Marcus Garvey. Photograph courtesy Oxford University Press

As I mentioned in the previous post, today is V.S. Naipaul’s birthday — which he shares, by [insert preferred adjective] coincidence, with Marcus Garvey.

Geoffrey Philp is celebrating the latter over at his blog, with a poem (“Marcus, the dream is never too much to bear”) and a guest post by Colin Grant, author of the recent biography Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. Philp asked Grant: if Garvey were alive today, would he be blogging? (He also posed the question to his readers, via an online poll; eighty-three per cent have answered in the affirmative.)

Grant writes:

Marcus Garvey had shown a love of words and learning from a young age. Famously, he walked around the quiet coastal town of St Ann’s Bay in Jamaica with a dictionary in his pocket. He’d learn half a dozen new words in the morning and try them out in conversation with his friends and startled adults in the evening . . .

Garvey, with the username “Black Star Rising”, would not confine himself to a blog; he would be an engaging and energetic user of Twitter, with lots of “followers,” and would have an active and influential Facebook page, with lots of “friends.”

One excellent online Garvey resource is the website of the UCLA African Studies Centre’s Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Project, which is engaged in publishing a definitive edition of the massive archive of documents covering Garvey’s career. The website includes a good introductory biography, excerpts from the published volumes, and downloadable files of the only known audio recordings of Garvey.

(Jeremy Taylor reviewed Grant’s Negro with a Hat in the August 2008 CRB.)

• “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 htmlgiant: http://bit.ly/aQuyKO

• Amanda Smyth (Black Rock) interviews Monique Roffey (The White Woman on the Green Bicycle) at Writers’ Hub: http://bit.ly/aaGcES

• David Granger on “The Material Culture of African-Guyanese” in Guyana Review: http://bit.ly/8YQAMc

• August 2010 issue of the Latin American Review of Books: http://bit.ly/anzFO3

Frank Collymore reading a copy of Bim in his garden.
Photograph courtesy the Estate of Frank A. Collymore

This week the CRB publishes Geoffrey Philp’s review of Patricia Powell’s novel The Fullness of Everything; a new poem, “The Garden”, by Ishion Hutchinson; and John T. Gilmore’s review of Edward Baugh’s new biography of Frank Collymore, the late Barbadian writer and editor of the pioneering journal Bim, described by his biographer as the literary godfather of a generation of West Indian writers.

Some CRB readers may remember that an excerpt from Baugh’s then book-in-progress appeared in our May 2008 issue, with the title “In praise of Colly”. Dipping into the archives and quoting from Collymore’s extensive correspondence, the piece describes his crucial role in encouraging and promoting the early literary careers of George Lamming, Derek Walcott, and other writers who made their debut in the 1940s and 50s. “We should not underrate his own writing,” Baugh says —

relatively minor in the overall scheme of things, but appreciable and significant. However, the more epoch-making achievement was his work with Bim, and Collymore’s Bim-related dealings with so many young men who were to play so great a part in the making of West Indian literature.

Gilmore ends his review of Frank Collymore: A Biography with a plea for a comprehensive new edition of Collymore’s fiction and poems. To which I’d add: it’s high time the Bim archive was fully digitised and made widely available online. If Collymore was West Indian literature’s godfather — an honour he shares with A.J. Seymour of Kyk-Over-Al and Henry Swanzy of Caribbean Voices — then all those back issues of Bim are part of our family history.

The CRB’s editorial engine is running again, though with the occasional cough and splutter — we’re not yet at cruising speed, as it were. But our May 2010 issue — our first in a year — is under way, with the first new reviews appearing at the start of the month and another batch published this week. Eventually we’ll settle into a more or less weekly schedule, with new material going live on the site every Monday.

Thus far, the May issue includes reviews of Anthony Winkler’s latest novel, Crocodile, and Geoffrey Philp’s book of short stories Who’s Your Daddy?; of collections of poems by Grace Nichols and Jennifer Rahim; of a book of interviews with Caryl Phillips, and of a literary study called Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum. We’ve also published the first instalment of a multi-part essay by Vahni Capildeo, recounting her recent visit to India for a literary conference — I hope this will be just the first in a series of longer prose narratives made possible by the CRB’s new format, in which we are unrestricted by printed page counts. And this week we’ve also published two new poems by Kei Miller.

The first of these, “This Zinc Roof”, is a sort of ode to the bare sheets of galvanised zinc — “this portion / Of ripple; this conductor of midday heat” — that both shelter and trap so many residents of the Caribbean’s desperate and depressed urban communities. When we planned to publish the poem this week, we had no idea that the events now unfolding in Kingston would give its poignant verses such a sharp and timely edge:

This that the poor of the world look up to
On humid nights, as if it were a crumpled
Heaven they could be lifted into….

This clanging of feet and boots,
Men running from Babylon whose guns
Are drawn against the small measure

Of their lives….