The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature — which will be awarded for the first time this year — has announced its 2011 longlist of ten books, in three genre categories:

Poetry

= Elegguas, by Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados) — Wesleyan
= A Light Song of Light, by Kei Miller (Jamaica) — Carcanet
= White Egrets, by Derek Walcott (St. Lucia) — Faber

Fiction

= The Loneliness of Angels, by Myriam Chancy (Haiti/Canada) — Peepal Tree
= Redemption in Indigo, by Karen Lord (Barbados) — Small Beer
= The Amazing Absorbing Boy, by Rabindranath Maharaj (Trinidad and Tobago/Canada) — Knopf Canada
= How to Escape a Leper Colony, by Tiphanie Yanique (US Virgin Islands) — Graywolf

Non-fiction

= Beauty and Sadness, by Andre Alexis (Trinidad and Tobago/Canada) — House of Anansi
= Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work, by Edwidge Danticat (Haiti/USA) — Princeton
= The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, by V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad and Tobago/UK) — Picador

As I’ve mentioned before, your Antilles blogger is on the organising committee for the OCM Bocas Prize, so it gives me much satisfaction to report that we’ve reached this stage in the judging process. I’m also pleased it’s such a diverse list, with writers representing six Caribbean countries, and ranging from two Nobel laureates (Walcott and Naipaul, of course) to two debut authors (Lord and Yanique).

There’s more information about the longlist here, and full details of the prize here. The three genre category winners — making up the shortlist for the overall prize — will be announced on 28 March, and the OCM Bocas Prize ceremony will be one of the highlights of the Bocas Lit Fest at the end of April.

V.S. Naipaul in his younger days

NAIPAUL

I’m unusual in that I have had a long career. Most people from limited backgrounds write one book. I’m a prose writer. A prose book contains many thousands of sentiments, observations, thoughts — it is a lot of work. The pattern for most people is to do a little thing about their own lives. My career has been other. I found more and more to write. If I had the strength, I probably would do more; there is always more to write about. I just don’t have the energy, the physical capacity. You know, one can spend so many days now being physically wretched. I’m aging badly. I’ve given so much to this career for so long. I spend so much time trying to feel well. One becomes worn out by living, by writing, by thinking.

Have you got enough now?

INTERVIEWER

Yes.

NAIPAUL

Do you think I’ve wasted a bit of myself talking to you?

INTERVIEWER

Not, of course, how I’d put it.

NAIPAUL

You’ll cherish it?

INTERVIEWER

You don’t like interviews.

NAIPAUL

I don’t like them because I think that thoughts are so precious you can talk them away. You can lose them.

— V.S. Naipaul, interviewed by Jonathan Rosen and Tarun Tejpal for the Fall 1998 Paris Review.

It’s often said the Paris Review invented the modern literary interview; the magazine’s famous interview archive, stretching from 1953 to the present, is now fully available online. Other Caribbean writers included: Jean Rhys, 1979; Guillermo Cabrera Infante, 1983; and Derek Walcott, 1986.

Marcus Garvey. Photograph courtesy Oxford University Press

As I mentioned in the previous post, today is V.S. Naipaul’s birthday — which he shares, by [insert preferred adjective] coincidence, with Marcus Garvey.

Geoffrey Philp is celebrating the latter over at his blog, with a poem (“Marcus, the dream is never too much to bear”) and a guest post by Colin Grant, author of the recent biography Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. Philp asked Grant: if Garvey were alive today, would he be blogging? (He also posed the question to his readers, via an online poll; eighty-three per cent have answered in the affirmative.)

Grant writes:

Marcus Garvey had shown a love of words and learning from a young age. Famously, he walked around the quiet coastal town of St Ann’s Bay in Jamaica with a dictionary in his pocket. He’d learn half a dozen new words in the morning and try them out in conversation with his friends and startled adults in the evening . . .

Garvey, with the username “Black Star Rising”, would not confine himself to a blog; he would be an engaging and energetic user of Twitter, with lots of “followers,” and would have an active and influential Facebook page, with lots of “friends.”

One excellent online Garvey resource is the website of the UCLA African Studies Centre’s Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Project, which is engaged in publishing a definitive edition of the massive archive of documents covering Garvey’s career. The website includes a good introductory biography, excerpts from the published volumes, and downloadable files of the only known audio recordings of Garvey.

(Jeremy Taylor reviewed Grant’s Negro with a Hat in the August 2008 CRB.)

V.S. Naipaul on BBC TV, 1994

“I’ve always been a writer. I’ve thought about it every day. There’s not been a day or part of a day when I’ve not thought about it . . . It has enabled me to be a free man . . . I’ve not written anything that I didn’t want to write.”

— V.S. Naipaul, interviewed by Jeremy Isaacs for the BBC TV programme Face to Face in May 1994. The BBC has just added a series of forty radio and TV interviews with “British” writers to their online archive, at a special page called “In Their Own Words”. The earliest, from 1937, is with Virginia Woolf; the most recent, from last year, with A.S. Byatt. The only other semi-Caribbean writer in the lot is Zadie Smith.

(By coincidence, it’s Naipaul’s birthday tomorrow.)

Odyssey Editions web page for The Enigma of Arrival, showing a page from the manuscript in the Naipaul archive

The literary agent Andrew Wylie said on Wednesday that he would begin his own publishing venture, called Odyssey Editions, which will produce e-book editions of titles by some of his clients, including Saul Bellow, John Updike and Philip Roth.

Mr. Wylie said his new company would focus on older titles whose digital rights are not owned by traditional publishers. The books will be available exclusively at Amazon’s Kindle store for two years.

— So reports the New York Times. The announcement has caused a minor kerfuffle in publishing circles. Caribbean readers may be more interested to know that one of the titles released by Odyssey as an e-book is V.S. Naipaul’s “novel” The Enigma of Arrival. The elegantly designed Odyssey website includes an excerpt from the book’s opening chapter, an “author commentary” (drawn from Naipaul’s 1987 essay “On Being a Writer”), and images of two manuscript pages from the Naipaul archive at the University of Tulsa.

Actually, these are typescript pages, with Naipaul’s handwritten revisions. The original manuscript is in longhand, in a series of ordinary school exercise books. Your Antilles blogger can boast of having seen these — and indeed held them! — on a visit to the archive in 2007. Yes, my hands did slightly tremble.

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?

•

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.

•

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?

•••

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.

Wilson Harris. Photograph courtesy Faber

Sir Vidia is no longer the Caribbean’s sole literary knight. As many Antilles readers have probably heard, Wilson Harris has been granted a knighthood in the latest British honours list. “It is a great moment in Guyanese literary history,” says David Dabydeen. Though your Antilles blogger is not keen on honours that come with titles, it’s nonetheless deeply gratifying to see Harris’s contribution to literature recognised by his adopted country.

Harris is a conundrum: a major Caribbean writer of powerful imaginative and intellectual influence who is at the same time little read and even less understood. His books are difficult in almost every sense, and extraordinarily ambitious: a cumulative and profound effort to erase borders between prose and poetry, fiction and metaphysics. Harris confronts the boundaries of politics, history, and language which have divided the natural world and the human imagination, and attempts to transcend them in an act of creative restoration or recuperation. His novels are like literary time machines, bringing past, present, and future into a single frame of the imagination, but also seeking out unities of space and place. He deals with abstract concepts like eternity and infinity in moving, poetic, if usually esoteric prose. I find reading Harris simultaneously frustrating, thrilling, and profoundly moving.

Anyway, it seems an apt moment for the CRB to introduce our new Wilson Harris author index page, which lists relevant content from the magazine, plus links to other useful material elsewhere online. We’ve also just set up a page for Lorna Goodison (and we introduced our Martin Carter page last week). We’ll be adding more pages for significant Caribbean writers in the coming weeks and months — keep an eye on our subject index.