Hannah Lowe. Photograph courtesy Tim Ridley

Despite the swell of her belly, Hannah Lowe is perched, apparently comfortably, on a wide bench at the British Library in London. The child who is coming will bear her father’s name, she says. “It’s important for me not to lose the name, because the child won’t feel the connection to the Caribbean that I do.”

In the November/December Caribbean Beat, Melissa Richards profiles British writer Hannah Lowe, whose debut book Chick is both named for and inspired by her Jamaican father, a professional gambler. Lowe talks about her “childhood full of contradictions,” growing up “within the façade of white middle-class family life” with a mixed-race immigrant father.

“I was always having to explain him to other people,” she says, “but it wasn’t just the fact that he was black and I was white. It was the fact that he was so old. He looked like a grandfather, and often he’d just got out of bed because he’d been playing cards all night, so he was this old dishevelled man with his hair stood on end.”

The resulting questions about personal history and ethnic identity — “what is race, what does ‘black’ look like?” — are the meat of both Chick and Lowe’s forthcoming memoir (due in 2014). And Lowe herself raises fascinating questions about how we can or should define what it means to be a Caribbean writer.

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Hannah Lowe reading from Chick at the 2012 Norwich Showcase (your Antilles blogger was in the audience!):

Stephen Tyrone Williams and Johnny Ferro in Children of God, directed by Kareem Mortimer. Photograph courtesy the trinidad+tobago film festival

The September 2010 issue of the CRB wraps up today, with the publication of our latest “Also noted” column, featuring brief reviews of ten recent books from and about the Caribbean. (They include Cecil Gray’s latest book of poems, two coming-of-age novels set in contemporary Trinidad, scholarly books on Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, and a series of guides to Caribbean street food).

As regular Antilles readers know, this issue of the CRB also includes a special section on recent Caribbean film, supported by the trinidad+tobago film festival 2010. Here’s a roundup of the seven films we’ve reviewed, in case you missed one or two:

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Could you be loved
Nicholas Laughlin on Children of God, directed by Kareem Mortimer

Gold fever
Georgia Popplewell on Orpailleur, directed by Marc Barrat

There will be blood
Jane Bryce on La Soga, directed by Josh Crook

Songs of the road
Ian Craig on Los Viajes del Viento, directed by Ciro Guerra

The return of the native
Dylan Kerrigan on The Amerindians, directed by Tracy Assing and Sophie Meyer

Addicted to rockstone
Kellie Magnus on The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee “Scratch” Perry, directed by Ethan Higbee and Adam Bhala Lough

Colour wheel
Andre Bagoo on Coolie Pink and Green, directed by Patricia Mohammed

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We’re very pleased the ttff decided to support this special film coverage, and we hope their partnership with the CRB will continue in some form.

You can see the full contents of the now-complete September 2010 issue here — now is a good time to catch up with anything you missed during the busy past eight weeks. Some highlights: Vahni Capildeo’s survey of the late Guyanese poet Mahadai Das; Mervyn Morris’s essay on the life and poetic achievement of Wayne Brown; Melissa Richards on Anton Nimblett’s short fiction; J. Michael Dash on Matthew J. Smith’s political history of Haiti in the mid-twentieth century; and Edwidge Danticat’s moving essay on writing and reading in dangerous times.

And now to gear up for the launch of the November issue . . .

The current issue of the CRB — September 2010 — begins publication today (and will continue for the next seven weeks, with new reviews and other pieces appearing every Tuesday). We open with reviews of two recent books of fiction — Melissa Richards on Anton Nimblett’s short story collection Sections of an Orange, and Robert Edison Sandiford on Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo — and the first review from our special section on recent Caribbean film, Andre Bagoo on Patricia Mohammed’s Coolie Pink and Green. (As I announced yesterday, this section is supported by the trinidad+tobago film festival 2010.)

What these books and this short film have in common — apart from references to colours in their respective titles — is a concern with how the threads of the past interlace with contemporary Caribbean realities. Sections of an Orange, in the words of its reviewer, explores “new definitions of Caribbean masculinity” against older versions of tolerance and accommodation. Redemption in Indigo considers new directions for Caribbean writing inspired by traditional folklore and elements of speculative fiction, “to the literature’s great benefit.” And Coolie Pink and Green is a meditation on the survival and evolution of Indian culture in Trinidad, from nineteenth-century indentureship to the present. As Bagoo writes:

There are related questions: should we preserve culture? Whose responsibility is this? Is change in a cultural practice really its demise? These are the issues the descendents of everyone brought to the Caribbean — not just Indo-Trinidadians — have to grapple with.