Barbara Jenkins. Photograph by Arnaldo James, courtesy Caribbean Beat

Two days ago, the CRB published “Flood”, a new piece of fiction by Trinidadian writer Barbara Jenkins, excerpted from her novel-in-progress De Rightest Place. Jenkins, past winner of the Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize (among other awards), published her debut short story collection Sic Transit Wagon in 2013. CRB deputy editor Shivanee Ramlochan engaged her in a short email interview about her current writing, the impact of the Hollick Arvon Prize, and how everyday concerns filter into her fiction.

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Shivanee Ramlochan: This excerpt from De Rightest Place whets the appetite, much as the characters it highlights find themselves drawn towards certain kinds of hunger. How far towards the novel’s completion are you, and are you enjoying the process of building this world?

Barbara Jenkins: The first part of your question is difficult. It’s a novel experience for me to be growing a novel, and I’m doing so guided by raw instinct. I feel I ought to be drawing it to a close soon: things have come to a head, and while not falling apart are certainly showing signs of fracture and reorientation — some things have become dominant in unexpected ways, others seem a little underdeveloped. So, to return to your question, how far am I? Well, maybe near to finding a resolution of sorts, but then I need to go back to what’s already there and do some massive reworking — pruning and thinning and chopping down and weeding and maybe even sowing some new select seeds in strategic locations. And am I enjoying building this world? You bet I am. I get lost in the place, the people, their motives, their sayings and doings. It’s a parallel world to escape to.

SR: The Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize, which you won in 2013, offered significant boons towards the completion of a novel, including a literary mentor and a spot on a prestigious Arvon writing course. How would you say the prize has helped De Rightest Place come into its own space?

BJ: Without a doubt, I owe where I am with this novel to the Bocas Lit Fest and the Hollick Arvon Prize. I left it to Arvon to find me a mentor, and they got me Bernardine Evaristo. What a mentor! What a writer! Our book club was reading her Mr Loverman at the time, and I thought that her style, her touch were just so much what I felt about what I was writing and what I would like to see in my novel.

It was a “marriage made in Arvon” and consummated over a period of a year through email. I’d send Bernardine work by a deadline of her choosing; she’d reply with reflections, questions, suggestions; and I’d answer — a real conversation that helped me refine what I was doing. Really basic stuff like plot outline, character map, stuff I hadn’t thought about, that made my focus sharper, my thinking clearer. It was brilliant. Totally new to me. And so necessary. That mentorship, which ended in June 2014, got me to where I am now, and I’ve hardly moved on — eyesight issues now resolved and other “life matters” always ongoing, but she left me in a place where I know where I’m going and I’ve just got to do the one-foot-in-front-the-other thing to get there.

SR: It’s no secret that, as far as Trinidadian letters are concerned, you’re the veritable doyenne of the short story form. What has the transition been like, from crafting short stories to working on a full-length novel?

BJ: It won’t be false modesty to deny the label “doyenne” — I’m learning and learning still. I’ve learned a lot lately from reading other Trinidadian short story collections — notably Rhoda Bharath’s The Ten Days Executive and Sharon Millar’s The Whale House. I was recently the inaugural British Council International Writer in Residence at the Small Wonder Short Story Festival at Charleston House in Sussex, and there I was exposed to dozens of short story writers and hundreds of short stories — and what all of that showed is how new, how raw, how unformed my craft still is. I would love to write lots more short stories and better ones.

A novel is entirely different. It’s not just size and scale. With a short story, you take one thread and examine it minutely and deal with the essence of it. With a novel, it’s holding dozens of threads of different colours and weights and textures to weave a tapestry whose design must change and morph and unfold over a period of time, while having some sort of cohesive weft and warp to hold it together.

SR: Is De Rightest Place being primarily written in Trinidad? If so, what are the benefits or effects of working on a creative fiction manuscript, while being ensconced in local space?

BJ: Oh yes. De Rightest Place is set right here. There are a couple of flashbacks to other locations, but here IS De Rightest Place. I like being embedded here — the immediacy of sensation — heat, light, rain, mosquitoes, noise, police sirens, birdsong, plants, wind, bamboo creaking, human voices influence how you feel, are feeling, noticing, as you’re writing. I don’t use air-conditioning in my writing space. I want to be in touch through all my senses with here, with now. It could be that I lack imagination and must feel to know, but that’s OK with me. I’m a grounded, practical sort of person, I think.

SR: Political furor, environmental scandal, human rights violations: so much goes awry with the world, on both a regional and international scale, while a writer works on shaping her very specific acreage in print. To what extent do you think external events filter into the day-to-day, page-by-page production of the novel? Is there a chance that, on some miniature level, almost everything gets written in?

BJ: For sure. The stuff of life, of human relations, of people’s priorities, of their desires — what else is there to tap into? How people behave in specific circumstances of ease or challenge, what people value, these vary from country to country. While they are not fixed, the priorities, the values, I mean, they do say something about a place at a moment in time. And capturing that in one’s characters and situations gives authenticity to the story that you’re telling. To write about the 1990s in T&T, for example, and not have the long shadow of the attempted coup and its aftermath cast over a character’s approach to life, is to write fantasy — which is OK if your character lives in a bubble or a cocoon, but even then the character would meet people whose values and philosophy have been affected.

We have a national amnesia about that traumatic event that I didn’t understand until I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant, where in a mythical post-Arthurian Britain a spell was cast that brought a mist of forgetfulness over the people, so that they could live in a false peace, forgetting wrongs lest the attempts at righting them brought discord. I think we have a collective amnesia about the hundreds of years of enslavement of African people, and about lots of other things. It may bring peace, but the aftereffects are there, shaping who we are and how we relate to one another. Guilt, shame, there as undercurrents in our relations. Claiming what’s around us, examining them, understanding them, seeking truth, not “moving on,” that’s how to avoid repeating mistakes, human errors, of the past. I feel that any writer here, now, cannot help but hold a mirror to us as we are, and seek through storytelling to find buried truths about how we came to be as we are — and perhaps tell or hint of a way to make us better.

douen, duende, douaine, done, dwen, duegne n A folklore character, the spirit of a child who died before baptism. Douens wear large hats, have backward-pointing feet, utter a soft hooting cry, and often lead children to wander off.

— Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad and Tobago, ed. Lise Winer

Announced (by no coincidence) on 31 October, All Hallows’ Eve, Douen Islands is a collaborative project by writer Andre Bagoo (author of the poetry collection Trick Vessels), graphic designer Kriston Chen, artists Rodell Warner and Brianna McCarthy, and musician Sharda Patasar. Its first manifestation is an e-book (downloadable here) of eleven poems by Bagoo, designed by Chen, and incorporating a series of brief texts by Warner (drawn from his Twitter account). Accompanying the e-book is Chen’s video adaptation of Bagoo’s poem “In Forest and Wild Skies”. Further online publications, videos, and live performances involving all five collaborators are in the works.

For many Trinidadians, douens — like other folklore characters — belong to another era. More amusing than sinister, they suggest a pre-electric time, rural life, tales to frighten children. But traditional folklore has also proved a rich resource for contemporary artists and writers. In the 1970s, artist Leroy Clarke produced a massive cycle of paintings, drawings, and poems called Douens, portraying a post-Independence society of “giddy and lost people.” A decade later, Peter Minshall’s 1988 mas band Jumbie released hordes of blank-faced spirits in the streets of Port of Spain, their empty, staring eyes suggesting a marauding hollowness all too apt in a time of political cynicism. More recently, poets James Christopher Aboud (Lagahoo Poems) and Fawzia Kane (Tantie Diablesse) and Trinidadian-Canadian novelist David Chariandy (Soucouyant) have re-imagined other supernatural folklore characters as metaphors for personal and cultural loss, the displacements of history, and the uneasiness of self-definition.

Douen Islands, whose creators describe the project as “a devious remixing of traditional Douen culture,” suggests that the old folklore stories and images remain relevant in the wired age — still offering insights into personal and collective fears. Though the poems’ voice is introspective and many of the references idiosyncratic, numerous co-options of nationalist rhetoric — such as Trinidad and Tobago’s national motto and “watchwords” — and the e-book’s (blood-)red-white-black colour scheme unsubtly indicate an allegorical intent. A prefatory note reads:

(a) Remove the straw hats. (b) Invite them inside. (c) Straighten their feet.

Invited in from the wilderness and dark, with supernatural deformities erased, the douen looks more and more like any Trinidadian of the post-Independence generation: mischievous but bewildered, uncertain of his social birthright, possibly hapless, possibly not helpless.

Soon after Douen Islands made its online debut, I asked its lead collaborators, Andre Bagoo and Kriston Chen, some questions about the project via email.

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Nicholas Laughlin: Andre, which came first, the poems or the collaborative? Had you written the pieces before you started working with your colleagues, or did they emerge from the collaboration itself?

Andre Bagoo: I entered the collaboration with a loose idea of something I wanted to express. But it was during the collaboration that the ideas crystallised and words and forms came. I had been drawn to myths surrounding the undead, such as the zombie, which has clear roots in the Caribbean. I entered the collaboration wanting to write a curse poem in the manner of Ovid’s Ibis, aimed at Trinidad and Tobago and modelled after the 1968 film The Night of the Living Dead. Then Kriston specifically raised the figure of the douen one day over coffee. From that moment came Douen Islands. The poems flowed and flowed.

NL: How exactly did this group of creative collaborators form — who or what was the catalyst?

AB: Kriston reached out to me on Tumblr after he was assigned to do a layout for my poem “The Tourist” in [the art and design e-magazine] Draconian Switch. I was struck by the rigour of his practice as a graphic designer, as well as his appreciation of — and obvious talent for — language. We met, and he asked if there was anything else I had on which we could collaborate. I suggested a zine/e-book.

That was in March [2013]. Thereafter, we had several meetings and excursions over which we began formulating. It soon became clear that we also had our sights on including an element of performance in the project down the line, and wanted even more people involved. I reached out to sitarist Sharda Patasar, whom I had never met before. We reached out to Brianna McCarthy and to Rodell Warner, both of whom we already knew. We have more in store.

Kriston Chen: “The Tourist”, if I may interject, is a brilliant poem — heavy and light at the same time. Apparently there’s thirty more pages out there somewhere. I hope to revisit it at some point. My favourite line:

Silence: the wind is not certain.
What to make of this now?

I’m a fan of Andre’s work first. As a graphic designer, it begins with words. I put great faith in good writers. Andre mentions Sharda, Brianna, and Rodell as collaborators — they’re also good writers, in their own ways. There’s an attraction to that, and of course a good concept will go a long way.

NL: Does the idea of a group of collaborators change the way you work?

AB: You could say the process of writing is not changed by collaboration. The writer must still sit down in isolation and let the words come, or find the words and forms, invoking their own processes. This is really a personal exercise which, I imagine, differs from writer to writer.

However, it is clear to me that things done during the collaboration — comments over coffee, shared outings to see films, plays, concerts, and art shows, trips to scenic trails — all begin to inform, inspire, and move the writing. If we include the process of formulating ideas and being inspired within the process of writing, then perhaps a collaboration creates a greater wealth of discourse from which to draw at the moment when the words need to materialise.

In this way, each collaboration changes the way I write, because it changes me. W.H. Auden said of collaboration, “you can only do it with people whose basic ideas you share — each can then sort of excite the other. When a collaboration works, the two people concerned become a third person, who is different from either of them in isolation.”

KC: Well said. The same applies, I think, to designers. I saw an interview recently with the musician Sting, where he describes collaboration as “surrounding yourself with confidence.” When it comes to writing, Andre is prolific and brilliant. I don’t know if he sleeps, but I do know that the words always show up. The biggest question or concern is usually, “Where do we meet for coffee?” The unspoken confidence with those you collaborate with creates possibilities and moves the work along.

NL: Traditional folklore always draws on collective anxieties, hopes, questions of being. What can the figure of the douen, the spirit as lost child, say about (or say to) contemporary Trinidad and Tobago?

AB: Like most folklore and myth, the douen figure is at once simple yet complex. The douen is the undead: the child who dies after never being baptised and who haunts the forest thereafter. It has no face, its feet are backwards, so that hunters following its tracks go in the wrong direction. The nature of the douen alone transmits complexity: it engages questions of religion, of mortality and age, of physical deformity or difference. This makes it an ideal mirror for contemporary Trinidad and Tobago.

The douen tells us about the marginalised and the abandoned, and this is the area where I wanted to give voice to something. The douen is a nightmare figure of youth, and the story of a new generation has to be told, even if that story, in some respects, is an old one. Douen Islands is about growing up in a world while coming to terms with injustice in all its forms: violence and crime, racism, homophobia, religious bigotry, classism, stigmatisation. It is about moving from a place of blind rage to a place approaching knowledge.

The douen is both anodyne yet powerful — it embodies a subversive power relationship that is the key to so much. It is at first seen as monster but then made hero through love, and the real Bogey-man is left at large. I found using the folklore in this manner to be irresistible, because of how we, as Trinidadians, immediately recognise it, but also because of how it telegraphs and taps into wider collective anxieties, as you say, such as the fact that each of us is destined to die.

KC: During the course of the project, Andre had sent me an essay about folklore by Gerard Besson. It’s a great read. The douen is revealed as a vehicle for disciplining the parent, and not the child.

Duenn did not haunt children, “No, not at all, the Duenn is haunt the parent.”

“How you mean?”

“Well, she didn’t have time for the boy. She too busy wid she business. Then the night come, she ent see the boy, she gone outside, she calling calling, she standing up in the road under the street lamp, alone, everyone inside, she calling him, ‘Robie, Robie!’ She going mad with fear. The boy loose, he dead, the Duenn take him, somewhere. ‘Robie,’ she bawl, running inside, ‘Robie!’ She crying now, she can hardly breathe. ‘Robie! What you doing there? You eh hear me calling you, come here!’ She was so glad to see him that she cut his tail good.”

This intrigues me — the idea of well-behaved adults. “She was so glad to see him that she cut his tail good”: what a sentence. Lots of tension and vulnerability here. Why hasn’t the narrative around the douen reached further? Why are we still at straw hats and backwards feet?

NL: Do the poems draw on any particular literary inspirations or models, other than Ovid?

AB: They draw from a diverse range of materials. There are references to the love duet in Act II of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, John Donne’s “La Corona”, and Hamlet. There are also references to Anand Gandhi’s film Ship of Theseus and to Grizzly Bear’s pop single “Yet Again”. Several aesthetic forces were also operating in the background as I wrote, particularly Neval Chatelal’s rendition of “O Re Piya” from the Bollywood film Aaja Nachle, Bunji Garlin’s “Carnival Tabanca”, and the sitar music of Sharda Patasar. And I’ve also stolen from Trinidad and Tobago’s national anthem, the national watchwords, as well as common sayings in Trinidad and Tobago dialogue, which, when rendered in this context, hopefully take on new meanings.

NL: What about Leroy Clarke’s Douens?

AB: We did not have these in mind. Another collection of poems, however, was operating in the background: Lagahoo Poems, by James Aboud.

NL: Why publish the project as an e-book? How important is the online aspect?

AB: Perhaps because of the realities of the markets, we do not have many indigenous poetry book publishers. Most Caribbean writers are published by foreign publishers, which is not itself a bad thing, and which certainly has its place in relation to the important process of reaching an international audience. But I wonder if the Internet, while often seen to be in animus with publishing, is not also an opportunity for post-colonial countries like ours, to publish our own stories in our own ways, using cyberspace’s breath of tools and its reach.

I wanted to use the internet as a forum for sharing this particular work. I wanted to do something compelling online, in a way that we might not expect, given the subject matter, or given our idea of Caribbean poetry.

NL: Kriston, how did you approach the design elements of the project?

KC: Many of the design decisions for the e-book are in keeping with those of a traditional poetry book. The poems themselves are set in a serif typeface, called Requiem, ideal for reading but also a remnant of a long history of literature as both colonial and a printed medium — lettering from the Renaissance period is the basis of these particular letterforms.

I took a few liberties, however, to push this e-book into the twenty-first century. The use of illustration (found images, photographs, typography, etc) is dangerous ground, but used heavily. It imposes imagery into the reader’s mind. And like a film adaptation that tends to be not as good as the book itself, [images] can kill it for the poet’s readers. Designers-as-authors was another break in tradition. It went way beyond the covers and interiors: from conceptualisation to editing to copywriting. This, I think, helped create an e-book that feels consistent and complete.

As for the video, again the onus was to keep it literary — not let the images get in the way of the text. This was achieved through the use of fewer, simpler, but more powerful elements: captions, sound, moon, and vintage footage (from Carnival 1932). The viewer completes the piece by engaging with all elements, but primarily the text or captions.

In terms of references, much of my aesthetic and type treatment is influenced by contemporary designers such as Peter Mendelsund, John Gall, Jason Booher, Meg Wilson — much of the Knopf/Vintage book cover department. Several spreads reference John Gall’s beautiful and clever Nabokov series (published by Vintage in the US). There’s also reference to artist Barbara Kruger’s propaganda messages. The video contains references to Jean-Luc Godard’s film Une Femme est une femme (1961), and a more contemporary version, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009).

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“We hope to attract even more collaborators,” Bagoo writes. You can get in touch with the collaborative at douenislands@gmail.com.

Founded in 1997 in Jamaica, currently based in New York, Small Axe is one of the Caribbean’s leading intellectual journals, devoted to “fashioning a criticism that works through our intellectual tradition.” Or, as editor-in-chief David Scott put it in a November 2008 CRB interview:

concerned with intervening in debates about the Caribbean in such a way as to be critical of the conventional paradigms in relation to which, or through which, the Caribbean was conceived, argued about, engaged —
to try to open up conceptual intellectual space for revisioning the Caribbean . . .

The Small Axe Project — driven by a collective of scholars and thinkers — now includes several web-based initiatives that complement the work of the print journal. The most recent of these is sx salon, a bimonthly online platform “for the convergence of expressions and discussions of the literary,” edited by Small Axe managing editor Kelly Baker Josephs (a literary scholar with roots in Jamaica, and regular CRB contributor) and writer-scholar Andrea Shaw. Launched in October 2010, sx salon publishes book reviews, interviews, discussions of literary and cultural topics, and new fiction and poems.

I recently asked Kelly a few questions about sx salon via email; even before she sent her replies, she returned the favour by interviewing me for a special discussion section on “Caribbean arts and culture online,” published in the February 2011 sx salon . You can read my answers to her questions here, and Kelly’s answers to my questions below.

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Nicholas Laughlin: Where and how does sx salon fit into the larger Small Axe Project — the Small Axe ecosystem, as it were?

Kelly Baker Josephs: sx salon is part of our decision to focus some of our energies on literary production. In the overall Small Axe Project, it’s one of two online platforms — the other being sx space, which focuses on visual art — and it houses another recent literary venture, the Small Axe Literary Competition. So, to sort of chart out the ecosystem a bit: there’s the journal Small Axe, which, with fourteen years of publishing, is the oldest and most visible component of the Small Axe Project; sx space, which has been up for close to four years, and is managed by Christopher Cozier; the literary competition, now in its third year; and the seedling, sx salon: a small axe literary platform.

NL: Between sx salon and the annual literary competition, it seems that Small Axe is paying new and closer attention to Caribbean literature. Why this shift, and what other fresh directions might the collective be moving in?

KBJ: Well, I’m not sure I’d say “new,” since the Small Axe Project has a long-standing reputation for supporting creative and critical work in Caribbean literature. But “closer,” yes, we are paying more particular attention to literary arts with these two projects.

The Small Axe Literary Competition was David Scott’s brainchild. He noted that there weren’t any similar literary prize competitions, and wanted to establish some form of institutional support for emerging Caribbean writers. The existing competitions were (and to some extent still are) either too international, eclipsing the Caribbean; or nationally based, like the Guyana Prize; or closed to new and as-yet-unpublished writers. Although it’s still in its early years, the competition has received so much positive support from writers and the Caribbean community at large that it seems it does fill a long-neglected need. (By the way, the deadline for this year has been extended to May 31. Interested writers can find information here.)

sx salon sprang in part out of that positive response to the literary competition, in part out of our concern when CRB paused publishing [between May 2009 and May 2010] and, more generally, out of our desire to provide a vital resource and virtual gateway for students and scholars of Caribbean literature. We’re in the embryonic stages of this yet, but growing towards it. I’m particularly excited about the newly expanded discussion section, which moves the project closer to its given designation as a salon.

Two other new projects concern the visual arts. We recently received a three-year grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to commission original artwork and scholarly essays for a project called “The Visual Life of Catastrophic History”. The project statement will be in the March 2011 issue of Small Axe. Also in that issue is the first folio of photographic work in a yearlong collaboration between the Small Axe Project and the London-based Autograph ABP.

Along with the ongoing work of the print journal, the Small Axe Project has quite a few new irons in the fire, but those above are the ones that are top of mind for me right now.

NL: Where and how do you think sx salon will fit into the broad and growing network of online resources (journals, blogs, archives) for Caribbean literature? And which of these other resources do you pay closest attention to?

KBJ: I’ll answer the easier question first: The Caribbean Review of Books, of course! I like to check out a few blogs that I think of as literary, even though they often cover culture more generally — Geoffrey Philp, Signifyin’ Woman, PLEASURE, Caribbean Book Blog — but I am not as regular with those as I would like to be. I have gotten into the (perhaps bad) habit of relying on my Twitter stream to remind me to check. I also regularly “go by” Repeating Islands, Latineos, and Active Voice because, at this point, how else would I know anything? Lately I have been following Tobias Buckell’s blog, because I am working up to an interview with him, and it’s been interesting to approach the Caribbean science fiction/fantasy world from this angle.

Now, as to how sx salon will fit into this particular ecosystem . . . I think one of the best responses I got when I was announcing the launch of the salon was at an event in New York last spring. Geoffrey Philp happened to be in the audience, and he got up and made a short speech about the importance of the new venture as institutional support for Caribbean literary arts. I hadn’t formed the idea in my head quite that way, but now I always think of it when I try to situate sx salon in the online network you reference. It is, like the print journal, based in academia, and bound to be heavily influenced by that. Our content is not exclusive, or even “gated,” but it will have an academic “flavour” because both myself and Andrea Shaw (who primarily manages the creative end of sx salon) are based in academia and approach the project from this background.

NL: A question I got asked just the other day, and found hard to answer: from your particular vantage point, how would you describe the current state of Caribbean literature?

KBJ: By the time this is published I am sure I will regret my answer, and wish I had been more informed and clairvoyant, but let me give it a shot. Like many people interested in Caribbean Literature, I am excited about the introduction of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and I have been paying close attention to the developments during their first year. I think the introduction of this prize, and the more regional Guyana Prize and the Small Axe Literary Competition, evidences a desire to own the means of valuing and rewarding Caribbean cultural production.

Of course, these prizes raise the inevitable question of how to define “Caribbean” when discussing cultural production. For example, the OCM Bocas Prize requires that the writer be born in the Caribbean or hold Caribbean citizenship. While I think I can guess at the impetus for such a rule, I don’t think the question is that easily answered. That excludes a large portion of writers that I think make significant contributions to the shape of our literature.

I’m not sure I’m answering your question, but I would say that this tension, this question of place, of citizenship, of (yes, the word is necessary) diaspora, is growing increasingly urgent. I don’t have any answers to this question, I’m still working on the right words to even phrase it, but I do know that it is a new question (different, say, to that of “exiled” writers), and I would venture to say that it most defines the current state of Caribbean literature.

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Read Kelly Baker Josephs’s most recent contribution to the CRB: a review of You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James, ed. David Austin, from our July 2010 issue.

Cover of the first issue of ARC; image courtesy the publishers

Creative work can’t thrive in isolation. Every artist, writer, musician, performer, or filmmaker needs contact with creative peers, a creative tradition, and an attentive audience, but also access to a critical space, a forum for sharing and discussing ideas. To put it more simply, an artist needs not only working time and the tools of her craft, but venues in which her work can be encountered, documented, and evaluated: galleries and museums, catalogues and magazines. For Caribbean visual artists, the latter are in short supply. In the Anglophone Caribbean particularly, visual art publications produced to international standards are rare.

ARC is a bold and brave intervention into this circumstance. Published by two young artists from St Vincent and the Grenadines, ARC defines itself as “a Caribbean art and culture magazine dedicated to highlighting emerging and established artists.” Holly Bynoe, ARC’s editor in chief, and Nadia Huggins, the magazine’s creative director, both work in the medium of photography. ARC is an ambitious extension of their creative practice, and a decisive engagement with the work of their contemporaries in the Caribbean and its diasporas.

The magazine’s website went live this week, and the first quarterly print edition of ARC will be launched later this month (find out how you can get a copy here). It features work by the Jamaican photographer Radcliffe Roye, the British filmmaker (with St Lucian roots) Isaac Julien, and the young Barbadian Sheena Rose, among other artists. Via email, Bynoe and Huggins answered a few questions about the project’s inspiration and intent.

Nicholas Laughlin: ARC is an acronym (“Art. Recognition. Culture”), but it also suggests, among other things, the geographical arc of the Antilles and the sense of a creative trajectory. What else?

Holly Bynoe: ARC, to me, informs and starts to discuss a projected motion — up, out, and beyond — into a space and a place of curiosity, where some things are defined and structured, and others are akin to the human condition — i.e., existing in an unsure and ambiguous space. ARC attempts to record and take stock of the individual processes that allow for creativity.

It is a play off the archipelago; one of the first shapes embedded in our collective unconscious, and the shape of the “first recorded boat” and the last boat my father worked on. In many ways, the word and its shift are deeply personal and related to my history. I think it is funny that the two mirror each other, especially when we consider the waters, boundaries, and motions of people across the region, and the way we have come to know each other through our similar experiences informed by this movement — their geographic dispersal and how this shape in many ways references a starting point, but never a final destination. And the lack of a destination or a defined position when considering a container or a contained space for art brings up wild ideas about form, structure, directions, and narratives.

Nadia Huggins: I really wanted a name that could roll off the tongue easily. A word that would be indelible in people’s minds. I’ve had a few people refer to it as “The Ark.” I find this really interesting, given the sort of history we come from. I love the way people make their own connections with the word: Arc, Arch, Ark, Art. The play on the archipelago is a really important aspect — I feel as though we are running a common thread through all of the islands and pulling each other closer.

From a visual standpoint, I wanted the name to have impact. The first element to a successful masthead is your name. Once the name functions in speech, it can then be translated into design and have varying effects. The letters function very symmetrically; there is something about a connection between the letters, each flowing seamlessly into the others, the same way a curve functions. Regarding the acronym, the letter R is the most important, because I wanted to give young artists the opportunity to be recognised for their work. If you dissect the logo, the R has a unique personality to it, whereas the other letters stand at an end. It is about creating that connection.

NL: What was the spark of inspiration or provocation that made you decide to start the magazine, and how does it fit into the continuum of your respective creative practices?

HB: Nadia and I have been discussing the possibility of working on something of ours for a long time. With our backgrounds in photography and our versatile growth over the past three years, it seemed a ripe time to consider it. I turned thirty, finished my MFA, and lost my father in the space of a week. I think when you go through such drastic shifts and change, you come out of it understanding what risks are, and above all what is important. It was time for me to figure out how I was going to fulfill that urge to create and be a part of something that would have a collective and necessary impact on my social space and geography.

I have an intensive photographic background, and I have been thinking about images — their culture, format, composition, history, and their interaction within spaces, be they formal, dictated, or arbitrary — for a good part of seven years, the last three with a strict academic focus. Being involved in a project like ARC forces me to first engage myself with dialogues and mediums that begin as being peripheral, only to realise that we all share a common “language” and code when we create. I have been looking at the work coming out of the region, and I think it can only benefit my personal practice.

I am interested in opening a space and discussion about how contemporary photographic practices are changing in the region. I want to find artists who are involving themselves in a global dialogue while remaining true to the dynamism and context of their lived experience.

NH: Honestly, I was feeling stifled with the commercial work I was creating. I felt as though I didn’t have an outlet to do the things I enjoyed most. I wanted a design project to explore type and images and to pour all of my meticulousness into — hence ARC. I also really love sharing information and ideas with people. I don’t think there is enough exposure given to what is going on around the region. I spend a lot of time on the Internet exploring and exposing myself to as much as possible. It has opened up my mind immensely.

I never had the opportunity to expand my horizons by going to college or travelling, so the Internet has always been my teacher. I think there are a lot of artists out there without this opportunity as well, who aren’t sure where to find the right kind of information to help them grow. Artists want to know what other artists in the region are doing. They want to explore and compare each other’s process and outcome. I wanted to create a central space for them to explore other people’s creations, ideas, and struggles. Exposure is crucial to growth.

Spread from the first issue of ARC, featuring photography by Radcliffe Roye; image courtesy the publishers

NL: What are ARC’s defining characteristics, and how do you imagine it fitting into the wider context of critical attention to visual art in the Caribbean?

HB: I see ARC as a playground, a space for experimentation and the unlikely. Our definition will ring through by the fact that we pay a great deal of attention to our artists and writers, their individual concerns and thoughts about reproduction, structure, and presentation of work. We don’t presume that ARC will fill a space in every artist’s household, but we want it to become a part of the way people come to understand how creativity is no longer a contained or static force. Everything is affected by it, from the way we communicate to the way we expose and represent ourselves to each other; one look at Facebook and you can see the way photography has changed how we understand the world around us. It is now a ubiquitous medium.

I also want ARC to enforce the fact that the artist is no longer a strictly autonomous or insular being. I want to have ARC interact with the culture of individuals and have them come to understand why it is important to start having a discourse set up around supporting and harnessing the potential of art. I don’t see its space as solely critical. While I think it is important to have fully fleshed out studies and explorations, I also think the way we are going to separate ourselves is to treat its presentation like an art piece, keeping in mind the way we all subjectively interpret and come to understand ideas, concepts, and visuals that relate, contradict, or support each other.

We are hoping to engage and enable the current generation of emerging artists who are formulating new ways of presenting themselves. Most of them are unsure about what they are creating and are working with process, spontaneity, and modernity in a visceral and reactive way. There are a lot of risks being taken now, and we want to explore how seasoned artists are in discourse with the emerging creators.

NH: When I first envisioned the magazine, I felt we had to ensure the design was clean, classic, and sleek. What we’ve done with the design isn’t unique, but I think it meets a certain standard in the way art magazines are done. I dislike publications where you feel as though you are being bombarded with information and you are unable to absorb what is necessary. There’s already a circus going on in an artist’s head, why overwhelm them with more clutter? I think there needs to be a rhythm and space to breathe when browsing pages. There is a reason why you go into a gallery and there are white walls — this is so you can focus on the central elements in the space. In our case it’s the text and images. That was one of the most important factors to me, creating and maintaining a particular aesthetic.

Also, I envision ARC as a place to exchange ideas. One of the most important things is to have that interaction; we want people to give feedback on the work that is being presented and share their ideas and frustrations too.

We also want to use the space to educate artists, which is why we are incorporating tutorials and tips on different processes, especially of how to move forward in promoting and cataloguing their work. I think a lot of people underestimate the power of the Internet, and they don’t have a handle on how it works and how it can improve your craft. That is why a lot of places like deviantART and Behance succeed in helping artists — there is a lot of interaction between the artists and their peers. I think this is crucial in moving forward. Artists need constructive criticism and positive feedback to improve. It’s time for us to start supporting each other.

NL: What’s been the most surprising discovery in the process of founding and launching the magazine?

NH: The demand for a publication of this nature is what surprised me the most. People are really excited about the project, because they want to have an uncensored space to see work, and have their work be seen. I get complaints that most of the spaces available to artists are pretentious and cater to only certain types of work. I believe it’s mainly the younger artists who share this sentiment — they feel excluded and they are intimidated by the current system’s set-up. This is why they gravitate to a lot of international spaces. There is that anonymity and that feeling of acceptance and open-mindedness. You have to be producing a certain type of work and moving within a certain circle of artists, you have to learn to speak a certain way.

I understand the importance of presenting yourself as an artist in a certain way, but I don’t think this approach gets through to the younger artists. They are not interested in this way of doing things. They like to think of themselves as rebellious and progressive, and they want a space like that where they can express themselves without feeling judged. There are a lot of stifled young people and artists in the Caribbean; we want to provide a space for them.

I want to help in the process of breaking down these walls in the region. I want our artists to be fearless when approaching us, regardless of the content of their artwork, but still maintain a high standard in the quality of work presented.

HB: I am most surprised by how amorphous ARC is. Even in its becoming, it changes every day. In this very premature stage we are coming to terms with how little we know. The learning curve gets steeper and we push on to create a space for it in order to honour its intention and merit. I think ambition and resources often clash. We have had a lot of support from our various networks and families. Without that, ARC would still be an idea.

The importance of envisioning your dreams can’t be overstated. When we started thinking about the project, it was in a neat container. Now it is free, without a lot of ideological judgments. I am not so naïve as to say we don’t have a purpose or agenda. The more we interact and show people what we are doing, new ideas, thoughts, and information materialise. We are very receptive to voices that we trust and we both have an intuitive sense of where we want this to be a in a couple years.

I am also very shy and self-conscious, and I have realised that through ARC my shame has sort of diminished. Even though it is still hard for me to fill roles that I am unsure of, every day I gain a little confidence. Pace is the trick. ARC is a full-time job for five people. I am still getting used to its dynamic, orders, and language.

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.

I’ve known Lisa Allen-Agostini since we were both undergraduates at UWI-St Augustine — long enough ago that I have to squint and do some mental math to work out the year. The very first time we met, she was introduced to me as a writer. At a stage when most of our peers were still happily clueless about the direction of their lives and careers, Lisa had not only a strong sense of vocation, but a body of published work.

We’ve been friends since then, and over the years I’ve published her writing in pretty much every one of the large and small magazines and journals I’ve worked on, from a very modest photocopied undergrad lit mag called Prometheus to the CRB. (Lisa’s most recent contribution to the latter is her interview with Christian Campbell, published earlier this week.) She is a poet and fiction writer — her young adult novel The Chalice Project appeared two years ago, and she’s working on the sequel. She’s also working on a collection of poems. She co-edited the Trinidad Noir fiction anthology. She’s been a journalist and critic with the daily press here in Trinidad, and used to write a weekly column for the Trinidad Guardian. She’s also raising two very smart and opinionated daughters. In between all this, she’s managed to launch an impressive and inspiring literary project: the Allen Prize for Young Writers.

Named in honour of Lisa’s father, the Allen Prize is an annual competition for young writers, aged twelve to nineteen, resident in Trinidad and Tobago. There are two age categories, and awards in four genres: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and drama. The Allen Prize programme also includes a series of free seminars for teenage writers, in which established authors from across the Caribbean share insights on literary craft and discipline and the business of publishing. Each year’s winners get a modest cash prize, publication of their work, and the chance to participate in a two-day workshop in which they will benefit from individual attention and instruction. The prize is incorporated as a non-profit organisation.

It’s an ambitious endeavour, aimed at making a crucial intervention in Trinidad and Tobago’s literary scene and education system. As Lisa has written:

The role of the writer can be transformative for his people. Our best writers show us facets of our everyday lives under a new, shimmering light: Walcott giving angry voice to the multi-racial Caribbean man Shabine in “The Schooner Flight”, or the gleaming prose of V.S. Naipaul describing bumbling Biswas trying to make his way in the world.

Through the voice of the writer we are glorified, abashed, chastised, elucidated. There is no one thing a writer does, or should do. It is not a prescriptive position, but rather a flexible, human one.

I’m proud and honoured to be one of the directors of the Allen Prize, and to have played a very small part in getting the programme up and running. I’m even more proud of Lisa, and her insistence that writers have an obligation to support their peers and successors; her conviction that literature, in whatever form it takes, is “absolutely necessary for the healthy functioning of a society.”

The 2010 Allen Prize opened for submissions on 1 September. The final deadline is 30 November. You can find out more about the submission process here. Please share this information with any young writers you may know, twelve to nineteen, living in Trinidad and Tobago. And if you’d like to support the programme — financially or by volunteering your time — you can contact the Allen Prize here.

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Lisa Allen-Agostini. Photograph by Richard Acosta

The day after the 2010 Allen Prize opened for entries, I asked Lisa a few questions via email about why she decided to undertake this initiative, her own experience as a young writer, and what the powers-that-be (or the powers-that-spend) might do to support writing in Trinidad and Tobago:

Antilles: The Allen Prize is a major undertaking. It’s not just a prize, it’s also an ongoing education programme. I’m still a bit in awe of the ambition of what you’ve started. Why did you decide to do this, and why now?

Lisa Allen-Agostini: A few years ago I thought about creating a prize for young writers. When I first conceptualised it, it really was just a prize. I wanted the prize to be sustainable, not a one-off thing, and that meant putting a structure in place with a foundation and a board. Then everyone, including the board, encouraged me to broaden the scope of it and make it more than just a prize, so all the additional elements — the seminars, the workshop, the publishing programme — were born.

It’s a good time for this because it’s always a good time to support young people, and writing has been my passion from childhood.

Antilles: At what age did you start writing?

LAA: I remember keeping a journal from about age six, but I didn’t write my first poem until I was about eight or nine. I wrote everything: skits, short stories, novellas, and poems — I even wrote a serial one page at a time, and passed it out in class — but somehow I didn’t enter a lot of competitions. When I was in lower sixth form, I entered and won the Clico Poetry Writing Competition, which was for many years the main opportunity for young poets in Trinidad and Tobago to get critical feedback and a bit of a reward. It was tremendously validating (it got my picture on the front page of the Trinidad Guardian!), and I think it helped confirm for me that I did in fact want to be a professional writer. Part of the reason I wanted to start a writers’ prize is the memory of how important that Clico prize was to me at the time.

Antilles: If the Trinidad and Tobago government or some major player in the private sector asked you how they could support writing and writers here, what would you suggest (other than big donations to the Allen Prize endowment, of course)?

LAA: Lack of investment in the publishing industry is probably the biggest gap we have right now. Publishing is not just printing. It’s investing in new writers, editing, and distribution — it’s very risky and expensive, but without a publishing industry writers have no option but to self-publish, with all the attendant ills. There are also other industries like theatre and film that could do with more support, and that would benefit writers as well. If I had a couple millions of dollars at my disposal I’d also start a transparent and consistent system of grants for writers, so that we don’t have to starve while we write.

Christian Campbell. Photograph by Sammy Rawal, courtesy Peepal Tree Press

Today is Independence Day here in Trinidad and Tobago — parades, flags, fireworks — and today we also wrap up the current issue of the CRB with three last features.

First, a portfolio of images from the painted wilde bussen — minibuses — of Paramaribo, accompanied by a short essay by your Antilles blogger. Decorated with hand-painted portraits of film stars and musicians, action heroes and politicians, the wilde bussen are a moving gallery of public art offering fascinating hints about the ideals and fantasies of contemporary Surinamese.

Next, the CRB’s “Also noted” column returns, with capsule reviews of ten recent books: poetry by M. NourbeSe Philip, Marion Bethel, and Jacqueline Bishop; a memoir by the late E.A. Markham; a new translation of a 1916 book by a pioneering Puerto Rican feminist; books on reggaeton and Haitian migrants; and more.

Finally, regular CRB contributor Lisa Allen-Agostini interviews the Bahamian poet Christian Campbell, whose debut book, Running the Dusk, was recently shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Campbell talks about his influences, literary and otherwise, about the shaping of his poetic voice, the texture of dusk in his book, and his sense of rootedness in multiple Caribbean locations:

I was raised by a Bahamian and a Trinidadian, and I was raised as a Bahamian and a Trinidadian. There’s also Grenada and Colombia/Venezuela (to open up the arc), and there’s likely Haiti somewhere down the line.

My breed of Caribbean person is not strange at all. I’m a UWI baby — my parents met at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. In the diaspora, and Toronto in particular, it makes perfect sense, because there is a lot of this cross-Caribbean mix-up business. The thing is, we haven’t really talked enough about what this means.

At a very early age, I knew the troubles and limits of nationalism and I know that I must also make trouble for the nation. My heritage gave me an innate sense of the broadness of the Caribbean and the many Caribbeans — “broader than Broadway,” as Barrington Levy would put it. It grounds me in my ability to fully draw on the spiritual resources of all the Caribbeans. It’s all mine.

Look out for a review of Running the Dusk in a future issue of the CRB.

And now that this issue of the magazine has closed, your Antilles blogger is hard at work on the September CRB, which will start publication next week Tuesday. I’m happy to say that this issue will include not only our usual coverage of books and visual art, but also a special section on Caribbean film, and our first regular music column. But more about those next week!

V.S. Naipaul on BBC TV, 1994

“I’ve always been a writer. I’ve thought about it every day. There’s not been a day or part of a day when I’ve not thought about it . . . It has enabled me to be a free man . . . I’ve not written anything that I didn’t want to write.”

— V.S. Naipaul, interviewed by Jeremy Isaacs for the BBC TV programme Face to Face in May 1994. The BBC has just added a series of forty radio and TV interviews with “British” writers to their online archive, at a special page called “In Their Own Words”. The earliest, from 1937, is with Virginia Woolf; the most recent, from last year, with A.S. Byatt. The only other semi-Caribbean writer in the lot is Zadie Smith.

(By coincidence, it’s Naipaul’s birthday tomorrow.)

Junot Díaz

Junot Díaz: I have to tell you something: when I was young, I read Moby Dick and I always thought, “There is no English like this in the world.” It was a book that contained twenty-five Englishes. And I was like, “Could I write a book that contained every single one of the languages I could speak fluently, or at least that I was aware of?” So that was a dream, too.

Guernica: You’re a great talker. I’ve heard you give talks and on the radio. You’re a naturally good talker. Do you think being a good talker is also part of being a good writer? Or did one come first? Were you a better writer, then a better oral speaker? Can you talk about that?

Junot Díaz: I guess it depends on who you ask. I would actually say that part of it is practice. In general, I’m actually pretty darn awkward. I guess I’m not a Caribbean person whose spoken language has always been kind of our playground. I never was one of those people who had the gift of gab, as they say. I’m not sure the two connect. I have friends who are incredible raconteurs. They tell tremendous stories. I mean, I can listen to the writer Francisco Goldman tell stories all day. But I’m terrible at telling stories, man. I’m telling you. I do better when I’m on the page.

— From an interview with Díaz by Adriana Lopez, in the July 2009 issue of Guernica; in which the Dominican-American writer discusses the origins of the name “Oscar Wao”, the role of the body in Caribbean culture, his favourite character from a book, and what he would be if he weren’t a writer:

Knowing me, I would probably be a lawyer. I’m really into our community, I’m really into the rights of immigrants, the rights of the working poor. I’m one of those little activist types. I probably would have just gone to law school.