Quick links

- Geoffrey Philp on his recently completed novel, a love-story-cum-murder-mystery "whose narrative, if it can be called that, is held together by blogs, e-mails, and Instant Messages (IMs)".

- One of Nalo Hopkinson's "writing log" posts leads to a stream of comments discussing the way the Caribbean is portrayed in mainstream culture.

- Kwame Dawes asks, where is the pulse of poetry today?

- In the London Review of Books, Hilary Mantel reviews a biography of Jamaica-born adventuress (how else would you describe her?) Elizabeth Marsh.

- In the North Carolina News & Observer, Dean C. Smith reviews Derek Walcott's Selected Poems.

Dear diary

"The best diarists aren't necessarily the best of men," writes Alastair Harper at the UK Guardian books blog, "though the best are, as it happens, usually men: grumpy, defeatist, perverted, drunken, misanthropic and misogynistic." My own favourite diarist is not a man, nor is she grumpy, defeatist, perverted, drunken, misanthropic, or misogynistic. Instead, Virginia Woolf is gossipy, neurotic, a wonderful mimic with a good memory for conversation, and the sheer pleasure she gets from unbuttoned, relaxed writing shimmers from every page. --But Harper's blog post makes me think how few diaries or journals by Caribbean writers have ever been published--none that I can think of, actually, if you don't count Andrew Salkey's Havana Journal and Georgetown Journal, which take the form of diaries but were always intended to be published, public narratives.

Whose diaries would I most like to read? I'd say Naipaul, but he almost certainly doesn't keep one. C.L.R. James's, but I don't believe he kept one either (and when, o when, will we get his full correspondence published?). Did Selvon? Martin Carter? Does Walcott? Does Lamming? The Caribbean seems to have excelled at just about every other literary genre--who might our great diarist be?

"More democratic"

Drowned out by the brouhaha of Hay, and then by the miles of column inches devoted to the Orange prize, the Commonwealth prize deserves more attention.... For Colin Channer, director of Jamaica's Calabash literary festival (where this year's winners were announced) and one of this year's final judges, the Commonwealth is more genuinely international than the Booker, and more democratic. It is certainly more likely to showcase a broad range of fiction.

--Toby Lichtig, arguing at the UK Guardian books blog that the British media should pay more attention to the Commonwealth Writers' Prizes. He also quotes Colin Channer's recommendations for "modernising" the prize. "Too many of the regional judges are academics."

"Rodney did not sleep to dream"

Rodney died in 1980, a mere twenty-seven years ago. It is quite remarkable that in such short historical time, a generation would become virtually oblivious to Walter Rodney's intellectual stature, his political contribution to the struggle for democracy in Guyana, and his approach to politics that transcended narrow, racial mobilization and class elitism. Rodney did not sleep to dream but dreamed to change Guyana. The question is why would there be such ignorance about Rodney's monumental contribution in his country of birth?

--In the week of the 27th anniversary of Walter Rodney's assassination, Linden Lewis writes a short essay in the Stabroek News on historical forgetfulness and Rodney's legacy.

CRB archive: "Goodman's Bay"

A poem by Christian Campbell, first published in the February 2005 CRB


Not even a chewed bone,
a used rubber in the seaweed, cut glass
smiling beneath the sand.
We don’t see them.

He is my brother.
Our hearts beat the same.
I have bad shoulders,
he has bad knees. We have
given our bodies an atlas.

He breathes softly,
on time, and we talk
very little, the good things, gasping.
I have long legs, one stride
to every two from him.

We run the dusk
at dusk. Everything
is open and live
with silence. All viscera.
God, there is too much
red in the sky.

Making braille in the sand
like this, we feel it in the lower back.
The sinking, the slipping,
all the little slopes and mounds.
We are listening to the body.

Whoever needs to howl
should howl. The warm breath
coming from the sea. The full moon
pulls the tide like a stubborn skirt.

Everything will last.

Children squawk on a swing, flying.
Bahamian children in the night.
The hotels are a glance away.

You feel it when you run
the sand. All of it,
the whole of your body
in the world. The swing
creaks slow, like love
in the morning. God,
the night is so blue.

Man and woman in the dark
water. Ghost and ghost on the seawall.
Someone sews false hair
into a slim girl’s dreams.
She does this at night for no good reason.
All this beauty for nothing.

Walking back with our chests
blooming, I taste my own sweat.
There are people dusting off
their feet as if dancing.
We pass a woman in a large,
damp t-shirt, nothing but salt.
We can’t see her face,
the smile or the frown, the hard
look of judgment. But the moon
is bareback and blind and the ground
is an altar of piss and rum and we know
that somewhere on this split tongue
of stone, someone just died, just finished
making love.


["Goodman's Bay", along with ten other poems by Campbell, appears in the anthology New Caribbean Poetry, edited by Kei Miller.]

McLemee on James on The Sopranos

In 6 seasons over 10 years, “The Sopranos” has confirmed again and again C.L.R. James’s point about the gangster as an archetypal figure of American society. But the creators have gone far beyond his early insights. I say that with all due respect to James’s memory--and with the firm certainty that he would have been a devoted fan and capable interpreter.

--Scott McLemee, at Inside Higher Ed, explaining how C.L.R. James's American Civilisation can help us understand The Sopranos--yes, really. (I've always been grateful to Scott for his review of Letters from London published in Bookforum in 2003).

Making it up

Judy Raymond, Caribbean Beat editor and sometime CRB contributor, on Jean Rhys and the "personal art" of make-up.

At university, fascinated by theatre but too timid to act, I did stage make-up. I plunged in at the deep end, turning undergraduates into pensioners, making them up to play in a musical about death that was set in an old people’s home. It was called The Dark, it was as bad as it sounds, and I don’t think it even ran for the full week at the Oxford Playhouse. But it taught me to work with greasepaint and do wrinkles. Later I learned kabuki make-up, for a production of West Side Story; and I grappled with artificial hair to give Dogberry a fearsome set of mutton-chop whiskers in a Victorian-style production of Much Ado About Nothing, staged in Trinity Gardens.

You give a 20-year-old wrinkles by using a blend of dark brown and crimson lake greasepaint sticks, mixing it on the back of your hand and applying it, swiftly, in as few strokes as possible, with a paintbrush. To make them realistic, you tell the actor to smile or frown, and the natural fold lines of those expressions will remain a few seconds after, long enough to trace them firmly with your brush. Those faint creases are where their real wrinkles will form, sneakily, over the years.

The dress rehearsals were the best: that was the first time you did the make-up, and it was a huge boost to the teenage cast’s confidence when they were suddenly made to look the part of the middle-aged tyrant or the bumbling constable they were required to impersonate.

That was when I first started wearing make-up seriously--except that it wasn’t entirely serious, because there’s always an element of play in it: who shall I be today? How would I look with lizard-green lids, or scarlet lips? It was more fun then, in the 80s, when you could paint on goth eyes with heavy kohl liner and charcoal eyeshadow, or venture out in green eyeliner and blue-and-silver eyelids . . . and have them much admired.

Nowadays, though, wearing too much make-up would make me look both older and less grown-up. Slap, the English call it. I wouldn’t want to look like an old slapper. But I still wouldn’t leave the house without it, out of an unsavoury, neurotic mix of vanity and its opposite. Even if I’m just buying milk at Hi-Lo, in my uniform of white t-shirt and jeans, my eyeshadow (a smudge of taupe) comes too.

Putting on make-up is still a form of playing dress-up, though my disguises now have to be more subtle. The ideal now, in this day and my age, is to look as if you’re naturally lovely but just happen to be wearing a touch of make-up, and not like a mistress of that most frivolous art.

Because, like fashion, it’s not considered a real art. Make-up is superficial, ephemeral, in the most literal sense. So I felt guilty when I arrived home the other day with not one but three new lipsticks. I’m appalled, honestly, to find I now own 27 (just did a spot of research there). That isn’t rational. This is an addiction, though a minor one.

But it also happened partly because I’m still in search of the perfect pink: not as deep as rose, as bright as bubblegum, or as inconspicuous as nude (you see the difficulty). One of the new ones has turned out to be a bright coral, which I’ll probably never wear, except for some special effect, like the creamy matt pale pink one I only use for a 60s look, with no blusher, ivory eyelids, and lots of black liquid eyeliner.

. . . But I digress. One of the reasons make-up is thought frivolous, and frowned upon by certain varieties of feminist, is because it’s thought to be for the viewing pleasure of men. Well, up to a point. Yes, women are seen, looked at as objects in ways that men are not--not necessarily sexual objects, though, but aesthetic ones. And self-adornment by people of both sexes may be the oldest of the applied arts. The hard truth, too, is that looks matter, and beauty, and the human concern with beauty, were not invented by men.

If you’re the sort of person who’s interested in the other arts, who cares about books and music and paintings and the look of the space you live in, it’s a logical extension of that concern to practise a personal art, with yourself as a canvas. Indeed, make-up is a most perfect form of self-expression, with yourself as not only the artist, but also both the subject and the object of your art. (Take it a little further and you become Cindy Sherman.)

Make-up improves on what nature gave you, and thus makes you look more like your real self. And yet the face you paint on is also a mask; which may be not only a disguise, but also a form of protection.

I think of the poignant photos of Jean Rhys as a very old woman, so obviously desperately sad, so carefully made up, and still beautiful.

She too would have learned about make-up in the theatre, when after leaving school she tried to be an actress. She became a chorus girl, but she was always terrified of the audience, and soon gave up the stage.

But in the dazzle of the naked bulbs that ringed the dressing-room mirrors, Rhys had discovered the uses of make-up. You come out of the cold outside world into the shabby intimacy of backstage, where with the rest of the cast you conspire to deceive the audience. Behind the bogus backdrops of the set, between the bare walls and harsh lights, you put on a new identity, in borrowed clothes and, thinner but more effective, a layer of greasepaint that covers the fear.

In those days nice girls didn’t paint, but in any case Rhys soon slipped below the threshold of respectability. A lover recorded in 1915 that she spent hours in front of a mirror, “combing out her lovely hair and playing with a make-up box filled with a variety of unguents, powders and lipsticks.”

She was 25 then, and didn’t need it to make her beautiful. She shouldn’t have needed it at 80. But this is how the novelist David Plante draws her in old age, in a picture as careful as it is cruel.

“Her make-up was hit-and-miss,” he writes. “There were patches of thick beige powder on her jaw and on the side of her nose, her lipstick was as much around her lips as on them, the marks of the eye-pencil criss-crossed her lids, so I thought she might easily have jabbed it in her eyes.”

By then, at last, Rhys was being feted as a great writer, thanks to her last and best novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. She had money to extend and heat her tiny cottage, to pay for nice clothes and trips to see new friends in London (among them Lady Antonia Fraser, also a writer and a beauty who took pleasure in that beauty). Why would Rhys feel the need to daub herself in this clumsy way, so that Plante could portray her as a clown?

Because she had so much to hide, although she revealed so much of herself in her fiction. Crippled by childhood wounds, Rhys had never learned the skills to cope with life. Very early on, she’d been afflicted by a profound loneliness that lasted through three marriages. She’d outlived three husbands, failed as a mother, endured poverty for decades. She met with success as a writer when she was an old woman, too late to enjoy it.

Her beauty was a shield and a consolation, though it didn’t make her life easier in any material way. Restored by make-up, it gave her a way to face the world.

--JR

Quick links

- Kwame Dawes on his "first real influence", Gerard Manley Hopkins.

- Marlon James on running afoul of US immigration.

- Geoffrey Philp on his new children's book, Grandpa Sydney's Anancy Stories.

- Nalo Hopkinson on where you can buy her handicraft online--latest item on offer is a music box.

- Tishani Doshi (at the UK Guardian books blog) on poetry at the Hay Festival, including this brief mention of Derek Walcott's appearance:

Only the previous night, I'd watched Derek Walcott receive a standing ovation in the very same tent when he recited, quite emotionally, Walter de la Mare's "Farewell". One woman in the audience requested that he read his own "Love After Love" because it had a special place in her heart. And he did.

- And Randy Kennedy (in the New York Times) on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the late Cuba-born, Puerto Rico-raised (i.e. Caribbean) artist who is representing the United States at this year's Venice Biennale.