Earlier this week, the CRB published F.S.J. Ledgister’s review of Edward Seaga’s two-volume political memoir, My Life and Leadership, plus historian Patrick E. Bryan’s monograph Edward Seaga and the Challenges of Modern Jamaica. Seaga, prime minister of Jamaica from 1980 to 1989 and leader of the opposition for a cumulative two decades, was the last member of Parliament to have entered public life before Independence. I must confess that, copy-editing Ledgister’s insightful review a few days ago, and contemplating Seaga’s sheer political tenacity, I was sorely tempted to title the piece after Prince Buster’s catchy 1967 song “Hard Man fe Dead”. I decided to err on the side of caution, and chose the less irreverent title “Last one standing”.

Also published this week: Brendan de Caires’s thorough, admiring, and rather naughty review of Lise Winer’s Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad and Tobago, a remarkable reference work that sets a new standard for Caribbean lexicography. For one thing, as de Caires illustrates in detail, “Winer is commendably open-minded about recording ‘all relevant words . . . pleasant or not’”. He goes on:

This level of exactitude in country matters may not be to everyone’s taste, but Winer’s open-eyed approach to language as it is actually used is central to what makes the DECTT so useful.

I think this is the most entertaining review we’ve published in the CRB for a long while, and an excellent demonstration that an intelligent and penetrating book review can and ought to be a fun read.

Finally, this week we publish as well two poems by the US-based Trinidadian poet Lauren K. Alleyne. “The Body, Given” and “Ode to the Belly” are both wry meditations on the eternal tensions between body and soul, and Alleyne is a poet I suspect we’ll be hearing much more from in the years ahead.

The Portal (2006; 107 x 73 cm), by Stanley Greaves; from the Shadows Move Among Them series

During November and December 2010, the CRB is running a readers’ donation drive. Find out more here. This post is the first of a series in which CRB contributors suggest five reasons to read and support the magazine — in the form of five reviews or other pieces from our archive.

Brendan de Caires writes:

I read as often as I can, but not as much as I should. I know this because I was lucky enough to grow up on the fringes of a circle of men who read obsessively throughout their adult lives. The poet Martin Carter was one of these men. He read with attitude, scoring books with impassioned marginalia, assessing the argument from page to page. When Tom Wolfe wrote profiles of the American glitterati he was said to enter their rooms like a shark sighting chum, salivating at the semiotics of their furniture, eager to price the crystal and decipher the meanings of their objets d’art. Carter came to books the same way; he saw deep into their inner beings, and could talk about them with an easy familiarity decades later. And while it is certainly true that Karl Marx illuminated much of his world view, I have always felt it was his prodigious intellectual curiosity, his irrepressible bookishness (as a teenager in Georgetown he often read a book a day) that fuelled the poetry within.

Martin was a second father to my own father, and from him we both learned a reverence for serious writing. Usually this meant politics. Long before I had read a page of their work, I knew the world was a better place for having Leszek Kołakowski, Isaac Deutscher, and Edmund Wilson in it. I also knew that any intellectual aspirations I might have had to be gauged by at least a passing familiarity with their “monuments of unageing intellect.”

Towards the end of his life, Martin was overwhelmed by pessimism about Guyana and the Caribbean. He mourned the absence of serious conversation and the near total disappearance of the cultural and political aspirations which had inspired the New World movement. It is a pity that he never lived to see the CRB find its feet, and to witness the revival of some of that spirit.

After meandering through the archives, I have chosen five pieces that I believe Martin and my father would have enjoyed.

1. Who dares to say what Wilson Harris’s fiction is all about? “Prosimetrum”, by Fred D’Aguiar (February 2009), is one of the few lucid accounts of what our most “misunderestimated” sage is up to do when he dissolves time and personality in his novels:

Landscape became instructive not simply in terms outlined by the Romantics, whose great legacy remains that landscape is a thing we can benefit from by knowing about, a cathedral of sorts for spiritual renewal. But for Harris that landscape enacts perception, governs it, steers it into new mental terrain. This transformative aspect of landscape was bound to alter Harris’s language, since the way he talked about place had to be part and parcel of his discoveries about the power of Guyana’s rainforest interior. When allied with time, this sensory reception of a place turned out to be a literary practice, a theory about fiction, an account of the intuitive imagination, and therefore a new type of fiction . . .

2. Stanley Greaves ought to be better known in the Caribbean. “Flatness is all” (November 2006) offers multiple insights into Guyana’s greatest living painter in the lambent prose that has made Rupert Roopnaraine our wisest critic. For me it also gives a glimpse into the intellectual world that might have flourished in Georgetown if our politics had turned out differently.

Underlining the abstract intent of these paintings, there is at work a phenomenology that relegates objects of nature to the viscous and contingent, as opposed to the crystalline hardness and necessity of the walls and roadways of the surrounding landscape. The interplay of the organic and the inorganic creates a certain tension. In the otherwise entirely mineral environment of the paintings there are three natural objects: a mango suspended on a string in Reaching; the breadfruit head of St Sebastian, his shadow pinned down with large nails; and a defiant branch sprouting improbably out of the arch in The Portal, the painting that takes the spiritual world as its subject. The Portal is a tale of two spaces, connected by a rope that curls in the foreground of one space and whose end is in the grip of the figure in the other. At both ends of the rope, the familiar infinity loop, a recurrent Greavesian motif . . .

3. I love take-downs, especially the quiet ones. “Unfit to print” (May 2005) is one of the most satisfying that I’ve read. Jeremy Taylor was my boss for five years and unfailingly tolerant of my myriad editorial misjudgments and lapses (which once included placing the wrong crossword grid into an issue of Caribbean Beat!). So I was glad to see he could be unashamedly judgmental, in the vulgar sense of that word, on the right occasions. I loved the slow unsheathing of the critical knife in this piece, and the way the title ends up referring not to the subject of the book under review but to the book itself.

There are production disappointments in this book too, which is unfortunate in the context of a polemic against poor quality and lack of professionalism: embarrassing typos (“Buju Bantan”), tortuous syntax, wild punctuation, and incomprehensible sentences . . .

4. Living in Canada has made me nostalgic for the directness of Trinidadians. Judy Raymond’s “Doctor, doctor” (November 2007) is another fine example of what happens when the right reviewer meets the wrong book. It also seems to me entirely appropriate that a book which missed the meaning of Eric Williams should be dismissed with an impatience not too dissimilar to his own.

Costar — who studied Williams’s character closely and fruitfully — wrote that the Doctor’s famous speeches in Woodford Square “are rated high as entertainment by those for whose benefit they are uttered.” This judgement is beyond the pale as far as Palmer is concerned: he considers it “contemptuous,” “extraordinary,” “uncharitable.”

It is none of those things; it is actually a perfectly apt compliment, since without a doubt entertaining his audience was one of the effects for which Williams, a brilliant orator, was aiming. But Colin Palmer is a Jamaican, and seems to have no inkling of the outright jokiness, much of it deliberate, of a great deal of Trinidad politics — surely an unfortunate blind spot in one who has set out to analyse an important period in the political history of Trinidad . . .

5. For me, “Wonder boy” (February 2008) is proof that Caribbean book-reviewing can rise to the level of the fiction it surveys. I particularly enjoyed the opening paragraph, and immediately resolved to read more of Marlon James. It came as no surprise to me when the American National Book Critics Circle chose The Book of Night Women for its 2010 fiction shortlist. Before long, I’m sure, James will be winning even bigger prizes, and tempting young novelists to try similar reviews of his own work.

I hate skinny prose. I hate — hold on a second. Essayus interruptus. While I come not to bury Junot Díaz but to praise him (profusely), please allow for a word from our sponsor. As someone who hates reviews that include the “I”, I have ironically proved the rock band Jane’s Addiction true by becoming that which I hate. But I digress. I’m simply trying to explain that “I” will pop up all over this review, for two reasons. A novel with fearless, fire-breathing prose, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao downright demands a review in the first person, teasing and taunting the “I” like a call-and-response in church. This novel may be the first since Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities to snatch reading from a passive to an active experience. But, more than that, Díaz, like the very best of novelists (a list that does not include Wolfe, by the way), makes a voyeur out of the reader, pushing wide open windows into lives we don’t deserve to see . . .

Three editions of the Jamaica Times from 1905. Images from the Digital Library of the Caribbean, University of Florida

Some weeks back, Antilles’ “In hand” series cast a glance at Belinda Edmondson’s Caribbean Middlebrow, which examines — as her subtitle has it — “leisure culture and the middle class” in the Caribbean, with a focus on Jamaica and Trinidad. This week the CRB publishes a full review by Brendan de Caires — as well as Vanessa Spence’s review of Pauline Melville’s novel Eating Air.

Caribbean Middlebrow covers a broad range of cultural phenomena, including “mid-nineteenth-century novels, fin-de-siècle newspapers, the gentrification of dialect poetry, the social politics of beauty pageants and jazz festivals, and transnational markets for popular fiction.” Edmondson has clearly put in some time in the archives, and readers who might like to follow her — investigating, say, how a nascent West Indian literary culture was charted in late-nineteeth- and early-twentieth-century newspapers — could do worse than browse the virtual stacks of the Digital Library of the Caribbean, or dLOC, a project of the University of Florida. This is a searchable library of digitised documents and publications — maps, photographs, books, journals, pamphlets, newspaper clippings and whole newspapers — all freely accessible to scholars, students, and ordinary readers. The Jamaica Times thumbnails above come from dLOC, where you can read entire editions of the paper from c. 1905. So does this film poster by the Cuban artist Eduardo Muñoz Bachs, designed for the 1975 Italian version of Zorro starring Alain Delon — which I’m reproducing here simply because I like it (three cheers for archives!):

Zorro poster (1976), by Eduardo Muñoz Bachs. Image from the Digital Library of the Caribbean, University of Florida

Image posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license by Georg Mayer

When the Caribbean and Canada regional shortlist for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize was announced last February, several of my friends and colleagues commented on — indeed, complained about — the fact that only one of the twelve shortlisted books was by a Caribbean author. (That was Raymond Ramcharitar’s Island Quintet, reviewed in the current CRB by Jonathan Ali.) I myself participated in a vigorous discussion of the matter initiated by a talented younger Caribbean writer (sadly, this happened behind the closed doors of Facebook).

One of this year’s CWP judges was the Guyanese critic Brendan de Caires — a friend and colleague and frequent CRB contributor. He recently published an essay called “The Winter of a Hundred Books” in the Literary Review of Canada, describing his experience of reading through the massive pile of books entered for the prize. The piece is chiefly about Brendan’s coming to terms with contemporary Canadian literature, as a recent migrant to Canada, but along the way he offers some insight into the near-absence of Caribbean books from the CWP shortlist:

The Canadian books on our shortlist (eleven out of twelve, as it happened) seemed to emerge from a culture that had learned how to look past unanswerable questions about national identity — a subject that consumes so many West Indian writers — and to deal with subjects more amenable to fiction. Ironically these lowercased, alternative concerns — widowhood, farming, village stories, minor social comedies — often wound up offering partial answers to the very riddles they were avoiding. Collectively they gave the impression of a thriving literary culture. No barbaric yawps, certainly, but intimations of a vast land, containing multitudes….

While many West Indian writers strain to gloss their scenery, speech and character traits for foreign audiences — a necessary evil in a region with hardly any local publishing — the Canadians suffer less angst. They worry less about explaining, or justifying themselves. Even in exile, West Indians tend to chase big game, while the Canadians are happy to trap whatever appears in the landscape. In more literary terms, you might say that in the tradition of A House for Mr Biswas or In the Castle of My Skin, we want to build Middlemarch, while Canadians — stereotypes notwithstanding — are often content with Cranford.

I wish more literary prize judges were bold enough to put their post-judging thoughts in writing and on the record. That might help make it clearer that all such awards are hopelessly subjective: dependent on the whims, prejudices, and idiosyncratic enthusiasms of the judges, and for that matter subject to all sorts of extra- or un-literary considerations, such as judges’ personalities, the form their deliberations take and the circumstances under which they happen, maybe even the weather. Literary prizes are an important mechanism for promoting books and supporting writers, but winning an award — even a big one, like the Nobel Prize — is no guarantee of literary excellence (assuming we can agree what that means). The real judge is Posterity, and most of us won’t be around to hear the verdict. Until then, it’s every reader for her- or himself.

(My own contribution to judgely divulgence, when I was a CWP judge last time around, was a series of “judge’s journal” notes here at Antilles: one, two, three, four.)