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 . . .

Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin (at left), moments before their execution; Port-au-Prince, November 1964

. . . on November 12, 1964, two pine poles are erected outside the national cemetery. A captive audience is gathered.

Radio, print, and television journalists are summoned. Numa and Drouin are dressed in what on old black-and-white film seem to be the clothes in which they’d been captured — khakis for Drouin and a modest white shirt and denim-looking pants for Numa. They are both marched from the edge of the crowd towards the poles. Their hands are tied behind their backs by two of Duvalier’s private henchmen, Tonton Macoutes in dark glasses and civilian dress. The Tonton Macoutes then tie the ropes around the men’s biceps to bind them to the poles and keep them upright.

This week, the CRB is very pleased to publish an essay by the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, excerpted from her new book. She begins by telling the story of the execution of two young Haitian activists, Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, at the order of the dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. This event, Danticat explains, is one of her personal “creation myths.” The story of these brave young men is her starting-point for a bracing consideration of the importance of literature, of the act of writing and the act of reading, in dangerous times:

When it was a crime to pick up a bloodied body on the street, Haitian writers introduced Haitian readers to Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Antigone, which had been rewritten in Creole and placed in Haitian settings by the playwright Franck Fouché and the poet Felix Morisseau Leroy. This is where these writers placed their bets, striking a dangerous balance between silence and art.

How do writers and readers find each other under such dangerous circumstances? Reading, like writing, under these conditions is disobedience to a directive in which the reader, our Eve, already knows the possible consequences of eating that apple but takes a bold bite anyway.

How does that reader find the courage to take this bite, open that book? After an arrest, an execution? Of course he or she may find it in the power of the hushed chorus of other readers, but she can also find it in the writer’s courage in having stepped forward, in having written, or rewritten, in the first place.

Also published in the CRB this week: the latest in our special series of film reviews, supported by the trinidad+tobago film festival. Ian Craig looks at Los Viajes del Viento (The Wind Journeys), a “road movie” set along Colombia’s Caribbean coast, directed by Ciro Guerra.

Finally, this week we launch our new music column, which focuses on new releases from underexposed Caribbean genres as well as classic recordings and performances of the past. It begins with B.C. Pires’s review of The Longest Kiss Goodnight, the latest album from the Trinidadian rock band jointpop (your Antilles blogger is a fan), and John Robert Lee’s essay on the late St Lucian folk singer Sesenne Descartes and her classic 1991 album, now scheduled for re-release.

It is a stuffy Thursday afternoon, thunder is rolling off in the distance, and your Antilles blogger is hunched at his desk, trying to clear through miscellaneous CRB paperwork, as we prepare to wrap up the current issue of the magazine and begin publication of the next. Les Loups Noirs are keeping me company. The Haitian “mini-djaz” ensemble, specialising in a blend of traditional compas with jazz and rock-and-roll influences, were wildly popular across the French Caribbean in the 1970s. “Jet Biguine” gives you an idea why. The track was included in Tumbélé: Biguine, Afro & Latin sounds from the French Caribbean, 1963–74, recently released by Soundway Records (here’s a review by Joe Tangari).

And here’s another Loups Noirs track, “Cap Haïtien”, which starts wistfully then becomes a cool little dance number:

• DaWire (@DaWireTweets) on the 2010 San Juan Feria de Arte Sonoro (Sound Art Fair): http://bit.ly/diKGrf

• RT @georgiap: Mapping Haiti’s patrimony: the Mapping Haitian History Project: http://bit.ly/cB4Qmh

• NPR on a new biography of Julio Lobo, “Sugar King of Havana” (link via Repeating Islands): http://n.pr/bAgxxe

• James Bridle: do books still need covers?: http://bit.ly/djFSyH

• Jim Hanas: get rid of the slush pile: http://bit.ly/dbqmQG

• Christopher Higgs: Some Thoughts on Book Reviews: if a book gets no critical attention, is it even a book?: http://bit.ly/dyGmyv

• Pauline Melville at FLIP, the Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty [in Potuguese]: http://bit.ly/ax647Y

Government Cut, Miami. Photograph by Emilio Labrador, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

What is the Caribbean? is not an unanswerable question. But there isn’t — will never be — a single, definitive answer that can encompass the complications of the geographic region named for the Caribs of half a millennium ago, its history and its culture. So our writers, artists, and thinkers keep asking: keep collecting and analysing evidence, outlining and testing theories, devising and deploying a language of criticism and imagination.

One of these thinkers — a man who was not born in the Caribbean, but who has spent six decades working in and on this region — is the eminent anthropologist Sidney Mintz, best known for his book Sweetness and Power (1985), which “describ[es] the economic, historical, and nutritional role of sugar in transforming European peasant societies into a proletariat, and fuelling the Industrial Revolution.” That summary is by Nicolette Bethel, who this week reviews Mintz’s latest book, Three Ancient Colonies, in the CRB.

Based on a series of lectures delivered at Harvard in 2003, Three Ancient Colonies presents case studies of Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico derived from Mintz’s long-term fieldwork. “Using anthropology’s methods of teasing out universals from variations in human social structure and culture,” Bethel writes, “he lays out a template for thinking about the Caribbean in general” and offers a revisioning of the concept of creolisation, the complex centuries-long socio-cultural process by which the various peoples who would eventually become “Caribbean” adapted to this crucial corner of the New World.

. . . understanding this process may illuminate our consideration of all the anomalous societies of the region, whether they be the seafaring, commerce-centred archipelagos on the periphery of the Caribbean proper (Bermuda, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos, the Cayman Islands) or the less slavery-centric Hispanic societies.

If places like the Bahamas and the Caymans are atypical of but at the same time integral to the Caribbean experience, what about a place like Miami? Near the tip of a peninsula thrusting south towards the Caribbean, Miami is closer to Nassau and Havana than it is to Tallahassee, the Florida state capital. Tens of thousands of its citizens are Caribbean-born or -descended, with roots in Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad — the whole archipelago. In “Sweet grouper throats”, an essay-cum-poem also published this week in the CRB, Mark Dow gives us oblique glimpses of contemporary Miami as a city whose bloodlines are at least partly Caribbean:

In the alley between Euclid and Meridian, connecting 14th Street to 14th Place, I ran into my neighbour’s cousin who had made the trip from Havana on an inner tube and would be driving my old blue Cavalier wagon when the Miami Police confiscated it because he was soliciting a prostitute in it, allegedly. We were shirtless and talked about baseball. When he was a boy in Cuba, he said, without a real ball, he and his friends would put two bottle caps back-to-back and wind tape around and around them. When eventually he played with a regulation-size ball, it seemed gigantic and was easy to make contact with. His cousin came over. Yeah, we used to play with a cork. It would dip and curve all over the place, so when we played with a regular, round ball that travelled straight, it was so easy to hit.

Dany Laferrière

Still life bathed in warm light: a porcelain bathtub with claw feet, sumptuous white towels draped over the edge, a table set with a stack of books and a glass of red wine. A Monday night in May, and 400 people fill the darkness of Montreal’s Place des Arts’ Cinquième Salle, waiting for Dany Laferrière. He seems to glide onstage, slim, tall, impeccably dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt open at the neck — a gentleman writer or, as the French are saying, un grand écrivain.

Instant applause. They know him well, maybe too well. How as a penniless refugee from Haiti, he chucked his menial job to write a novel about a penniless Haitian refugee writing a novel about himself. A mythical summer in a sweltering apartment on rue St-Denis, drinking, womanizing, reading, writing about the meaning of it all, sure it would lift him out of poverty and obscurity.

— Marianne Ackerman profiles the Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière in the September issue of The Walrus. A new edition of his How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired appeared a few months ago; the English translation of his latest novel, I Am a Japanese Writer, will be published later this year:

Badgered by his publisher for a new book, a writer (who lives in a tiny room on rue St-Denis) is blocked, and to stall him blurts out a provocative title: Je suis un écrivain japonais. Since he’s black, some people don’t believe him; others are furious. During the months that follow, while he seduces Japanese women, reads Basho, and hangs out in cafés, rumours of the book’s existence create a literary storm.

Your Antilles blogger is spending the long Emancipation weekend at his desk, slogging away at CRB correspondence and copyediting, and kept company by the wistful, sometimes eerie melodies of the Haitian composer and musician Frantz Casséus. Specifically, I’m listening to the Haitiana album he made with the soprano Barbara Perlow, originally released in 1969 and now available from Smithsonian Folkways.

I can’t find any of the tracks from Haitiana on YouTube, so instead here is Casséus playing the “Lullaby” from Haitian Dances, recorded in 1954.

There’s a lovely memoir of Casséus by his protégé Marc Ribot in the Winter 2003 issue of BOMB. As a lagniappe, here is Harry Belafonte’s celebrated 1956 recording of Casséus’s song “Mèci Bon Dié”: