Eric Roach. Photograph courtesy Laurence Breiner

Today’s Stabroek News includes an essay by Al Creighton on the Tobagonian poet Eric Roach, one of Caribbean literature’s great tragic figures.

Born in Tobago in 1915, educated at a grammar school in Scarborough, Roach began publishing his poems in the late 1930s in local newspapers. Over the next forty years he created an important body of work, both poems and plays, and in the 1950s developed a regional audience via literary journals like Bim and Kyk-Over-Al and the BBC Caribbean Voices programme. But, as the scholar Laurence Breiner writes,

Some fear of going unnoticed haunted Roach throughout his career. He often seemed to be caught in the wrong time or the wrong place. In the 1950s, his most productive decade, he watched talented contemporaries turn away from writing poetry, or emigrate, or both: chief among them George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Cecil Herbert, and H.A. Telemaque. Committed to the Caribbean, and sure (in those days) of his talent, he worried whether poetry could survive in the Caribbean climate (social as much as meteorological).

In 1962 Roach stopped writing poems for eight years, and though his work was now included in a number of international anthologies, he appears to have struggled with a sense of futility and despair. In 1965, Roach wrote this biographical note for the British anthology Verse and Voice:

He has been a soldier, teacher, civil servant and failed writer. Born nearly fifty years ago in the tiny, little known island of Tobago where his family are peasants, Roach hoped to become a poet, but his talent for verse did not develop beyond his native dooryard, and after a few years he abandoned the writing of verse.

In 1974, in an act better remembered than any of his poems (the final irony), Roach drowned himself at Quinam Bay.

Two decades later, Roach’s collected poems were finally published, and in 2008 Breiner’s book Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry offered a sustained critical assessment of his oeuvre. The November 2006 CRB included an essay by Breiner, “Laureate of nowhere”, drawing on his research for Black Yeats, and considering the reasons for Roach’s “low visibility” among Caribbean writers:

Roach at heart always remained a man of the dooryard and the village, but as a poet he had global instincts, a hunger to be widely heard and heeded. He saw the Federation as presenting him with a resolution for the dilemma of his generation, in the form of an opportunity to vastly expand the “horizon” of his audience while staying at home on the “private hillock” of his island, rather than emigrating. If the Federation had succeeded, he would have been its national poet, with a bronze statue on the grounds of the now-vanished capital. But it failed, and Roach was suddenly the laureate of nowhere.

In our August 2008 issue, Vahni Capildeo gave a contemporary Caribbean poet’s assessment of Roach’s career, in her review of Black Yeats. Roach’s poems and his life story — the example of his dedication and his despair — continue to haunt some younger Trinidadian writers. Jennifer Rahim’s recent book Approaching Sabbaths — reviewed by Ian Dieffenthaller in the May 2010 CRB — includes a sequence of poems titled “A Return to Quinam Bay”. Rahim re-traces Roach’s final journey and meditates on the intersection of literature and history, truth and ambition:

Quinam is a bay west of the first lies
of discovery. Three hills that never were,
people never seen. There a poet swam

to sea to reverse history. My version:
invention was his one hope all along,
but its light dulled to night in him.

I write now to make all our stories go on.

Installation view of Karyn Olivier’s ACA Foods Free Library. Photograph courtesy the artist

The latest issue of the CRB — dated July 2010 — began publication yesterday (and will continue for the next six weeks, with new reviews and other pieces appearing every week). We kick things off with three reviews.

First, Ian Dieffenthaller tackles Anson Gonzalez’s Artefacts of Presence: Collected Poems, casting an eye over the Trinidadian poet’s forty-year career and oeuvre. Apart from his poems — “very much part of the canon,” Dieffenthaller argues — Gonzalez was the founder and editor of the influential journal New Voices, published intermittently over two decades, and he has been a key colleague and mentor for two generations of Trinidadian writers.

Next, two reviews of recent fiction. Andre Bagoo, a political reporter and analyst for the Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, brings his journalist’s insight to his review of Monique Roffey’s novel The White Woman on the Green Bicycle. Roffey’s book, recently shortlisted for the Orange Prize, turns on the tantalising notion of a fictional affair between Trinidad and Tobago’s first prime minister, Eric Williams, and the female half of an expatriate couple who settle in Port of Spain in the 1950s. Meanwhile, Nadia Ellis takes a look at How to Escape from a Leper Colony, a collection of short fiction and the first book by the young writer Tiphanie Yanique of the US Virgin Islands. Ellis’s review suggests Yanique is a talent we should expect much from in the future.

And this week the CRB also publishes a portfolio of images from ACA Foods Free Library, a public art project by Karyn Olivier (part of the recent Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art programme at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut). Olivier, hoping to “create a social environment of shared activity,” set up a free lending library of Caribbean books in a West Indian supermarket in Hartford. The portfolio documents the project and is accompanied by an interview with the artist. “My hope was for this library to expand what we imagine the ‘consumables’ of a market to be,” she says.

Particularly when that market inadvertently traffics in nostalgia for home. I was thinking it could be a place where we could really slow down, browse, and relish the sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and, yes, the imperishable produce of our West Indian heritage. I really liked the idea of borrowers returning the books when they were finished “digesting them.”