Mervyn Morris

Do you know those moments when nothing has happened; nothing that you can talk about — yet you feel that some tremendous change has taken place? It is like the spinning and prickling in the limbs that you can feel at night when your bones are growing; except this other kind of change is more to do with how, and what, you are able to feel and think — a sudden roar in your secret imagination, or a new fluidity in your sense of yourself and the world, whether or not you find a place to express this.

The Jamaican poet Mervyn Morris’s poem “The Pond” is not “about” some big event or theme. It is that rare thing, a poem that brings you to one of those moments you live entirely alone and that transforms you . . .

— Vahni Capildeo muses on “The Pond” for YM, a magazine for “new readers and writers of poetry,” published by the British Poetry Society.

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:

•

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

•

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 . . .

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.

The first bimonthly online-only issue of the CRB — no. 21, dated May 2010 — wrapped up publication last week, with the third and final part of Vahni Capildeo’s vivacious essay on visiting India, “Questions of approach”. You can see the full contents of this issue here, just in case you missed something.

And now the CRB’s very small editorial team — that’s me, dear reader — is taking a short breather, and prepping to start publication of issue no. 22, dated July 2010, early next week. Stay tuned!

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.

Excerpt from The Terror and the Time, Rupert Roopnaraine’s 1979 film, including Martin Carter’s reading of his poem “This Is the Dark Time My Love”

Were Martin Carter still alive, he would be eighty-three today. Carter’s life and work have been much on my mind the past months. They offer exemplary matter for contemplation of questions about the place of the Caribbean writer in the world, about literary integrity and seriousness, about the meaning of literary success, and about the shape of contemporary Caribbean poetry.

His birthday seems an apt moment to introduce a new section at the CRB website. Readers may have noticed that the relaunched website includes a subject index page — a work in progress — where reviews and other pieces from the magazine are listed under major subject headings, making it easier to navigate our six-year archive. In the coming months, we plan to expand the subject index with pages dedicated to significant Caribbean writers, where we will list relevant CRB (and Antilles) pieces, along with a selection of interesting links to material online elsewhere.

I’m pleased that our new Martin Carter page is the first. There you’ll find links to Vahni Capildeo’s review of Carter’s Collected Poems from the November 2006 CRB, Stewart Brown’s essay on Carter’s art and legacy from our February 2006 issue, and the selections from Carter’s poetry notebooks that we published in November 2008 — as well as links to reviews and articles in other periodicals, biographical resources, and poems.

I will always be speaking with you. And if I falter,
and if I stop, I will still be speaking with you, in
words that are not uttered, are never uttered, never
made into the green sky, the green earth, the
green, green love . . .
….And I was bathing by the sea and there was a
gull, a white gull, so far, so far . . .
….I saw the weak wing flutter long before it did,
and the webbed foot dip, long before it did; and
the sudden wave, and the scarlet tinted foam of
a sunset burning like fire already gold in flames.

(From “Suite of Five Poems”, written in 1961
and first published in 2000 in Kyk-Over-Al)

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.

The CRB’s editorial engine is running again, though with the occasional cough and splutter — we’re not yet at cruising speed, as it were. But our May 2010 issue — our first in a year — is under way, with the first new reviews appearing at the start of the month and another batch published this week. Eventually we’ll settle into a more or less weekly schedule, with new material going live on the site every Monday.

Thus far, the May issue includes reviews of Anthony Winkler’s latest novel, Crocodile, and Geoffrey Philp’s book of short stories Who’s Your Daddy?; of collections of poems by Grace Nichols and Jennifer Rahim; of a book of interviews with Caryl Phillips, and of a literary study called Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum. We’ve also published the first instalment of a multi-part essay by Vahni Capildeo, recounting her recent visit to India for a literary conference — I hope this will be just the first in a series of longer prose narratives made possible by the CRB’s new format, in which we are unrestricted by printed page counts. And this week we’ve also published two new poems by Kei Miller.

The first of these, “This Zinc Roof”, is a sort of ode to the bare sheets of galvanised zinc — “this portion / Of ripple; this conductor of midday heat” — that both shelter and trap so many residents of the Caribbean’s desperate and depressed urban communities. When we planned to publish the poem this week, we had no idea that the events now unfolding in Kingston would give its poignant verses such a sharp and timely edge:

This that the poor of the world look up to
On humid nights, as if it were a crumpled
Heaven they could be lifted into….

This clanging of feet and boots,
Men running from Babylon whose guns
Are drawn against the small measure

Of their lives….