In the November 2007 CRB...

The November 2007 issue of the CRB, no. 14, is now on its way to subscribers. You can see the contents page of this issue at the CRB website, and as usual selected pieces are posted online.

In this issue: reviews of new biographies of Eric Williams and Toussaint L'Ouverture, of the audio recording of Kamau Brathwaite's lecture MiddlePassages, of books of poems by Mervyn Morris and James Berry, of Tobias S. Buckell's novel Ragamuffin, of a book of essays about the Garifuna, and of the Infinite Island show at the Brooklyn Museum--plus poems by Ian McDonald and Shara McCallum, an excerpt from Ralph de Boissière's autobiography, an interview with Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, and more. If you're not subscribing to the CRB yet--what are you waiting for?



Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, interviewed by Nazma Muller in the November 2007 CRB

"Suriname is hard to get to"

Audrey just nods. The flight is four hours late. She knows she’s already missed her connection in Port of Spain and must spend two days in Trinidad waiting for the next flight home. Suriname is hard to get to. Worse yet, it’s hard to get back to.

The Fall 2007 Virginia Quarterly Review, a special issue on "South America in the Twenty-First Century", includes a travel essay by Daniel Titinger, "Kicking the Ball to Holland", on Suriname's unlikely role in the world of football.

Stabroek on Naipaul

Long live the Stabroek News, the only newspaper in the Caribbean that runs editorials in the form of book reviews. From today's edition, on the new Naipaul:

Naipaul ... rescued himself from the clutches of 'island "culture"' by writing his way into the tradition of the English novel--with enviable grace and humour, it must be said. He presented the pathetic lives of these small people with simple destinies so powerfully that it has often become difficult to tell where his malevolence ends and our insecurities begin. Walcott chose a different, arguably more difficult way of seeing. He teased a past out of these provincial characters, housed them in something more than ruins of a colonial past. He considered them, and the cultures that had left them behind, synoptically, illuminating one literary tradition through his mastery of another. He created a past that all of us can enter and consider, one that allows us to reinterpret ourselves, and to come to terms with our legacies rather than simply escape them. For many West Indians that is an achievement that deserves more than a snide misreading from our other Nobel laureate.

The Caribbean Writer and the Antigua and Barbuda Lit Fest



Issue number 22 of The Caribbean Writer, the annual literary journal published by the University of the Virgin Islands, has just been published. Their website hasn't been updated yet with the new issue, but an article in the St Thomas Source offers a tiny peek at the contents.

Meanwhile, up in Antigua, they're getting ready for the 2007 Antigua and Barbuda International Literary Festival, which opens on Friday. (Last year it was called the Caribbean International Literary Festival.) The three-day programme is headlined by Jamaican Anthony Winkler and Trinidadian Elizabeth Nunez. Sadly, your Antilles blogger won't be there to report on the festivities--any readers in Antigua want to give it a go?

"I like the life"

In today's Sunday Express, B.C. Pires interviews Gordon Rohlehr, one of the indisputably major figures in Caribbean literary scholarship, who has just retired from UWI, St Augustine, after forty years.

... Purely by chance, I had begun working in the calypso before I got here. One highpoint would have been when I did the lecture "Sparrow and the Language of Calypso" for the Caribbean Artists Movement in 1967.

It forced one to engage with a people's music and all implied with that: the relationship between singer and group, between the music and social and political affairs. There could have been no better introduction into Trinidadian society than an interest in the calypso, what it was doing, its themes, why people reacted to certain things and not others, what made it popular [etc]. That made me amenable to Trinidad.

Some links....



A work by Cuban artist Quisqueya Henríquez, included in The World Outside: A Survey Exhibition 1991-2007

- In the New York Times: Kaiama L. Glover reviews The Pirate's Daughter, a new novel by Margaret Cezair-Thompson set on Jamaica's Navy Island, once owned by Errol Flynn; and Ken Johnson reviews DR-based Cuban artist Quisqueya Henríquez's solo show currently at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

- In Time, Neel Chowdhury reviews V.S. Naipaul's A Writer's People, describing the book as "miserly" and "pretentious" (what a change from the book's flattering earliest reviews...). And it was published nearly a month ago, but I'll still link here to a Naipaul review I missed: Nilanjana S. Roy's in the India Business Standard.

- Here's an interview with Edwidge Danticat from the Foreign Policy in Focus think tank.

- And in the litblogs, Geoffrey Philp writes about his "Jamaican touch" and Marlon James attacks "slave mentality".

[Oops, missed another interesting Naipaul review: Sanjay Subrahmanyam's in the LRB.]

Misc.

What's been going on while Antilles was temporarily off the grid? A review by former LRB editor Karl Miller of the new Naipaul, in the TLS. A conversation with Isaac Julien in the Fall issue of BOMB, in which he talks about his new film, Small Boats. (This issue of BOMB also includes a conversation between Edwidge Danticat and Junot Díaz and a short story by CRB regular Anu Lakhan--neither available online.) A review of books about Che Guevara in The Latin American Review of Books, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the death of the iconic hero of the Cuban Revolution. And Marlon James's blog has had a makeover!

And here we are....

Rather, here I am, dear readers: back at my desk after nearly a month of travel, hard at work on the November CRB, which goes to press in a few days. As I sift through proofs and pin down contributors' bio notes, posting may continue to be slow, at least till the magazine is safely out of my hands. But I can at least drop a few hints about what CRB readers can expect to find in our next issue. Substantial reviews, first of all, of two new biographies: Madison Smartt Bell's of Toussaint L'Ouverture and Colin Palmer's of Eric Williams. Reviews also of the latest collections of poems by Mervyn Morris (this one well overdue) and James Berry, and Tobias Buckell's new novel--also of an anthology of Bajan cricket writing and a collection of essays on the Garifuna of Belize. Plus a review of Infinite Island, the big Caribbean art show currently running at the Brooklyn Museum; an interview with the Cuban writer Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, author of the steamy Dirty Havana Trilogy; and new poems by Ian McDonald and Shara McCallum.

And I'm especially excited to be running an excerpt from the forthcoming autobiography of Ralph de Boissière, which Lexicon will publish later this year. About a month ago, as I was sitting in Ken Ramchand's office, he casually mentioned he had the typescript. I had to admit to him I didn't realise de Boissière was still alive--he turned 100 on 6 October--and I jumped at the chance to run a chapter of the book in the CRB. The one I chose is called "I join the subversives", and it describes de Boissière's first meetings with Alfred Mendes, C.L.R. James, and Albert Gomes in Port of Spain back in the 30s, and the founding of the pioneering literary magazines Trinidad and The Beacon.

So if there are any Antilles readers who are not yet CRB subscribers--better get to it, quick sharp.