Stephen Tyrone Williams and Johnny Ferro in Children of God, directed by Kareem Mortimer. Photograph courtesy the trinidad+tobago film festival

The September 2010 issue of the CRB wraps up today, with the publication of our latest “Also noted” column, featuring brief reviews of ten recent books from and about the Caribbean. (They include Cecil Gray’s latest book of poems, two coming-of-age novels set in contemporary Trinidad, scholarly books on Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, and a series of guides to Caribbean street food).

As regular Antilles readers know, this issue of the CRB also includes a special section on recent Caribbean film, supported by the trinidad+tobago film festival 2010. Here’s a roundup of the seven films we’ve reviewed, in case you missed one or two:

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Could you be loved
Nicholas Laughlin on Children of God, directed by Kareem Mortimer

Gold fever
Georgia Popplewell on Orpailleur, directed by Marc Barrat

There will be blood
Jane Bryce on La Soga, directed by Josh Crook

Songs of the road
Ian Craig on Los Viajes del Viento, directed by Ciro Guerra

The return of the native
Dylan Kerrigan on The Amerindians, directed by Tracy Assing and Sophie Meyer

Addicted to rockstone
Kellie Magnus on The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee “Scratch” Perry, directed by Ethan Higbee and Adam Bhala Lough

Colour wheel
Andre Bagoo on Coolie Pink and Green, directed by Patricia Mohammed

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We’re very pleased the ttff decided to support this special film coverage, and we hope their partnership with the CRB will continue in some form.

You can see the full contents of the now-complete September 2010 issue here — now is a good time to catch up with anything you missed during the busy past eight weeks. Some highlights: Vahni Capildeo’s survey of the late Guyanese poet Mahadai Das; Mervyn Morris’s essay on the life and poetic achievement of Wayne Brown; Melissa Richards on Anton Nimblett’s short fiction; J. Michael Dash on Matthew J. Smith’s political history of Haiti in the mid-twentieth century; and Edwidge Danticat’s moving essay on writing and reading in dangerous times.

And now to gear up for the launch of the November issue . . .

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 as the medium of filmmaking itself. Yet the potential for using Caribbean literature as a source for making films remains largely unexplored. In this workshop, facilitated by novelist and screenwriter Caryl Phillips, participants will get to grips with adapting a classic work of Caribbean literature for the screen. Using Jean Rhys’s short story “Let Them Call it Jazz” as his template, Phillips will take the participants through the necessary steps of adaptation before they attempt some writing of their own. Phillips will then critique the participants’ work.

Saturday 2 October, 9.00 am–4.00 pm
University of the West Indies, St Augustine
TT$300 (lunch included). Discounted price for students: TT$250
Pre-registration is required. Call (868) 621 0709 to register

About the facilitator:
Caryl Phillips is a St Kitts-born British writer. His work includes the radio play The Wasted Years (1984, BBC Giles Cooper Award), and the novels Crossing the River (1993, James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and A Distant Shore (2003, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize). Phillips wrote the film of his own novel, The Final Passage (Peter Hall, 1996), as well as the screenplay for Playing Away (Horace Ové, 1986), and the film of V.S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur (Ismail Merchant, 2001). He is presently professor of English at Yale University.

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. His second book of poems, Voyages, appeared seventeen years later, by which time Brown was better known as a prose writer. In 1984 he began writing a column for the Trinidad Express, and over the next quarter century In Our Time appeared in several other newspapers in Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guyana — well over three thousand editions, or several novels’ worth of prose.

In Our Time ranged over subjects from social and political commentary to literary criticism to personal reminiscence, and even outright fiction. “I write about anything,” Brown said in 1987, and “I use the techniques of fiction in writing these pieces.” Several dozen In Our Time columns were collected in A Child of the Sea (1989) and Landscape with Heron (2000), but the vaster part of this extraordinary oeuvre remains in suspended animation, as it were, in newspaper archives and clipping files. Elegantly composed, furiously thought out, often moving, occasionally infuriating, Brown’s columns belong to an important Caribbean tradition of literary writing in the popular press, and furthermore decisively influenced a generation of younger Trinidadian writers who used the newspaper column as a literary medium of urgency and ambition.

In the mid 1990s Brown moved permanently to Jamaica, where he had lived earlier in his life, and there he became best known as an editor — of the literary pages of the Observer, of several anthologies and collections of poems by other writers, and of the short-lived online journal Caribbean Writing Today — and as a teacher and mentor. The writing workshop he ran out of his various Kingston homes developed into an important institution in the Jamaican literary scene.

This week, the CRB remembers Wayne Brown and his literary legacies. We publish, first, “Pan Session: Laventille”, a poem found among his papers after his death; as well as an essay on Brown’s life and work by Mervyn Morris, his longtime friend and fellow poet. (This piece is adapted from Morris’s introduction to the new collected edition of Brown’s poems forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press. A new collection of his prose is also in preparation.)

We also continue our special section on recent Caribbean film, supported by the trinidad+tobago film festival, with Georgia Popplewell’s review of Orpailleur, a thriller directed by Marc Barrat and set in the interior of French Guiana.

Probably the most iconic image from any Caribbean film: Jimmy Cliff as Ivanhoe Martin in The Harder They Come

The CRB’s chief interest, as our name makes clear, is books. But it’s also clear that no art form is isolated or insulated from others, and literature is part of a creative continuum with visual and performing arts. From early on, the CRB has tried to engage with Caribbean art especially, as well as film and music, and in the magazine’s current online incarnation we intend to expand our critical focus to pay more sustained, serious attention to these forms of creative imagination and thought.

Tomorrow the September 2010 issue of the CRB will begin publication. I’m very pleased about two particular elements. First, later this month we’ll launch a regular music column, in which we’ll publish reviews of new releases in a wide range of Caribbean genres, as well as short essays on specific musicians and composers, significant songs and albums of the past, events, trends, and musical phenomena. Second, the September CRB will include a special section on recent Caribbean film, supported by the trinidad+tobago film festival 2010.

This is the CRB’s second partnership with the ttff, who previously supported a small section of film reviews in our August 2008 issue. This month’s special section is more ambitious: for the duration of this issue, we’ll publish a new review each week of films drawn from the ttff’s 2009 and 2010 programmes. (The films for review were selected by the CRB, and the reviews independently commissioned; the reviewers’ opinions are their own, not the ttff’s.) We’re grateful the ttff recognises the importance of creating a critical context for the work of Caribbean filmmakers, and we hope this initiative is the beginning of more regular film coverage in the magazine.

You can find out more about the trinidad+tobago film festival 2010 at their website, with news and updates at the festival blog.