Links, links, links

Happy new year, dear readers--I hope 2009 is treating you well so far. After my year-end break, I'll gradually ease myself back into regular posting here over the next few days. A handful of literary links, to start.

- Weekend America spoke to Derek Walcott recently about politics and poetry--specifically, about Barack Obama's interest in poetry. Walcott described the process of writing "Forty Acres", his poem in honour of the American president-elect:

"The way I knew [the poem] was going to perhaps finish itself was finding the rhyme which sometimes happens in a poem, like crowd and plowed. Once that happened, I saw the furrow that the plow had made. Same thing as if say a limousine were going through a crowd it would make a furrow of a kind and the turnover of the dirt would be the separation of people before the president's car, which of course becomes a plow, so the idea of the design of the whole endeavor of the plowing becomes the endeavor of shaping the flag, with all the states, confederate and union together, led by this plowman who is the young president."

- More Walcottiana: in today's Stabroek News, Al Creighton reports on a recent BBC programme in which Walcott answered questions from a studio audience and discussed his masterwork Omeros.

- A couple of months ago I linked to Ian Buruma's review of The World Is What It Is in the New York Review of Books. The latest edition of the NYRB includes two letters responding to the piece, from V.S. Naipaul's onetime lover Margaret Murray and his onetime friend Paul Theroux.

- In his column in today's Newsday, Andre Bagoo laments the fact that--at least in Trinidad and Tobago--"boys don't read":

... for some boys it is almost an indictment against their masculinity. Books, of any kind, are alien objects. They contain information, maybe some pictures, but they dare not been seen to contain that most catholic of qualities: pleasure.

- And Marlon James--whose second novel The Book of Night Women is one of the titles I'm most eagerly anticipating this year--returns to blogging with some new-year thoughts.

2008 CRB books of the year

Where, dear readers, did this whole gallumphing year go? Does our perception of time change as we get older, so that the days and weeks and months speed faster and faster downslope--or is that apparent acceleration unique to your humble Antilles blogger?

It doesn't seem so very long since I posted the CRB's list of 2007's most noteworthy books, but indeed it was exactly one year ago. Now it's time again to rack the collective editorial brain, and decide which of 2008's new books we wish to commend to our readers.

This past year, in our four quarterly issues, the CRB reviewed exactly fifty books, and "noticed" thirty-five in our "Also noted" column. (That's a few less than in 2007. We actually published more pages in 2008, but we also devoted a greater proportion of them to visual arts and film, and to new poems, stories, and essays. Maybe the reviews have also been getting a bit longer.) Our longish lead-time means that many books from the latter part of 2008 won't actually be reviewed in our pages till next year.

And of all these books that have passed over our desks and through our hands, which do the CRB's editors believe should find, as we put it a year ago, a permanent place in our readers' bookshelves? Once again, we have chosen only books that ought to interest general readers across the Caribbean, excluding specialist scholarly titles. There are ten books on our list: two novels, two books of poems, two anthologies, a biography, a memoir, an illustrated volume of art history, and one book that is hard to categorise. In alphabetical order, the 2008 CRB books of the year:

After-Image, by Dennis Scott, ed. Mervyn Morris (Peepal Tree Press)
A posthumous selection of poems by the much-missed Jamaican writer, published seventeen years after his death. Dating mostly from the last years of his life, these poems seem to foreshadow Scott's untimely departure; they also reintroduce an important forbear to today's emerging writers. (Reviewed by F.S.J. Ledgister in the November 2008 CRB.)

Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today, ed. Nathalie Bondil (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
This massive catalogue of an exhibition that ran at the MMFA looks at the development of art in modern Cuba against the background of the country's tempestuous history over the last century and a half--reproducing works from the national collections alongside documentary photographs, commercial art, and political propaganda. (Reviewed by Nicholas Laughlin in the August 2008 CRB.)

Horses in Her Hair: A Granddaughter's Story, by Rachel Manley (Key Porter Books)
Manley's third family memoir tells the story of her grandmother Edna Manley--wife of Jamaica's first premier and mother of the country's fifth prime minister, but also a cultural icon in her own right. Gently, honestly, eloquently, Manley offers a lingering assessment of a woman who was a legend in her own time. (Look out for a review in the February 2009 CRB.)

Jamaican Food: History, Biology, Culture, by B.W. Higman (University of the West Indies Press)
At once a cultural history, an anthropological study, and an encyclopedia of flora and fauna--fish, flesh, and fowl--Higman's comprehensive survey of "food practices" in Jamaica, from the time of the pre-Columbian Taino to the present, is a surprisingly entertaining miscellany of historical references, statistics, recipes, and anecdotes. (Reviewed by Anu Lakhan in the November 2008 CRB.)

Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Gay and Lesbian Writing from the Antilles, ed. Thomas Glave (Duke University Press)
A landmark anthology of fiction, poems, essays, and memoirs by thirty-seven writers, confronting head-on one of the contemporary Caribbean's areas of darkness. Whether telling tender love stories or declaiming fierce polemics, these voices insist that gay and lesbian writers (and readers) have a central place in the Caribbean literary tradition. (Reviewed by Kelly Baker Josephs in the November 2008 CRB.)

Pynter Bender, by Jacob Ross (Fourth Estate)
This epic first novel by Grenadian Jacob Ross--also author of two short story collections--tells the strange and densely lyrical story of the title character's childhood and adolescence in an unnamed island shadowed by a sinister dictator. Pynter's growth into troubled consciousness and his movement from his rural home village to the confusions of urban life mirror his island's social evolution. (Look out for a review in the February 2009 CRB.)

The Same Earth, by Kei Miller (Weidenfeld and Nicholson)
The first novel by one of the most accomplished Caribbean writers of his generation shows the development of the gifts Miller displayed in his previous books of poems and short fiction: narrative energy, wry humour, and a knowingness about the world as tender as it is unsparing. (Reviewed by Lisa Allen-Agostini in the November 2008 CRB.)

Selected Poems, by Ian McDonald, ed. Edward Baugh (Macmillan Caribbean)
This career-summing volume by an eminent Caribbean man of letters assembles poems written in six decades. McDonald's poems are scrupulously attentive to the world and its joys and pains; only rarely does lyrical talent so closely coincide with generosity of spirit. (Look out for a review in the February 2009 CRB.)

Trinidad Noir, ed. Lisa Allen-Agostini and Jeanne Mason (Akashic)
This bold anthology of short fiction by both celebrated writers and new unknowns stares unblinking into the dark corners and alleyways of the contemporary Caribbean, and reminds us that--despite the brightly coloured stereotypes--these islands have always been home to violence and brutality and things we'd rather forget. (Look out for a review in the May 2009 CRB.)

The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of V.S. Naipaul, by Patrick French (Picador/Knopf)
The literary sensation of the year, French's biography of the Caribbean's most polarising writer--the man we love to hate and hate to love--is a gripping and ultimately moving study of a literary intelligence prepared to destroy everything in its path in its quest to understand the world. (Reviewed by Jeremy Taylor in the November 2008 CRB.)

Not a blogger was stirring

Your Antilles blogger is not on vacation, dear readers. The opposite, rather: this last week I've been haunted by the ghosts of deadlines missed, and other year-end monsters. And much pre-occupied with CRB fundraising, to see the magazine through the next year, and also with Commonwealth Writers' Prize reading--there are dozens of books in my yet-to-read pile, and more to come. So now is perhaps the time to say, apologetically, that posting here at Antilles is likely to be sparse until we are over the brink and into 2009.

Naturally, if there is Truly Big News relating to Caribbean literature, I will rouse myself to report it; also before the year is out you can expect at least one more CRB subscription appeal. And on 31 December I will post the titles of the 2008 CRB books of the year. Meanwhile, I'd love to hear what Antilles readers think are the reading highlights of the past twelvemonth. Tell us in the comments below!

Links, links, links

- Another end-of-year best-books list, this time in the Washington Post, including Lorna Goodison's memoir From Harvey River and (inevitably!) Patrick French's The World Is What It Is.

- At the Harper's Sentences blog, Wyatt Mason reads V.S. Naipaul's introduction to A House for Mr. Biswas and reflects on virtuosity.

- Geoffrey Philp points us to a poem by Fred D'Aguiar in Poetry:

The shoemaker’s wife ran preschool
With a fist made not so much of iron
But wire bristles on a wooden brush.

She made us recite and learn by rote.
Our trick was to mouth words, sound
As if we knew what we would one day

Come to know, what would dawn
On us as sure as a centipede knows
What to do with its myriad legs....

- And Charmaine Valere is slowly making her way through David Dabydeen's Molly and the Muslim Stick, which provokes memories of "inappropriate sexual encounters"....

"Like Kamau Brathwaite, or Martin Carter...."

Two minutes and forty-one seconds well spent: the UK Guardian posts a video of Linton Kwesi Johnson reading "If I Woz a Tap Natch Poet".

Reminder: support the Signifyin' Guyana short story competition

Many thanks to those Antilles readers who responded to my appeal last week to support the Signifyn' Guyana short story competition for Guyanese writers. To recap: Charmaine Valere of Signifyin' Guyana, the competition organiser, is trying to raise part of the prize money via ChipIn, which makes it easy to donate online. If you haven't taken a look at the competition announcement yet, please do--and please consider supporting emerging Guyanese writers by making a small donation to the prize fund. (And great thanks to Geoffrey Philp for posting a similar appeal.)

Walcott on Omeros

The BBC World Service is currently running a lengthy question-and-answer session with Derek Walcott in its World Book Club series.

Fielding questions from a studio audience and listeners around the world, Walcott insists that Omeros is not a reworking or transformation of Homer in a Caribbean setting, as so many commentators have assumed. He has some interesting technical points about the metrical and rhyming structure of the poem and the "ancestors" to whom these elements pay tribute. He talks about the problems of using Caribbean creole in poetry, and about his avoidance of metaphor ("metaphor is an accident, an evocation": the aim is to have a noun create the physicality of an object, not simply evoke it).

At the end of the session, Walcott remarks that, out of the whole history of poetic endeavour, only about 300-400 pages can be called real poetry. "Including some of yours?" enquires the presenter. To which Walcott replies, "Let me speak to my lawyer."

You can listen to the programme on demand for a week after its first broadcast, or download it as a podcast. Go to www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice and follow the links.

"The book is the ideal tool"

Culture on a global scale concerns us all. But it is above all the responsibility of readers--of publishers, in other words. True, it is unjust that an Indian from the far north of Canada, if he wishes to be heard, must write in the language of the conquerors--in French, or in English. True, it is an illusion to expect that the Creole language of Mauritius or the West Indies might be heard as easily around the world as the five or six languages that reign today as absolute monarchs over the media. But if, through translation, their voices can be heard, then something new is happening, a cause for optimism. Culture, as I have said, belongs to us all, to all humankind. But in order for this to be true, everyone must be given equal access to culture. The book, however old-fashioned it may be, is the ideal tool. It is practical, easy to handle, economical. It does not require any particular technological prowess, and keeps well in any climate. Its only flaw--and this is where I would like to address publishers in particular--is that in a great number of countries it is still very difficult to gain access to books. In Mauritius the price of a novel or a collection of poetry is equivalent to a sizeable portion of the family budget. In Africa, Southeast Asia, Mexico, or the South Sea Islands, books remain an inaccessible luxury. And yet remedies to this situation do exist. Joint publication with the developing countries, the establishment of funds for lending libraries and bookmobiles, and, overall, greater attention to requests from and works in so-called minority languages--which are often clearly in the majority--would enable literature to continue to be this wonderful tool for self-knowledge, for the discovery of others, and for listening to the concert of humankind, in all the rich variety of its themes and modulations.

-- J.M.G. Le Clézio's Nobel lecture--delivered yesterday in Stockholm--is now online.