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.

Eric Roach. Photograph courtesy Laurence Breiner

Today’s Stabroek News includes an essay by Al Creighton on the Tobagonian poet Eric Roach, one of Caribbean literature’s great tragic figures.

Born in Tobago in 1915, educated at a grammar school in Scarborough, Roach began publishing his poems in the late 1930s in local newspapers. Over the next forty years he created an important body of work, both poems and plays, and in the 1950s developed a regional audience via literary journals like Bim and Kyk-Over-Al and the BBC Caribbean Voices programme. But, as the scholar Laurence Breiner writes,

Some fear of going unnoticed haunted Roach throughout his career. He often seemed to be caught in the wrong time or the wrong place. In the 1950s, his most productive decade, he watched talented contemporaries turn away from writing poetry, or emigrate, or both: chief among them George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Cecil Herbert, and H.A. Telemaque. Committed to the Caribbean, and sure (in those days) of his talent, he worried whether poetry could survive in the Caribbean climate (social as much as meteorological).

In 1962 Roach stopped writing poems for eight years, and though his work was now included in a number of international anthologies, he appears to have struggled with a sense of futility and despair. In 1965, Roach wrote this biographical note for the British anthology Verse and Voice:

He has been a soldier, teacher, civil servant and failed writer. Born nearly fifty years ago in the tiny, little known island of Tobago where his family are peasants, Roach hoped to become a poet, but his talent for verse did not develop beyond his native dooryard, and after a few years he abandoned the writing of verse.

In 1974, in an act better remembered than any of his poems (the final irony), Roach drowned himself at Quinam Bay.

Two decades later, Roach’s collected poems were finally published, and in 2008 Breiner’s book Black Yeats: Eric Roach and the Politics of Caribbean Poetry offered a sustained critical assessment of his oeuvre. The November 2006 CRB included an essay by Breiner, “Laureate of nowhere”, drawing on his research for Black Yeats, and considering the reasons for Roach’s “low visibility” among Caribbean writers:

Roach at heart always remained a man of the dooryard and the village, but as a poet he had global instincts, a hunger to be widely heard and heeded. He saw the Federation as presenting him with a resolution for the dilemma of his generation, in the form of an opportunity to vastly expand the “horizon” of his audience while staying at home on the “private hillock” of his island, rather than emigrating. If the Federation had succeeded, he would have been its national poet, with a bronze statue on the grounds of the now-vanished capital. But it failed, and Roach was suddenly the laureate of nowhere.

In our August 2008 issue, Vahni Capildeo gave a contemporary Caribbean poet’s assessment of Roach’s career, in her review of Black Yeats. Roach’s poems and his life story — the example of his dedication and his despair — continue to haunt some younger Trinidadian writers. Jennifer Rahim’s recent book Approaching Sabbaths — reviewed by Ian Dieffenthaller in the May 2010 CRB — includes a sequence of poems titled “A Return to Quinam Bay”. Rahim re-traces Roach’s final journey and meditates on the intersection of literature and history, truth and ambition:

Quinam is a bay west of the first lies
of discovery. Three hills that never were,
people never seen. There a poet swam

to sea to reverse history. My version:
invention was his one hope all along,
but its light dulled to night in him.

I write now to make all our stories go on.

During the CRB’s break in publication last year, your Antilles blogger put his head together with two writer friends — Vahni Capildeo and Anu Lakhan — and started a modest little publishing project, the literary and art journal Town. Each issue contains just a few short pieces of writing, poems mostly, and two or three images. Town appears at irregular intervals — roughly, every two or three months — in two formats. We print simple broadside editions, and post them in public locations — on walls, lampposts, inside bookshops, etc. — and each issue also appears online, where readers can download PDFs of the broadsides to make their own physical copies. Town is rooted in Port of Spain, but international in scope: the four issues we’ve published so far have included writers from five continents.

The latest issue, our fourth, is published this week. It features poets from Jamaica, Hungary, Belarus, and Britain — Ishion Hutchinson, Agnes Lehoczky, Valzhyna Mort, and John Whale — and images by a Vincentian artist, Holly Bynoe. Antilles readers in Port of Spain can keep an eye out for the broadsides appearing randomly around the city, and others further afield can find this issue here.

André Alexis. Photograph courtesy the CBC

Reviewing is, by its nature, the chronicle of a small community: writer, book, reader. It is, for the brief time it exists, a community of equals. A reader/reviewer who fails to appreciate or understand a book tends to blame the book or the writer. And, in fact, it may well be that the book is ineptly done or that the writer is at fault. But readers are generally blind to their own deficiencies, and reviewers even more so. It’s very, very rare to find a reviewer — whose job, after all, is to convince us that he or she knows whereof he or she speaks — who will even admit the possibility that he or she is the weak member in the community he or she is chronicling.

Well, yes, but what should the reviewer do? Begin any negative review with a mea culpa, with an apology for his or her betrayal of the book under consideration? No, obviously, that would be fatuous. The problem is, rather, in the approach. Our reviews have become, at their worst, about the revelation of the reviewer’s opinion, not about a consideration of the book or an account of the small world that briefly held writer and reviewer in the orbit of a book. Reviews have turned into a species of autobiography, with the book under review being a pretext for personal revelation.

— From an essay by Trinidadian-Canadian writer André Alexis on “The Long Decline” of literary criticism in Canada, published in the latest issue of The Walrus.

The latest issue of the Trinidad-based art and design e-magazine Draconian Switch was released today. Edited and designed by Richard Rawlins, DS 12 features profiles of fashion designer Robert Young and musician Nigel Rojas, photos by Rodell Warner, plus an essay on “the strangling of Carnival” and coverage of recent artists’ projects. Download the PDF here.