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 . . .

Caryl Phillips. Photograph courtesy Georgia Popplewell/Caribbean Free Photo

The trinidad+tobago film festival/2010 programme offers a number of workshops for aspiring filmmakers, including a session on adapting literary works for the screen, led by Caryl Phillips.

The ttff provides this information:

The practice of turning a work of literature into a film is almost as old as the medium of filmmaking itself. Yet the potential for using Caribbean literature as a source for making films remains largely unexplored. In this workshop, facilitated by novelist and screenwriter Caryl Phillips, participants will get to grips with adapting a classic work of Caribbean literature for the screen. Using Jean Rhys’s short story “Let Them Call it Jazz” as his template, Phillips will take the participants through the necessary steps of adaptation before they attempt some writing of their own. Phillips will then critique the participants’ work.

Saturday 2 October, 9.00 am–4.00 pm
University of the West Indies, St Augustine
TT$300 (lunch included). Discounted price for students: TT$250
Pre-registration is required. Call (868) 621 0709 to register

About the facilitator:
Caryl Phillips is a St Kitts-born British writer. His work includes the radio play The Wasted Years (1984, BBC Giles Cooper Award), and the novels Crossing the River (1993, James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and A Distant Shore (2003, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize). Phillips wrote the film of his own novel, The Final Passage (Peter Hall, 1996), as well as the screenplay for Playing Away (Horace Ové, 1986), and the film of V.S. Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur (Ismail Merchant, 2001). He is presently professor of English at Yale University.

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.

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.

Probably the most iconic image from any Caribbean film: Jimmy Cliff as Ivanhoe Martin in The Harder They Come

The CRB’s chief interest, as our name makes clear, is books. But it’s also clear that no art form is isolated or insulated from others, and literature is part of a creative continuum with visual and performing arts. From early on, the CRB has tried to engage with Caribbean art especially, as well as film and music, and in the magazine’s current online incarnation we intend to expand our critical focus to pay more sustained, serious attention to these forms of creative imagination and thought.

Tomorrow the September 2010 issue of the CRB will begin publication. I’m very pleased about two particular elements. First, later this month we’ll launch a regular music column, in which we’ll publish reviews of new releases in a wide range of Caribbean genres, as well as short essays on specific musicians and composers, significant songs and albums of the past, events, trends, and musical phenomena. Second, the September CRB will include a special section on recent Caribbean film, supported by the trinidad+tobago film festival 2010.

This is the CRB’s second partnership with the ttff, who previously supported a small section of film reviews in our August 2008 issue. This month’s special section is more ambitious: for the duration of this issue, we’ll publish a new review each week of films drawn from the ttff’s 2009 and 2010 programmes. (The films for review were selected by the CRB, and the reviews independently commissioned; the reviewers’ opinions are their own, not the ttff’s.) We’re grateful the ttff recognises the importance of creating a critical context for the work of Caribbean filmmakers, and we hope this initiative is the beginning of more regular film coverage in the magazine.

You can find out more about the trinidad+tobago film festival 2010 at their website, with news and updates at the festival blog.

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.