“Footnotes” is a series of occasional blog posts giving further information about books reviewed in the CRB

The November 2013 CRB includes a review by Ishion Hutchinson of Edward Baugh’s Black Sand: New and Selected Poems. “Baugh’s brand of poetry,” writes Hutchinson, “has given the quotidian Caribbean experience, and often the unexamined Caribbean life, an exhilarating poetic presence.”

Emeritus professor of the University of the West Indies, Baugh is a leading authority on the work of Derek Walcott — and one of the best readers of Walcott’s poems your Antilles blogger has ever heard. He published the first book-length study of Walcott (Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision, 1978), edited the St Lucian Nobel laureate’s 2007 Selected Poems, and has written copiously on Walcott’s poetry and his influence on Caribbean literature.

Baugh spent much of his career at UWI’s Mona campus, where — with colleagues like Kenneth Ramchand and Mervyn Morris — he helped lay the foundations for serious scholarly consideration of West Indian literature. In particular, Baugh’s 1977 essay “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History” has been recognised by a subsequent generation of scholars as a seminal contribution to Caribbean literary criticism.

At UWI-Mona, Baugh also served as the campus’s public orator. His addresses delivered in this role, detailing the achievements of the university’s honorary graduands, are collected in Chancellor, I Present … (1998), which you can read in part at Google Books.

As Hutchinson notes in his review, though Baugh has been writing poems for five decades, he has not been the most prolific of poets. Nonetheless, “Baugh has patiently created an important oeuvre that is indelible.” His previous books of poems, A Tale from the Rainforest (1988) and It Was the Singing (2000), share with Black Sand the quality Hutchinson describes as “the fluid way in which he moves beyond expression into comprehension, articulating with superb intimacy those echolocations outside of the verbal framework.”

Baugh is also a longtime CRB contributor — for example, reviewing Walcott’s book The Prodigal, Lorna Goodison’s Controlling the Silver, and more recently Vahni Capildeo’s Undraining Sea. The CRB archive also includes an essay by Baugh on Frank Collymore, excerpted from his biography of the late Barbadian writer and editor (which was in turn reviewed in the CRB by John Gilmore).

“For most of my life,” Baugh said in a 2006 Caribbean Beat interview, “people knew me simply as a critic. I was writing poems, getting the odd poem published here and there, but here and abroad, except for a few people who were into poetry, people knew me as a critic.

“I always used to say, half in jest, but only half, that the thing I would most have liked to be in the world is a poet. So the fact that sometimes now people refer to me as poet first is a kind of great thrill to me.”

Listen to Edward Baugh reading several of his poems at The Poetry Archive.

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.

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.

Last Friday, 3 December, Derek Walcott gave the annual Robert B. Silvers Lecture at the New York Public Library, on “Hemingway and the Caribbean”. The library has been kind enough to post video footage of the lecture online for those of us in other cities or on other continents.

V.S. Naipaul in his younger days

NAIPAUL

I’m unusual in that I have had a long career. Most people from limited backgrounds write one book. I’m a prose writer. A prose book contains many thousands of sentiments, observations, thoughts — it is a lot of work. The pattern for most people is to do a little thing about their own lives. My career has been other. I found more and more to write. If I had the strength, I probably would do more; there is always more to write about. I just don’t have the energy, the physical capacity. You know, one can spend so many days now being physically wretched. I’m aging badly. I’ve given so much to this career for so long. I spend so much time trying to feel well. One becomes worn out by living, by writing, by thinking.

Have you got enough now?

INTERVIEWER

Yes.

NAIPAUL

Do you think I’ve wasted a bit of myself talking to you?

INTERVIEWER

Not, of course, how I’d put it.

NAIPAUL

You’ll cherish it?

INTERVIEWER

You don’t like interviews.

NAIPAUL

I don’t like them because I think that thoughts are so precious you can talk them away. You can lose them.

— V.S. Naipaul, interviewed by Jonathan Rosen and Tarun Tejpal for the Fall 1998 Paris Review.

It’s often said the Paris Review invented the modern literary interview; the magazine’s famous interview archive, stretching from 1953 to the present, is now fully available online. Other Caribbean writers included: Jean Rhys, 1979; Guillermo Cabrera Infante, 1983; and Derek Walcott, 1986.

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
of childhood, an old fence at noon, bel-air, quadrille,
la comette, gracious turns, until delight settles.
A voice like rain on a hot road, a smell of cut grass,
its language as small as the cedar’s and sweeter than any
wherever I have gone, that makes my right hand Ishmael,
my guide the star-fingered frangipani.

— Derek Walcott, from “Homecoming”, in The Bounty

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“Manmay la dit wai!”, from Sesenne: St Lucia’s First Lady of Folk (1991), produced by Ronald “Boo” Hinkson. Audio recording courtesy the St Lucia Folk Research Centre:

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Marie Selipha “Sesenne” Descartes, St Lucian folk singer and “queen of folk culture,” died on Wednesday 11 August in Mon Repos.

The poet John Robert Lee has written an obituary of Sesenne published by the St Lucia Folk Research Centre. He describes her public debut in the early 1920s:

Sony [Sesenne’s father] had plans to start a La Rose group in the Micoud area and he needed a lead singer. Sesenne was then posed with the challenge of being lead singer/chantwelle of that new La Rose group. Sesenne was about eight years old at the time. Her father first informed her mother of his decision to place her in the group because he believed she was the best individual to become the chantwelle. Sesenne accepted and she took her first bold steps into folk culture history. Sesenne said of her distinct and pristine voice, “Everyone was envious of my voice” and “when I sang I could be heard in Magretout.”

At the peak of the La Rose celebrations in Mon Repos, a huge crowd of La Rose fans awaited the commencement of the séance. Sesenne realised that the crowd was growing impatient, so she requested that coffee be served to the people in an effort to curb their increasing frustration. The ushers at the séance organised many teacups to be filled with coffee for whoever wanted a drink. And as if that was not enough, Sesenne asked the ushers to cut the two cakes that were gifted to the La Rose group into small pieces so that everyone could get a taste. The people were all appreciative of that gesture of genuine hospitality. When all of that was done, Sesenne stepped onto the stage and sang these words — “ah ya yai mamai La Rose, pa plé wé!” — the crowd went into an uproar.

Read more about Sesenne here.

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“Pale Edward ba mwen”, from Sesenne: St Lucia’s First Lady of Folk (1991), produced by Ronald “Boo” Hinkson. Audio recording courtesy the St Lucia Folk Research Centre:

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“Mais oui, ça vrai”, from Sesenne: St Lucia’s First Lady of Folk (1991), produced by Ronald “Boo” Hinkson. Audio recording courtesy the St Lucia Folk Research Centre:

“Mais oui, ça vrai”

Si mwen di ’ous ça fait mwen la peine
’Ous kai dire ça vrai.
Si mwen di ’ous ça penetrait mwen
’Ous peut dire ça vrai.
Ces mamailles actuellement
Pas ka faire l’amour z’autres pour un rien.

Translation by John Robert Lee, published in Elemental (2008):

If I tell you that affair grieved me
you can believe it’s true,
if I tell you you tore up my heart,
you can say yes, it’s true.
If I tell you you pierced me
you can believe I tell the truth.
Young people of today,
you do not make your love for nothing.

Dustjacket of the first edition of Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun, from the H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Literature, University of Illinois at Chicago library

Does the physical format of a book — its size, shape, weight, the design of its cover and pages, the texture and smell of the binding — influence the experience of its reader? Of course. You don’t have to be a hardcore bibliophile to enjoy an attractively (or even eccentrically) designed volume, or a literary historian to understand how the original format of a book’s publication could have affected its reception by critics and readers.

Dustjacket of the first edition of Geoffrey Drayton’s Christopher, from the H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Literature, University of Illinois at Chicago library

The University of Illinois at Chicago’s library is home to the H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Literature, about a thousand books collected over a fifty-year period by the late Jamaican poet (known to his friends as “Dossie”). Most of these books are now-rare first editions. The UIC library has digitised about six hundred dust jackets from these volumes and made the images available online via a searchable database — an admirable resource for anyone interested in Caribbean literature. Your Antilles blogger has just spent a pleasing half-hour browsing the collection.

Dustjacket of the first edition of Derek Walcott’s The Gulf, from the H.D. Carberry Collection of Caribbean Literature, University of Illinois at Chicago library

• Revival of Paul Simon/Derek Walcott’s Capeman opens in NYC in August: http://bit.ly/bxdLLX

• Trinidadian Marlon Griffith wins 2010 Commonwealth Connections international arts residency: http://bit.ly/9y7e2o

• Announcing @Carifringe: an annual regional arts festival hosted in Nassau, launching October 2010: http://bit.ly/aXkXpw

• Bahamian Christian Campbell shortlisted for Forward Prize for best first collection: http://bit.ly/9cahf2

• Draconian Switch 13: Cozier, Smailes, Ashraph, Rawlins, Vasquez, Bolai: http://bit.ly/bhZeLZ

• George Elliott Clarke on the Calabash poetry anthology, So Much Things to Say: http://bit.ly/aR97gM

• Mediapart on Anthony Joseph’s recent performance in Arles (report in French + video footage): http://bit.ly/bCCu2j

• Lesley McDowell reviews Kei Miller’s The Last Warner Woman in the Glasgow Herald: http://bit.ly/csxOH7

Christian Campbell

The shortlists for the 2010 Forward Prizes for Poetry were announced today. The UK Guardian suggests that

An expected clash between Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott on the shortlist for this year’s Forward prize for best poetry collection has been averted, after Walcott’s latest collection failed to make the cut.

(The paper’s correspondent delicately declines to make any link between Walcott’s absence from the list and the fact that this year’s judging panel is chaired by Ruth Padel.)

But the real news for Caribbean readers is that the Bahamian poet Christian Campbell’s Running the Dusk has been shortlisted for the best first collection prize. This is a good time to dip into the CRB archive and re-read Campbell’s poem “Goodman’s Bay”, published more than five years ago in our February 2005 issue:

We run the dusk
at dusk. Everything
is open and live
with silence. All viscera.
God, there is too much
red in the sky . . .