Antilles: the weblog of the CRB

Sunday papers roundup

Links to some interesting reviews, columns, and features from newspapers in Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago:

- In the Stabroek News, in his weekly "Arts on Sunday" column, Al Creighton writes on "East Indian drama in the Caribbean", subtitled "still a work in progress". "There is a very wide gap between the poetry and fiction that focus on the East Indian presence and ethos and the written plays that treat the same thing," Creighton argues, before going on to discuss the works of Guyanese playwrights like Basil Balgobin, Rajkumari Singh, and Sheik Sadeek.

- Also in the Stabroek News, Ian McDonald writes an homage to Czeslaw Milosz: "One is blessed to be given longevity not only with reason intact but with the faculty which generates ideas and insights unimpaired and the ability to give expression to them still powerful. It is very rare."

- The "Arts and Leisure" section of the Jamaica Gleaner offers Laura Facey's review of Andrea Levy's novel Fruit of the Lemon, as well as two pieces of short fiction--"Chocolate Tree", by Kimmisha Thomas, and "Picket Fences", by Charmaine Morris--and a narrative poem, "Below the HTB Hard-dough Bread Line", by Soulette Gray.

- In the Jamaica Observer, Leisha Chen-Young writes about a visit to the Savacou Gallery in New York, founded by Jamaican Loris Crawford in 1985 to show the work of Caribbean, Latin American, and African artists.

- And in the Trinidad Express, Ruth Osman reports on a lecture--titled "The Writer and the Man" Criticising V.S. Naipaul"--delivered by Kenneth Ramchand last Thursday as part of UWI-St Augustine's "year of Naipaul". "In a lecture filled with humorous anecdotes and stories about his personal reaction to Naipaul's writing, Ramchand analysed our perception of the famous writer. He said that some people seemed to be more concerned with Naipaul himself, than with what he wrote."

Lagniappe: Geoffrey Philp announces the publication of a special Caribbean issue of Sable magazine, including an "intersong" with Kamau Brathwaite, fiction by Edwidge Danticat, poems by Kay Swaby and Esther Phillips, an essay on Louise Bennett-Coverly, "On My Bookshelf" by Philp himself, and much more.