The photograph of Keith Smith that long accompanied his Express column

Keith Smith, Trinidadian journalist, died early in the morning of Tuesday 8 February, at the age of 65.

Over his forty-five-year career, which started at the now-defunct Daily Mirror and ended at the Trinidad Express, the newspaper he helped found in 1967, Smith was a reporter and editor, and a beloved mentor to scores of younger journalists. But to the reading population of Trinidad and Tobago he was best known as a columnist, in the most expansive possible sense. (And anyone who met him knew that “expansive” referred not only to his mind, his talent, and his personality, but also his physique.) The Keith Smith column, which for years ran daily in the Express, mixed personal anecdote and humour with social and political observation, street smarts and folk wisdom, delivered in a prose style his regular readers could recognise sometimes by a mere sentence.

The classic Keith Smith sentence seemed effortlessly endless, a stream of consciousness unto itself, rolling and eddying. A single Keith Smith sentence could contain assertion, qualification, question, disquisition on human folly, epiphany, moral lesson, and pun. And then, with barely a pause for breath, he would dash off another.

Kim Johnson, Smith’s former Express colleague, writes:

Keith Smith was one of the most remarkable men I’ll ever meet. He was certainly the most gifted writer I’ve known, and that based on the most lightweight of literary forms, the newspaper column. His are the only columns I’ve ever cut out to file away.

Column-writing is exhausting. Composing one weekly, in which you mine your own life’s experiences for things to say, drains the most talented in a few months, after which they produce dull, tasteless mud, usually uninspired opinions on whatever is the most recent political bacchanal. Yet Keith was able to churn out a personal column daily for years — decades! — and still regularly produce gems of prose, even the occasional diamond. And that without the shameless self-promotion that is so common among columnists . . .

And as he was vast in his talents so too, I felt — and told him so — that he squandered them with equal prodigality. Although Keith was quite aware of his talents he didn’t ponder on it or labour at honing them, as did other writers of lesser gifts but larger ambition — and I count myself in that group . . .

Now that I see the source of Keith’s brilliance was his capacity for wonder. He never became jaded or cynical but rather could be surprised over and over and over by the small things we encounter every day, both negative and positive, and that we take for granted.

From Judy Raymond, another of his colleagues:

At their best, Keith’s columns were like the most brilliant extempo calypsoes. They were dashed off at great speed, but they had their own poetry and they contained nuggets of great wisdom. Nobody could hope to imitate them, but they were an influence and inspiration for other writers nevertheless because of their depth and sharpness and the easy way they showed Keith’s huge understanding of the time and the place he lived in. Perhaps he should have written something grander or bigger or more lasting. But as it is he turned the newspaper column into an art form.

Keith wasn’t always easy to work with, because he was the last person who should have been put to manage anything. He should have been chained to a desk and made to write. That’s what he was born for.

He was a character. Everyone who knew him has their own Keith stories, not all of them printable. The Express newsroom and the world will be a duller place without him.

In a column published last October, when news got around that Smith was hospitalised, B.C. Pires — yet another onetime Express colleague — wrote a column parodying — which is to say, paying high tribute to — his style:

If Keith wasn’t in a hospital bed, was at his desk, instead, eating his hands, chewing his way to inspiration via his knuckles — the whole newsroom watching through the all-glass office wall understood that his concentration was deepest when his fist disappeared into his mouth — if Keith was working on yet another column that would touch the length and breadth of Trinidad & Tobago, from Belmont to Brooklyn and Brixton, would make them laugh, or make them angry, or make them smile, or make them weep, or — at his best — make them do them all at the same time in the same column — if Keith was in the black of health (because don’t ever think Keith “Laventy Rhythm Section” Smith would claim he was in the pink of health), if Keith was firing on all cylinders, I know I coulda send Keith to deal with bmobile for me . . .

Anu Lakhan, who knew Smith first at the Express and later persuaded him to write for the food column at Caribbean Beat — food and columns being two things he knew better than almost anyone — sends this note:

It is a small claim to fame, but it is mine, and I guard it as I would the mango vert once so hilariously and bizarrely defended by Keith Smith in a Caribbean Beat feature. The fame to which I refer is getting Keith to write for Caribbean Beat’s growing food section.

It was not his fine prose nor star byline that made his contributions such an honour. No. It was the fact that he agreed at all to do a piece. Then another. Then he startled the universe by submitting the actual written product for review. And then, unfathomably, each piece was on time. My agnosticism shuddered in the face of such miracles.

No one would deny this as one of Keith’s finer moments (triumph over sloth is no small achievement), but I know of one finer still.

There’s little risk of happening upon excessive displays of humanity in our time. I saw one once, though. It channeled through this man who always seemed to exist just beyond anything that could be defined. Through Keith, directly to me, then, in a far bigger and more extraordinary way, to all that might be considered civilised and good.

It was over a news story. The kind of story that can turn provincial tragedies into world news. He absolved me of a tiny but hideous mission to relate some instructions from a higher-up. “You told me,” he said. Just that.

There was nothing dramatic like silencing anyone or burying the story on an obscure page. But Keith — uninterested in gore glory — let a few survivors think, for a short while, that the world was not entirely barbaric. It was a beautiful elision. The media had not, in fact, offered any gesture of empathy. Keith Smith offered decency and humanity.

I met Keith Smith only once or twice, and I knew him neither as a colleague nor as a friend. (Though I had the privilege a single time, six years ago, of being his editor.) I knew him as one of his readers, starting when I was eleven or twelve and first taking the newspapers seriously. For what seems like always, his column was simply a fact of life, a fixed point in the universe. I’d even say it was one of the things that made Trinidad Trinidad.

Life, the universe, and Trinidad are a little less than they were, now that he’s gone.

Detail from West India Scenery (1836), by Richard Bridgens

This week the CRB publishes Jonathan Ali’s review of Moloch Tropical, the most recent film by the Haitian director Raoul Peck; as well as an essay by Judy Raymond on the nineteenth-century Trinidadian artist Michel Jean Cazabon. “He’s considered a pioneer,” Raymond writes,

and indeed in some respects he was. Even more importantly, we think of Cazabon as one of us. He was a Trinidadian, of mixed race, and his work evokes pride and nostalgia and a sense of pleasing familiarity . . . But the nostalgia evoked by Cazabon is for a Trinidad that may never have existed. And the more you look at his paintings, the odder they start to seem.

That’s because we look at him as if he were unique. In fact, Cazabon fits firmly into a tradition, and once he is set into this context, his paintings become, if no less idiosyncratic, then at least more understandable.

Raymond goes on to contrast Cazabon’s paintings and drawings with those of another artist working in Trinidad a generation earlier: the Englishman Richard Bridgens, today remembered by scholars and collectors for his West India Scenery (1836), an album of lithographs. Raymond — the editor of Caribbean Beat, Parliament columnist for the Sunday Express, and author of two biographical books — is now at work on a study of Bridgens, of whom, it turns out, relatively few documents have survived. Via email, she answered a few questions about her interest in Bridgens and the challenges of her research.

Nicholas Laughlin: Why did you choose Bridgens as a subject?

Judy Raymond: While I was researching what became the essay on Cazabon that you very kindly published in the CRB, I wanted to put Cazabon in context. His European artistic antecedents are sometimes mentioned, but you don’t hear anything about art in Trinidad before him. When I looked around, there was Mr Bridgens, lurking modestly in the wings, as was his wont.

I wanted to find out a bit more about him in turn: what was his professional background, and, other than designing the first, ill-fated Red House and drawing pictures of the slaves, what other work did he produce — and I was amazed by the answers. His career was surprisingly high-level and very diverse artistically and geographically, and the importance of his pictures of Trinidad is still massively underestimated, though a few academics have recently rediscovered him.

He’s now become an obsession. When I leave Parliament [in Port of Spain] on a Friday afternoon I’m picturing what his Red House would have looked like, with Prince Street running through the centre. Or what he would have seen in the 1830s, while he was walking home up St Vincent Street from the government offices, where he was the superintendent of public works, to his house in the new part of town, overlooking the Ariapita estate.

NL: Your two previous biographical works were of living subjects, available for interview and possessing their own archives. Where have you looked for and found material on Bridgens? Is there much archival material on him in Trinidad?

JR: Bridgens is a very shadowy figure, and there isn’t a lot of information on him anywhere. He knew and worked with a really stellar group of people, but I suspect his problem was that he lacked any talent for self-promotion. For instance, he did important work on the interior of Sir Walter Scott’s house, Abbotsford, but the first couple of times he crops up in Scott’s letters, it’s as “Mr Buggins” (a rather hobbit-like variant of his name). He didn’t always show up on the radar.

Worse, family history said his personal papers were destroyed in one of the many fires that have ravaged Port of Spain over the years. The surviving information on him has to be mined, nugget by nugget, and then the pieces put together like a jigsaw puzzle, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.

My research so far has included visiting Holy Trinity Cathedral to look at the statue of Sir Ralph Woodford, and reading the slave compensation registers from 1836 (very well kept at the national library, I’m happy to say — a gloved librarian turned each page for me). I may yet go and browse through the burial registers at Lapeyrouse Cemetery.

But generally it would have been easier if I’d been based in London, or had access to the Yale Centre for British Art.

NL: Your essay on Cazabon in the current CRB argues for a more nuanced interpretation of his work than is generally held. Will your book on Bridgens suggest a new line of thinking on his work?

JR: Overall, yes, partly because so far as I know, no one has joined up the dots and told the story of his life and the course of his whole career, though different periods of it have received specialised attention.

But more importantly, when I tell people who know the pictures in West India Scenery what I’m working on, they say something like, “But those pictures are so horrible and racist!” Yes, they are — the book was published in 1836, and Bridgens was absolutely a man of his time, and had a vested interest in slavery.

But there’s much more to the pictures than that. I think just as novelists say their characters take on lives of their own, the same thing happened with the people in Bridgens’s drawings. They started off as caricatures and became portraits. In spite of himself, he was fascinated by them.

As a result, we know all sorts of details of the lives of people who would otherwise be totally forgotten, having been taken captive as children somewhere in west Africa just over two centuries ago, and then enslaved on sugar estates in north Trinidad. Bridgens inadvertently preserved their memories. I’ve even been able to put tentative names to a couple of the slaves in his pictures.

The Portal (2006; 107 x 73 cm), by Stanley Greaves; from the Shadows Move Among Them series

During November and December 2010, the CRB is running a readers’ donation drive. Find out more here. This post is the first of a series in which CRB contributors suggest five reasons to read and support the magazine — in the form of five reviews or other pieces from our archive.

Brendan de Caires writes:

I read as often as I can, but not as much as I should. I know this because I was lucky enough to grow up on the fringes of a circle of men who read obsessively throughout their adult lives. The poet Martin Carter was one of these men. He read with attitude, scoring books with impassioned marginalia, assessing the argument from page to page. When Tom Wolfe wrote profiles of the American glitterati he was said to enter their rooms like a shark sighting chum, salivating at the semiotics of their furniture, eager to price the crystal and decipher the meanings of their objets d’art. Carter came to books the same way; he saw deep into their inner beings, and could talk about them with an easy familiarity decades later. And while it is certainly true that Karl Marx illuminated much of his world view, I have always felt it was his prodigious intellectual curiosity, his irrepressible bookishness (as a teenager in Georgetown he often read a book a day) that fuelled the poetry within.

Martin was a second father to my own father, and from him we both learned a reverence for serious writing. Usually this meant politics. Long before I had read a page of their work, I knew the world was a better place for having Leszek Kołakowski, Isaac Deutscher, and Edmund Wilson in it. I also knew that any intellectual aspirations I might have had to be gauged by at least a passing familiarity with their “monuments of unageing intellect.”

Towards the end of his life, Martin was overwhelmed by pessimism about Guyana and the Caribbean. He mourned the absence of serious conversation and the near total disappearance of the cultural and political aspirations which had inspired the New World movement. It is a pity that he never lived to see the CRB find its feet, and to witness the revival of some of that spirit.

After meandering through the archives, I have chosen five pieces that I believe Martin and my father would have enjoyed.

1. Who dares to say what Wilson Harris’s fiction is all about? “Prosimetrum”, by Fred D’Aguiar (February 2009), is one of the few lucid accounts of what our most “misunderestimated” sage is up to do when he dissolves time and personality in his novels:

Landscape became instructive not simply in terms outlined by the Romantics, whose great legacy remains that landscape is a thing we can benefit from by knowing about, a cathedral of sorts for spiritual renewal. But for Harris that landscape enacts perception, governs it, steers it into new mental terrain. This transformative aspect of landscape was bound to alter Harris’s language, since the way he talked about place had to be part and parcel of his discoveries about the power of Guyana’s rainforest interior. When allied with time, this sensory reception of a place turned out to be a literary practice, a theory about fiction, an account of the intuitive imagination, and therefore a new type of fiction . . .

2. Stanley Greaves ought to be better known in the Caribbean. “Flatness is all” (November 2006) offers multiple insights into Guyana’s greatest living painter in the lambent prose that has made Rupert Roopnaraine our wisest critic. For me it also gives a glimpse into the intellectual world that might have flourished in Georgetown if our politics had turned out differently.

Underlining the abstract intent of these paintings, there is at work a phenomenology that relegates objects of nature to the viscous and contingent, as opposed to the crystalline hardness and necessity of the walls and roadways of the surrounding landscape. The interplay of the organic and the inorganic creates a certain tension. In the otherwise entirely mineral environment of the paintings there are three natural objects: a mango suspended on a string in Reaching; the breadfruit head of St Sebastian, his shadow pinned down with large nails; and a defiant branch sprouting improbably out of the arch in The Portal, the painting that takes the spiritual world as its subject. The Portal is a tale of two spaces, connected by a rope that curls in the foreground of one space and whose end is in the grip of the figure in the other. At both ends of the rope, the familiar infinity loop, a recurrent Greavesian motif . . .

3. I love take-downs, especially the quiet ones. “Unfit to print” (May 2005) is one of the most satisfying that I’ve read. Jeremy Taylor was my boss for five years and unfailingly tolerant of my myriad editorial misjudgments and lapses (which once included placing the wrong crossword grid into an issue of Caribbean Beat!). So I was glad to see he could be unashamedly judgmental, in the vulgar sense of that word, on the right occasions. I loved the slow unsheathing of the critical knife in this piece, and the way the title ends up referring not to the subject of the book under review but to the book itself.

There are production disappointments in this book too, which is unfortunate in the context of a polemic against poor quality and lack of professionalism: embarrassing typos (“Buju Bantan”), tortuous syntax, wild punctuation, and incomprehensible sentences . . .

4. Living in Canada has made me nostalgic for the directness of Trinidadians. Judy Raymond’s “Doctor, doctor” (November 2007) is another fine example of what happens when the right reviewer meets the wrong book. It also seems to me entirely appropriate that a book which missed the meaning of Eric Williams should be dismissed with an impatience not too dissimilar to his own.

Costar — who studied Williams’s character closely and fruitfully — wrote that the Doctor’s famous speeches in Woodford Square “are rated high as entertainment by those for whose benefit they are uttered.” This judgement is beyond the pale as far as Palmer is concerned: he considers it “contemptuous,” “extraordinary,” “uncharitable.”

It is none of those things; it is actually a perfectly apt compliment, since without a doubt entertaining his audience was one of the effects for which Williams, a brilliant orator, was aiming. But Colin Palmer is a Jamaican, and seems to have no inkling of the outright jokiness, much of it deliberate, of a great deal of Trinidad politics — surely an unfortunate blind spot in one who has set out to analyse an important period in the political history of Trinidad . . .

5. For me, “Wonder boy” (February 2008) is proof that Caribbean book-reviewing can rise to the level of the fiction it surveys. I particularly enjoyed the opening paragraph, and immediately resolved to read more of Marlon James. It came as no surprise to me when the American National Book Critics Circle chose The Book of Night Women for its 2010 fiction shortlist. Before long, I’m sure, James will be winning even bigger prizes, and tempting young novelists to try similar reviews of his own work.

I hate skinny prose. I hate — hold on a second. Essayus interruptus. While I come not to bury Junot Díaz but to praise him (profusely), please allow for a word from our sponsor. As someone who hates reviews that include the “I”, I have ironically proved the rock band Jane’s Addiction true by becoming that which I hate. But I digress. I’m simply trying to explain that “I” will pop up all over this review, for two reasons. A novel with fearless, fire-breathing prose, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao downright demands a review in the first person, teasing and taunting the “I” like a call-and-response in church. This novel may be the first since Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities to snatch reading from a passive to an active experience. But, more than that, Díaz, like the very best of novelists (a list that does not include Wolfe, by the way), makes a voyeur out of the reader, pushing wide open windows into lives we don’t deserve to see . . .