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.

Photograph by Juhan Sonin, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

The Caribbean’s rich literary heritage — in multiple languages — has made a contribution to world culture well out of proportion to the region’s small size. We have produced winners of many literary awards, including three Nobel laureates — Saint-John Perse (1960), Derek Walcott (1992), and V.S. Naipaul (2001). But until now there has been no indigenous Caribbean literary award, organised and judged by Caribbean people, of genuinely international scope.

— So say the organisers of the new OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, which was announced this morning in St Augustine, Trinidad.

The OCM Bocas Prize, which will be awarded for the first time in April 2011, will honour the best book of poetry, fiction, or literary non-fiction by a Caribbean writer each year. It comes with a cash award of US$10,000, sponsored by the One Caribbean Media Group. The prize is administered by a new literary festival, the Bocas Lit Fest, based in Port of Spain and with satellite events around Trinidad and Tobago. The first Bocas Lit Fest runs from 28 April to 1 May, 2011, and the OCM Bocas Prize ceremony is scheduled for Saturday 30 April.

(Where does the name come from? Boca is Spanish for mouth, and the Bocas del Dragón — the Dragon’s Mouths — are the narrow sea passages connecting the Gulf of Paria to the Caribbean Sea. For centuries the Bocas were the gateway between Trinidad and the rest of the world. And the mouth is the organ of speech and song — the human body’s gateway for literary expression.)

The CRB is very pleased to be a media partner for both the festival and the prize (and your Antilles blogger and CRB editor is on the organising committee for both). It’s high time we had a major literary festival here at the southern end of the Caribbean, and a literary prize of regional scope and international stature is also long overdue.

The Bocas Lit Fest programme and the list of participating writers will be announced in early 2011. And the OCM Bocas Prize opens to entries on 8 November (you can download the submission guidelines and entry form here). Antilles will post regular updates on both festival and prize in the coming months — and you can also keep up with Bocas news via Twitter.

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 . . .

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.

Jamaat al Muslimeen leader Yasin Abu Bakr (centre, in white) and journalist Jones P. Madeira (right) on live television during the 1990 insurrection. TTT image later reproduced in the Trinidad and Tobago newspapers

“At 6.00 pm this afternoon the government of Trinidad and Tobago was overthrown.”

On the evening of 27 July, 1990, these were the words that informed a shocked nation that a group of armed insurrectionists had stormed Trinidad and Tobago’s Red House and sole TV station, and were holding the prime minister hostage, along with several dozen Cabinet ministers, MPs, journalists, and others. Yasin Abu Bakr, the leader of the Jamaat al Muslimeen, appeared on television and calmly announced that “the revolutionary forces are commanded to control the streets.”

It was a huge bluff, of course, or a delusion. The Muslimeen never controlled more than a few thousand square feet of territory in Port of Spain. They were outgunned, had no popular support, and there was never any chance their coup attempt would succeed, though for five days there was a very real risk that most or all of their hostages would be killed. Trying to avoid bloodshed, the authorities negotiating with Abu Bakr secured the Muslimeen’s surrender on 1 August — Emancipation Day — by means of the infamous amnesty which led, after some judicial wrangling, to their walking free.

The Muslimeen would go on to become a potent and dangerous political force in Trinidad and Tobago, credited with or blamed for intervening in several general elections. Abu Bakr remains controversial, hated by most, admired by a crucial few. To this day many Trinidadians, not otherwise bloodthirsty, openly express the opinion that he should have been killed by the security forces in the aftermath of the insurrection, amnesty or no amnesty. Downtown Port of Spain is still scarred by the fires and pillaging that erupted on the night of 27 July. And many believe that the atmosphere of violence that has prevailed in recent years can be traced back to the events of 1990. As Mark Lyndersay put it, writing in the May 2008 CRB:

There’s a popular argument that the coup attempt in Trinidad and Tobago changed this twin-island nation forever, that the growth of violent crime over the last decade can be traced back to that act of pointless lawlessness and the distribution of guns on the evening of July 27, 1990.

Lyndersay — who, as a Trinidad Guardian photojournalist, was perilously close to the centre of the action during those five days in 1990 — was reviewing Days of Wrath, journalist Raoul Pantin’s account of being held hostage inside the TTT building. Dennis McComie has more recently published his 1990: The Personal Account of a Journalist Under Siege, and in 1992 Eden Shand — a former government minister and Muslimeen hostage — published The Estates Within, a “docu-drama” play based on events inside the Red House during the insurrection. But, as Lyndersay wrote in his review of Pantin’s book,

The 1990 insurrection is much like the proverbial elephant described by blind men. There were so many aspects to the event that have never been publicly discussed or narrated by those who experienced them that it’s possible no one has a truly comprehensive overview of the coup attempt. After almost two decades, all that is publicly available about the Muslimeen insurrection are a few facets on a complicated and still disturbing event, little windows into what happened over those puzzling, terrifying days.

Which is why many Trinidadians were relieved when recently elected Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar announced her government’s intention to appoint a commission of enquiry into the coup attempt. For twenty years, successive governments ignored calls from citizens both prominent and ordinary for a formal probe. It is widely believed that key Opposition MPs, fortuitously absent from the Red House on that fateful Friday evening, had been tipped off about the Muslimeen’s plans, and important aspects of the negotiations over the notorious amnesty remain unknown to the public. Almost a generation later, it’s time to face the truth and its consequences.

Now Showing (2010), silkscreen on paper, 20 x 27 inches, edition of one hundred signed and numbered prints, by Christopher Cozier. Image courtesy the artist and the trinidad+tobago film festival

The camera, as it were, hovers gently in the air, looking down into an empty walled enclosure. A man walks past, glimpsed only in silhouette. On his head he carries a box labelled “Made in China”, and atop that are balanced the expensive shoes and well-tailored trousers of a businessman or politician. Another strange object appears, a loaf of bread on wheels. The ghost image of a tree looms in the distance, and at the bottom of the frame a line of feet stamp out a rhythmic tattoo. Faces scroll by, some anonymous, some familiar from old movies: Clint Eastwood in a Stetson, a Zanjeer-era Amitabh Bachchan, Jimmy Wang Yu in character as Fang Gang the One-Armed Swordsman. And a block of text that might be the corner of a tattered marquee poster, announcing “12.30”. Showtime? Headline? Deadline?

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Like a complicated multiple-exposure shot in an old avant-garde film, Christopher Cozier’s Now Showing conjures up an atmosphere of both nostalgia and sinister comedy. The eye doesn’t know where to focus first. The imagery derives from the artist’s private vocabulary — as he explains in a series of notes — but refers to a familiar gritty urban Caribbean space you could call Kingston or Georgetown or Nassau, though in this case the specific location is Port of Spain.

In his sardonic late-70s poem “The Spoiler’s Return”, Derek Walcott imagined the shade of the calypsonian on leave from Hades — “I decompose, but I composing still” — gazing down from the heights of Laventille across his former hometown. Through the eyes of his narrator, Walcott builds up an almost cinematic portrait of the city. Spoiler remarks:

all Port of Spain is a twelve-thirty show,
some playing Kojak, some Fidel Castro . . .

(A few years later, in Midsummer, Walcott fleshed out a similar mise-en-scène —

This Spanish port, piratical in diverseness,
with its one-eyed lighthouse, this damned sea of noise,
this ochre harbour, mantled by its own scum . . .

— as though writing directions for a hypothetical set designer.)

Now Showing similarly describes a world that is not a stage but a series of close-ups and long shots, where every man or woman on the street has a starring role, iPod headphones or the speakers of a passing car contribute a soundtrack, and individual fantasy and ambition determine genre: The Fast and the Furious here, Sex and the City there, Bollywood or Blaxploitation, Nouvelle Vague or mumblecore, space opera or Hong Kong kickup.

“It’s not a new question, this collision of art and life,” Cozier writes, and the Trinidadian fascination with the cinematic — with a notion of life lived large under floodlights — has often been documented and discussed. V.S. Naipaul, with unconcealed irritation, described it as long ago as 1962, in The Middle Passage:

In its stars the Trinidad audience looks for a special quality of style. John Garfield has this style; so did Bogart. When Bogart, without turning, coolly rebuked a pawing Lauren Bacall, “You’re breathin’ down mah neck,” Trinidad adopted him as its own. “That is man!” the audience cried. Admiring shrieks of “Aye-aye-aye!” greeted Garfield’s statement in Dust Be My Destiny: “What am I gonna do? What I always do. Run.” “From now on I am like John Garfield in Dust Be My Destiny,” a prisoner once said in court, and made the front page of the evening paper.

For Naipaul, this taste for “the Hollywood formula” (or for “Indian films of Hollywood badness”) was evidence of Trinidad’s “fraudulent” cosmopolitanism. “Trinidadians of all races and classes are remaking themselves in the image of the Hollywood B-man,” he wrote. But forty years later, in Reading & Writing — older, less anxious, with less to prove — Naipaul admitted his own debt to the popular cinema fare of his childhood:

Nearly all my imaginative life was in the cinema. Everything there was far away, but at the same time everything in that curious operatic world was accessible. It was a truly universal art. I don’t think I overstate when I say that without the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s I would have been spiritually quite destitute.

To observers of a certain bent, this is all evidence of the infiltration of foreign cultural influences: the short, slippery path from gangster movies and rap music to a voracious murder rate. But the first movie theatre opened in Port of Spain in 1911. Larger-than-life moving images of elsewhere have been part of our urban landscape and our collective imagination for nearly a century, at once feeding upon and stimulating an even older proclivity for self-dramatisation, a role-playing mode of being instantly recognisable as a quintessential Trinidadian trait. We play ourselves, make style, gallery, exantay. The mind’s camera rolls.

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But within the frame of Now Showing, who plays the lead? Fragments of handwritten text, like lines detached from a script, float over and around the images. The most revealing may be a simple recitation of the names of the days of the week: “Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday.” Because what the lens of the artist’s imagination brings into focus are precisely the details of the mundane — a concrete wall, a tree, a pair of feet walking past, shod in trendy Clarks boots — that give emotional texture to the movie of our everyday lives. (“The Life Movie”, as the Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill put it.) Now Showing hints at numerous narratives — personal, public, comic, tragic — unreeling simultaneously. But the key story is about how unassuming moments or gestures can become motifs or symbols or icons when they are observed and recorded — by a camera, a pencil, a pen.

The cut-tree (cut-nature) is, of course, the one outside the Forensic Centre in Federation Park. I have been looking at it for some years now — and especially so since the rise in daily murders in our city. I find it interesting that the tree was cut down, the trunk burnt out, yet it’s sprouting again. To me this says something about history — about persistence and
hope . . .

Often I am driving past this location. The people standing around [the tree] may have lost a son, a father, a brother or relative, for example. While waiting, they are hearing gunfire from the police shooting range over the wall.

— From Christopher Cozier’s notes on Now Showing

You can push the conceit too far. Life is not art. The guns shoot real bullets, and nobody has a stunt double. But we can’t live without remembering and imagining, and memory and imagination borrow forms and shapes from the alternative worlds created by artists. In other times and places, we might have understood moments of our lives as scenes from a play, chapters in a novel. Now we understand ourselves in a different and accelerated medium: we live in movies, music videos, video games. The images flash by faster and faster. What do we see when we freeze the frame?

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Some of Cozier’s preliminary sketches and source material for Now Showing, displayed at the launch of the print on 16 July, 2010. Photograph courtesy Richard Rawlins

Now Showing is a silkscreen edition limited to one hundred signed and numbered prints. It was commissioned by the trinidad+tobago film festival as the official 2010 festival image, and created in collaboration with master printer Luther Davis of Axelle Editions, New York. Elements of the work will appear on the festival poster and other merchandise.

The launch of Now Showing on 16 July, 2010, is covered in issue 13 of Draconian Switch. Filmmaker Mariel Brown has made a short documentary about the creation of the work.

Yesterday was Indian Arrival Day in Trinidad and Tobago, the annual occasion for commemorating the country’s ancestors from the Indian subcontinent and their long journeys here, across the dark waters of two oceans. Since it fell on a Sunday, we got the public holiday today instead; but, holiday or not, your editor-blogger was hard at work this afternoon publishing the latest pieces in the CRB.

Today’s additions to the May 2010 issue are reviews of recent books of short fiction by Jamaican-American Thomas Glave and Trinidadian Raymond Ramcharitar, as well as the second instalment of Vahni Capildeo’s essay “Questions of approach”, on her visit to India earlier this year. I didn’t particularly plan to publish the latter to coincide with Arrival Day, but it seems pleasingly appropriate today to read Vahni’s vivacious and penetrating account of her own arrival in the strange-yet-familiar city of Delhi:

The buildings were bigger than buildings I had known that resembled them: not skyscrapers, simply housing stacked up, compounded or magnified to be a greater size. I could not always tell if they were governmental, offices, or residential. There were balconies and bougainvillea.

India is this, India is that, I would not say.

Even when, walking back to the IIC one day, I encountered an elephant standing in the middle of the road, I refused to see it as particularly Indian. It was not big for an elephant and seemed aware of this, and weary. An Internet address to promote a French conversation group was chalked on its forehead and some French-style people were enjoying themselves on its back.

Even when a multi-jet fountain was playing and I was talking with poets and eating a pomegranate-jewel-encrusted mango reinterpretation of a sponge and custard pudding, I would not read into that the years of the art of service perfected under arbitrary, demanding rulers, of whom the Raj were not the most sophisticated.