a purpose or agenda. The more we interact and show people what we are doing, new ideas, thoughts, and information materialise. We are very receptive to voices that we trust and we both have an intuitive sense of where we want this to be a in a couple years.

I am also very shy and self-conscious, and I have realised that through ARC my shame has sort of diminished. Even though it is still hard for me to fill roles that I am unsure of, every day I gain a little confidence. Pace is the trick. ARC is a full-time job for five people. I am still getting used to its dynamic, orders, and language.

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 the Caribbean’s literary calendar. The Calabash formula was simple and successful: invite first-class writers from around the world to mingle with an avid audience of Jamaicans and others in an idyllic beachfront location, for three days of readings, performances, music, and conversation. The relaxed setting — with a huge tent pitched in a seaside meadow as the main venue, and Calabash Bay for a backdrop — meant that Calabash felt less like a literary festival and more like a giant beach party where everyone was interested in books, and writers were the guests of honour.

The Calabash organisers had already announced the end-of-May dates for the 2011 festival, and regular attendees were speculating, as usual, about the line-up of invited writers. So Calabash fans in Jamaica and elsewhere were taken aback by the announcement yesterday evening, at a press conference in Kingston, that there would be no festival in 2011 after all — and that “the Calabash International Literary Festival is over in its present incarnation.”

“We had a fantastic run, and the festival effectively accomplished what it set out to do ten years ago,” said co-founder Colin Channer in the official press release. The Calabash International Literary Trust is expected to continue its series of writing workshops and seminars. And according to Kwame Dawes, another of the three co-founders, some key members of the Calabash team — minus Channer — plan to regroup in 2012 to launch a new literary event to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Jamaican independence.

Writer and CRB contributor Annie Paul was at the fateful press conference, and posted a brief report at her blog last night, hinting at speculation about Channer’s “mysterious” departure from the Calabash team. She promises more details, and possibly an interview with Dawes, in the coming days.

Meanwhile, regular Calabash attendees — some of whom had already booked accommodation for the 2011 event — exchanged messages of consternation. By coincidence, the end of Calabash coincides with the launch of a major new literary festival at the other end of the Caribbean. The Bocas Lit Fest, based in Port of Spain, Trinidad, runs from 28 April to 1 May, 2011. (Your Antilles blogger is a member of the planning committee.) Bocas offers a completely different vibe — urban buzz and energy, rather than beachside idyll. But it shares with Calabash a sense of the Caribbean as an important literary nexus, and the goal of bringing extraordinary talent from around the world to home audiences. When Calabash fans recover from their disappointment, they ought to check out what’s going on in Port of Spain.

For a look back at the tenth anniversary of the Calabash International Literary Festival last year, see Vincentian writer William J. Abbott’s Antilles report.