Call for applications: Bridget Jones Travel Award

Writers, artists, musicians, and arts researchers from across the Caribbean: take a look at the call for applications for the 2008 Bridget Jones Travel Award.

Arts researchers or practitioners living and working in the Caribbean are eligible to apply for the Bridget Jones Travel Award, the deadline for which is the 11th January 2008. The winner of the award will present their work at the Society for Caribbean Studies Annual Conference, 2nd-4th July 2008 at Edinburgh University.

Eligibility

If you are an arts practitioner or researcher (postgraduate, postdoctoral or professional) working in any region of the Anglophone, Hispanic, Francophone or Dutch-speaking Caribbean, you may apply for the Award. The successful recipient will receive £650 towards travel expenses and, in addition, a full bursary to cover conference fees and accommodation. Applications are especially welcome from individuals with no institutional affiliations. We encourage visual artists, performers and creative writers to submit proposals in addition to the more usual scholarly research papers.

How to apply

To apply for the Award you must submit either:
(a) A proposal for a presentation of your work, in the areas of film, literature, visual or performing arts.
(b) A proposal for a reading of original creative work.
Applications should be in writing, including a covering letter, full curriculum vitae and statements from two referees who are able to comment on your work. Completed applications must be received by 11th January 2008. A decision will be made by the committee in late January.

Applications and enquiries should be sent by e-mail or by post to Kate Quinn, Chair of the Bridget Jones Award Sub-Committee:

Kate Quinn
Institute for the Study of the Americas
31 Tavistock Square
London WC1H 9HA
kate.quinn@sas.ac.uk

For more information on the Bridget Jones Travel Award and the Society for Caribbean Studies, visit the Society website on www.caribbeanstudies.org.uk.

Remembering Martin Carter

13 December was the tenth anniversary of the death of Martin Carter, a great Caribbean man of letters and a poet who stands--alongside Walcott, Brathwaite, and Bennett--at the head of the West Indian poetic tradition.

In yesterday's Stabroek News, Al Creighton took a brief look back at Carter's posthumous career and offered close readings of two of his poems, "The Poems Man" and "The Conjunction". The CRB has run two substantial pieces on Carter in the last couple of years. In our November 2006 issue, Vahni Capildeo reviewed University of Hunger, the edition of Carter's poems edited by Gemma Robinson. And in February 2006, we published an essay on Carter, "The truth of craft", by Stewart Brown (who co-edited another edition of the great man's poems last year, with Ian McDonald).

(I wrote a review of University of Hunger too--in the July/August 2006 Caribbean Beat.)

Other Carter resources online:
- his very brief Wikipedia entry (in need of some expert attention)
- his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for those with subscriptions
- a short tribute by Geoffrey Philp, published on Carter's birthday in 2006
- a review of Carter's 1977 Poems of Succession, by Wyck Williams
- an interview with Carter done in 1995 by Gemma Robinson

Stabroek links

In today's Stabroek News: Ian McDonald on Michael Gilkes's play The Last of the Redmen, and Stanley Greaves on "the working-class contribution to the development of art in Guyana".

Times notables

The New York Times has released its annual list of "100 Notable Books of the Year", chosen by the book review editors (in a few days they'll name their ten best books of the year). They include four titles of particular Caribbean interest: Derek Walcott's Selected Poems, ed. Edward Baugh; Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm Dying; and Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by the Trinidadian writer Arnold Rampersad. As 2007 draws to a close, we'll be seeing lots more lists like this--maybe, dear readers, we'll even do one here at Antilles.... Any suggestions? What are the most interesting, most revelatory, most enjoyable Caribbean books of the past year? Tell us in the comments below.

Coming home

On Saturday 17 November, at the annual graduation exercises of the University of Trinidad and Tobago, an honorary doctorate was conferred on the writer Ralph de Boissière (an excerpt from whose autobiography, Life on the Edge, appears in the November CRB). Below is the citation read by Kenneth Ramchand, associate provost of UTT's Academy of the Arts, Letters, Culture, and Public Affairs.

***

Yes, the eyes open in childhood. But they open afresh in youth, in maturity, in old age, perceiving each time with a different understanding the bonds we call home. Trees, speech, bird calls, meandering clouds and wind and rain--all become an extension of yourself in childhood, a larger you that is both outside of you and a part of you, as you are only tantalisingly and dimly aware. You have no name for this condition which is both frightening and dear to you. The word "home" comes later like a surprise. With time it begins to seem that you are a creation of home, this patch of earth and all that exists upon it, even as home is at the same time your own creation, which you once fashioned with love and wonderment, and fear of the unknown.

--From Life on the Edge


Chancellor,

I couldn’t decide whether my theme should be spiritual (the return of a native) or literary (the re-discovery of another jewel in the lost literature of the West Indies). So let us have it both ways.

Ralph Anthony Charles de Boissière was born on October 6, 1907. His first novel was published in 1952; his most recent came out in 2007. His first marriage took place in Trinidad in 1935; his second was solemnised in Australia on November 3, 2007.

You could say, Chancellor, he was always serious about his craft.

In his hundredth year he completed Life on the Edge: The Autobiography of Ralph de Boissière. It is a compellingly honest, heartfelt, poetic, and above all courageous book. It is an epic account of the never-ending and exhilarating struggle to find out, to hold on, to make and re-make a life in a fragmented and widening world.

This autobiography is also of huge social, political and cultural significance: it makes us see and imagine ourselves in our landscape and history for a full one hundred years, in the ennobling way that only one who loves and claims a people and a place no matter what, can make us see and imagine.

Before this, he wrote five novels, over eighteen short stories, and a number of plays, including a West Indian musical drama, Calypso Isle, which played to full houses at The New Theatre in Melbourne in 1955. Mr de Boissière has lived in Australia for nearly sixty years, but the content, theme, and tone of his work from Crown Jewel to Rum and Coca-Cola to Homeless in Paradise and The Call of the Rainbow (the last two covering the period 1956 to 1970) have always been West Indian. This Trinidad Quartet establishes de Boissière as the most important writer for understanding and feeling the making of modern Trinidad.

Chancellor, our honorary graduands are presented on the day when academic degrees are conferred upon undergraduates, not because we want to test their patience but because we want our young people to find inspiration in the lives of those with academic training who have shared their expertise with their society and the world; and because we also want them to see that those who have not formally passed through the university also have gifts, skills, discipline, and commitment that have enriched our society and the world.

Chancellor, Ralph de Boissière did not go to university. He came from one of the best-known French Creole families, but this "white" boy was an enemy of colonialism and privilege. As a simmering youth he grew his hair long long long for months in inarticulate protest. He caused real dismay and alarm in his family and among his class by associating with working people and ordinary citizens in their natural habitats.

And then, in the late 1920s and 1930s, he joined up with a group of rip-roaring artists and intellectuals who had political and educational intent (C.L.R. James, Alfred Mendes, Albert Gomes, the violinist Sonny Carpenter). They produced the magazine called Trinidad and the famous journal The Beacon. They were fired up by the Russian Revolution, Garveyism, Negritude, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Harlem Renaissance, and were part of a shaking of colonial Trinidad that increased in intensity with the Butler riots, leading to one-person-one-vote in the 1940s, and the possibility of a democratic revolution.

Chancellor, James and Mendes received honorary doctorates for their Beacon activities; and the titles of their novels (Minty Alley, Pitch Lake, and Black Fauns) are familiar to many. But the name of de Boissière is kept alive in this island only by a handful of scholars.

Take notice, Chancellor. His first novel, Crown Jewel, was published in 1952, and his second, Rum and Coca-Cola, in 1956. This was the Golden Age when artists, painters, dancers, sculptors, musicians dreamed of Federation and because of Federation; a time when Sam Selvon, George Lamming, Roger Mais and Edgar Mittelholzer were beginning their careers and raising the West Indian novel high high high.

So why doesn’t de Boissière figure in the conversation about the West Indian novel? In the 1950s and 1960s London was the West Indian literary capital. With a young family and with the closing of the privileged ranks against him, de Boissière went to Chicago to train as a motor mechanic. He ended up working on the assembly line of General Motors in Australia in 1948. Who knows, Mr Chancellor, you might have driven in a Holden with the de Boissière touch.

De Boissière’s first two novels capture two watershed moments in our history. Crown Jewel depicts Trinidadian society in the years between 1935 and 1937 when men and women of the working class and of every ethnic origin began the process which led to universal suffrage, and political independence.

In de Boissière’s own words, “Rum and Coca-Cola deals with the war years when tens of thousands of American soldiers and civilians were building military bases on the island. The American military had in effect become our rulers. There is not the same tension as in Crown Jewel because everyone had a job and many had two. The conflicts were of a more subtle sort-—the breaking down of British prestige, the mockery of former British might, under American occupation.”

We are still innocent of the meaning of these two moments.

The two novels remained virtually unknown till the 1980s, when they were reprinted in London by the firm of Allison and Busby. In 1973, the late, lone Clifford Sealy called Crown Jewel Trinidad’s “most important political novel ... the fundamental work of fiction in our society”. When the book reappeared in 1981, Salman Rushdie called it “a salutary corrective to the feckless irresponsible image that Trinidadians have been given by V.S. Naipaul”. The UK Observer said: “Once in a blue moon, a lost gem is unearthed from the general rubble of period fiction. Crown Jewel is one such find.” One West Indian critic had already pronounced that Crown Jewel “combines social realism and political commitment with a concern for the culture of the feelings” and that this novel is “essential reading for an understanding of the rich possibilities of young Trinidad in the 1930s and 1940s, and for discerning the outlines of that unique emerging creature that Sam Selvon called ‘the Trinidadian person’.”

Chancellor, I commend Ralph de Boissière as one of the founders of our literary tradition, a man who overcame the biases of race and colour, a gifted writer who projected the power of the powerless, a visionary whose insight into the compassion and creativity of our men and women and of their potential to create a humane and just society has been unwavering throughout his hundred years.

Chancellor, I urge you by the authority invested in you by the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago to confer upon Ralph Anthony Charles de Boissière the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa.

--Kenneth Ramchand

Por favor and s'il vous plaît

One of the CRB's long-term objectives, dear readers, is to offer every issue of the magazine online fully translated into Spanish, French, and Dutch, and so increase our readership throughout the non-Anglophone Caribbean. Perhaps the time will come when we can afford to hire language editors to oversee this. But in the nearer future, we're trying to get a modest translation pilot project off the ground.

We're looking for volunteers fluent in Spanish and French--preferably but not necessarily with some professional translating experience--willing to tackle, say, one review or essay per month (or one every other month), to help us start building a multilingual online archive. Sadly, at the moment we can't afford to pay for this, but every translation will be published with a full credit to the volunteer translator, and we'll list their names in the print magazine too.

This is a great opportunity, for instance, for university students majoring in Spanish or French--they get nice, juicy pieces of text to practise on, and they can list "CRB translator" in their CVs. We'd be very grateful for the help of any of our readers with the language skills and time to participate in this project.

If you'd like to volunteer, you can email me directly at nicholas[NOSPAM]laughlin[AT]gmail[dot]com. (You're going to delete [NOSPAM] and put in the "at" sign and dot, of course.) And please pass this on to anyone you think may be able to help. With any luck, the CRB's Spanish and French archives will make their first appearances in time to greet the new year.

"We learn to read collectively"

Via if:book, the blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book, a link to an audio interview with Junot Díaz in which he talks about "reading as a collective enterprise":

Nobody learns to read outside of a collective. We forget--because we read and we read alone--we forget that we learn to read collectively. We learn with our peers, and a teacher teaches us.... When you read a book--and especially like this book, where there's gonna be Spanish, there's gonna be historical references, there's gonna be nerdish, as they say, forget the elvish, the nerdish, there's gonna be fanboy stuff, there's gonna be talk about Morgoth, about dark side, about John Brunner's science fiction books, about Asimov, about Bova, about Andre Norton, about E. E. Doc Smith's Lensman, you know all this weird esoteric stuff, amongst all these Dominican references, Caribbean references, urban black American references, all this nerd talk, all this kind of hip "we went to college" speak--the reason that's all there in one place is the same reason that reading is a collective enterprise. When we did not know a word when we were young and learning, we would ask someone. We forgot--I think many of us forget--that praxis, that fundamental praxis. What I want is for people to read and remember that reading, while we may practice it alone, in solitude, it arose out of a collective learning and out of a collective exchange....

(My copy of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao arrived two days ago; I've been reading it hungrily--though solitarily--in the evenings.)

(Three Díaz posts in a row!)

"You can go home again"

The immigrant experience, it's been noted, is no longer what it once was. When immigrants who came to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left their homelands, they left them forever....

Things are different in the jet age. Now you can go home again, and the trail of immigration has become a two-way street. Assimilation is less certain, involvement with the homeland more intimate and more fraught. Even after a generation or more, families can remain suspended between two places, two languages and the claims of two discordant histories. All this is especially true of immigrants from the Caribbean basin, whose lands are so close, and whose status and plans are so often unclear.

-- From a review of Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by William Deresiewicz, in The Nation. (Thanks to Antilles reader Matthew Hunte for the link.)