The 2007 Calabash International Literary Festival winds down with a reggae jam session. Photograph by Georgia Popplewell/Caribbean Free Photo

Between its founding in 2000 and its tenth anniversary in 2010, the Calabash International Literary Festival — based in Treasure Beach, on the south coast of Jamaica — grew into one of the major events on the Caribbean’s literary calendar. The Calabash formula was simple and successful: invite first-class writers from around the world to mingle with an avid audience of Jamaicans and others in an idyllic beachfront location, for three days of readings, performances, music, and conversation. The relaxed setting — with a huge tent pitched in a seaside meadow as the main venue, and Calabash Bay for a backdrop — meant that Calabash felt less like a literary festival and more like a giant beach party where everyone was interested in books, and writers were the guests of honour.

The Calabash organisers had already announced the end-of-May dates for the 2011 festival, and regular attendees were speculating, as usual, about the line-up of invited writers. So Calabash fans in Jamaica and elsewhere were taken aback by the announcement yesterday evening, at a press conference in Kingston, that there would be no festival in 2011 after all — and that “the Calabash International Literary Festival is over in its present incarnation.”

“We had a fantastic run, and the festival effectively accomplished what it set out to do ten years ago,” said co-founder Colin Channer in the official press release. The Calabash International Literary Trust is expected to continue its series of writing workshops and seminars. And according to Kwame Dawes, another of the three co-founders, some key members of the Calabash team — minus Channer — plan to regroup in 2012 to launch a new literary event to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Jamaican independence.

Writer and CRB contributor Annie Paul was at the fateful press conference, and posted a brief report at her blog last night, hinting at speculation about Channer’s “mysterious” departure from the Calabash team. She promises more details, and possibly an interview with Dawes, in the coming days.

Meanwhile, regular Calabash attendees — some of whom had already booked accommodation for the 2011 event — exchanged messages of consternation. By coincidence, the end of Calabash coincides with the launch of a major new literary festival at the other end of the Caribbean. The Bocas Lit Fest, based in Port of Spain, Trinidad, runs from 28 April to 1 May, 2011. (Your Antilles blogger is a member of the planning committee.) Bocas offers a completely different vibe — urban buzz and energy, rather than beachside idyll. But it shares with Calabash a sense of the Caribbean as an important literary nexus, and the goal of bringing extraordinary talent from around the world to home audiences. When Calabash fans recover from their disappointment, they ought to check out what’s going on in Port of Spain.

For a look back at the tenth anniversary of the Calabash International Literary Festival last year, see Vincentian writer William J. Abbott’s Antilles report.

Earlier this week, the CRB published F.S.J. Ledgister’s review of Edward Seaga’s two-volume political memoir, My Life and Leadership, plus historian Patrick E. Bryan’s monograph Edward Seaga and the Challenges of Modern Jamaica. Seaga, prime minister of Jamaica from 1980 to 1989 and leader of the opposition for a cumulative two decades, was the last member of Parliament to have entered public life before Independence. I must confess that, copy-editing Ledgister’s insightful review a few days ago, and contemplating Seaga’s sheer political tenacity, I was sorely tempted to title the piece after Prince Buster’s catchy 1967 song “Hard Man fe Dead”. I decided to err on the side of caution, and chose the less irreverent title “Last one standing”.

Also published this week: Brendan de Caires’s thorough, admiring, and rather naughty review of Lise Winer’s Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad and Tobago, a remarkable reference work that sets a new standard for Caribbean lexicography. For one thing, as de Caires illustrates in detail, “Winer is commendably open-minded about recording ‘all relevant words . . . pleasant or not’”. He goes on:

This level of exactitude in country matters may not be to everyone’s taste, but Winer’s open-eyed approach to language as it is actually used is central to what makes the DECTT so useful.

I think this is the most entertaining review we’ve published in the CRB for a long while, and an excellent demonstration that an intelligent and penetrating book review can and ought to be a fun read.

Finally, this week we publish as well two poems by the US-based Trinidadian poet Lauren K. Alleyne. “The Body, Given” and “Ode to the Belly” are both wry meditations on the eternal tensions between body and soul, and Alleyne is a poet I suspect we’ll be hearing much more from in the years ahead.

Gregory Isaacs, Jamaican reggae singer, died this morning in London (as reported by the BBC and other media).

Nicknamed “Cool Ruler”, Isaacs was once described as “the most exquisite vocalist in reggae, his pliable baritone equally at ease with silken ballads and slinky dance grooves.” His best known song is the title track from his 1982 album Night Nurse:

Dawn Scott working on A Cultural Object in 1985. Photograph courtesy the National Gallery of Jamaica

Dawn Scott, Jamaican artist, died on Tuesday 21 September in Kingston.

The National Gallery of Jamaica posted an obituary:

Figurative batik was Dawn Scott’s main medium for some twenty years, culminating in her solo exhibition Nature Vive (1994) at the Grosvenor Galleries in Kingston. By far her most impactful exhibition, however, was her contribution to Six Options: Gallery Spaces Transformed (1985), the National Gallery’s (and Jamaica’s) first exhibition of installation art. On this occasion, she produced A Cultural Object, a haunting, spiral-shaped “zinc fence” structure which transposed some of the realities of Jamaica’s inner city life into the gallery spaces of the National Gallery.

A Cultural Object, in permanent display in the NGJ’s contemporary galleries, is a powerful and disturbing work that continues to influence younger Jamaican artists, most recently Ebony G. Patterson, whose Cultural Soliloquy (Cultural Object Revisited) (2010) was included in the Young Talent V exhibition at the National Gallery.

In later years, Scott taught at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts and worked as a fashion, interior, stage, and set designer. In 1999 she was awarded a Bronze Musgrave Medal for her contribution to Jamaican visual art. The citation read, in part:

Hers is a humanist art in which the human figure takes central stage. Her social concerns are reflected in her dignified but graphic depictions of the life of the working class.

Detail of A Cultural Object (1985), by Dawn Scott. Photograph by Nicholas Laughlin

Wayne Brown (1944–2009). Photograph courtesy Mariel Brown

The Trinidadian writer Wayne Brown — who died a year ago this week, on 15 September, 2009 — first came to widespread attention as a poet. His debut book, On the Coast (1972), won him the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and a Gregory Fellowship at the University of Leeds. His second book of poems, Voyages, appeared seventeen years later, by which time Brown was better known as a prose writer. In 1984 he began writing a column for the Trinidad Express, and over the next quarter century In Our Time appeared in several other newspapers in Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guyana — well over three thousand editions, or several novels’ worth of prose.

In Our Time ranged over subjects from social and political commentary to literary criticism to personal reminiscence, and even outright fiction. “I write about anything,” Brown said in 1987, and “I use the techniques of fiction in writing these pieces.” Several dozen In Our Time columns were collected in A Child of the Sea (1989) and Landscape with Heron (2000), but the vaster part of this extraordinary oeuvre remains in suspended animation, as it were, in newspaper archives and clipping files. Elegantly composed, furiously thought out, often moving, occasionally infuriating, Brown’s columns belong to an important Caribbean tradition of literary writing in the popular press, and furthermore decisively influenced a generation of younger Trinidadian writers who used the newspaper column as a literary medium of urgency and ambition.

In the mid 1990s Brown moved permanently to Jamaica, where he had lived earlier in his life, and there he became best known as an editor — of the literary pages of the Observer, of several anthologies and collections of poems by other writers, and of the short-lived online journal Caribbean Writing Today — and as a teacher and mentor. The writing workshop he ran out of his various Kingston homes developed into an important institution in the Jamaican literary scene.

This week, the CRB remembers Wayne Brown and his literary legacies. We publish, first, “Pan Session: Laventille”, a poem found among his papers after his death; as well as an essay on Brown’s life and work by Mervyn Morris, his longtime friend and fellow poet. (This piece is adapted from Morris’s introduction to the new collected edition of Brown’s poems forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press. A new collection of his prose is also in preparation.)

We also continue our special section on recent Caribbean film, supported by the trinidad+tobago film festival, with Georgia Popplewell’s review of Orpailleur, a thriller directed by Marc Barrat and set in the interior of French Guiana.

Lady Saw

BLVR: Do you separate from the Lady Saw people see in the dancehall when you’re not onstage?

LS: You know, a friend of mine recently told me how she saw me onstage one night, and I came down off the stage, and a man said something to me. And I told him: “Lady Saw — she’s done right now. That was Lady Saw there, she’s done now. I’m Marion Hall, talk to me.” Marion Hall is a homegirl. You see how hard it was to get me out? [Laughs] I stay home, you know? I don’t have a lot of friends. I have a lot of fans, not so many friends. I stay home, I feed the dogs, I bathe the dogs. I have a farm up in Ocho Rios, I’m there. But I’m boring, you know — until it’s time to touch the stage.

— Jamaican dancehall performer Lady Saw, interviewed by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro in the July/August 2010 issue of The Believer.

Sharing at the Table (1999), by Seya Parboosingh. Image courtesy the National Gallery of Jamaica

Seya Parboosingh, American-born artist living in Jamaica since 1958, died on Friday 13 August in Kingston.

The National Gallery of Jamaica blog published a short obituary:

The painter and poet Seya Parboosingh, née Samila Joseph, was born in 1925, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was of Lebanese descent. She attended the University of Iowa, where she concentrated on creative writing. Seya met and married Jamaican artist Karl Parboosingh in New York in 1957 and began to paint under his direction. The couple settled in Jamaica in 1958 and that year they had their first joint exhibition at the Kingston and St. Andrew Parish Library. Seya spent most of her active life in Jamaica and was a well-recognised member of the Jamaican artistic community . . .

The close artistic partnership between Seya and Karl Parboosingh continued until the time of his death in 1975 and arguably endured beyond that time. Some of her most poignant works were visual expressions of her grief at his passing.

The critic Petrine Archer wrote a profile of Parboosingh for Caribbean Beat in 2000. You can download a PDF of the piece here. Archer wrote:

Seya’s painting has always tended towards minimalism. Her surfaces are characterised by a handful of motifs and images that she uses again and again. Typical are her silent female figures and seemingly isolated objects drawn from nature. Flowers, fruits, birds, fish and angelic figures are painted so that they relate to each other, but still remain separate. Even when they touch they rarely interact; each object seems self-sufficient with a sense of wholeness. But partnered with one another, her subjects tell a story of cosmic unity and love among all things.

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.)

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.

Portrait of Bob Marley on a t-shirt, Amsterdam; photograph by mdemon, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

You posit the theory that Peter Tosh was just as talented as Bob, but for various reasons would never achieve the kind of overall popularity he did. What was it about Marley that has made him worldwide the most recognisable face and voice of reggae music?

He never wrote a bad song, and his songs contained the essence of great truths. His life in the simplicity of the country had imbued him with an understanding of his existence that came from watching things grow.

Plus, in a way that is unlike any other contemporary singing star, he was fired by his public love of God — of the good. Utterly charismatic as a performer, his shows channeled the soul of positivity, with utterly transcendent consequences.

It is also naïve to pretend that Bob’s physical appearance didn’t help: his Anglo-Saxon features and light skin perhaps made him less threatening to white audiences.

— From an interview with Chris Salewicz, author of the newly published Bob Marley: The Untold Story, by Bob Ruggiero in Houston Press. Salewicz — a British music journalist who lived in Jamaica from 1995 to 1997 — previously collaborated on Songs of Freedom, a book of Marley photographs by Adrian Boot.

Marley would have turned sixty-five this year. To mark the anniversary, Putumayo World Music has issued Tribute to a Reggae Legend, an album of Wailers covers by musicians from around the world, working in various genres. And the Putumayo blog has started a series of video interviews in which musicians and others reflect on Marley’s global legacy. The first features Reuben Koroma of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars. (You can also hear the All Stars’ version of “No Woman No Cry”. Thanks to CRB contributor Georgia Popplewell for this link.)

(From the CRB archive: Geoffrey Dunn’s review of Bob Marley, by Garry Steckles, published in our November 2008 issue.)