Carnival reading

Band of the Year?, by Trinidadian artist Ashraph (see more works from his current show here)

Here in Trinidad, the countdown to Carnival is getting louder and louder. Just four more days to Dimanche Gras.... But CRB readers on foreign shores needn't feel entirely left out. A selection of Carnival-related pieces from our archives, to help assuage the jumbie:

- From the February 2007 CRB: Kenneth Ramchand's essay "On Minshall and reading the mas".

- From August 2006: Mark Lyndersay on Jeffrey Chock's Trinidad Carnival: Photographs.

- From November 2005: Jeremy Taylor on Robert Antoni's novel Carnival.

- From February 2005: Keith Smith on Stefan Falke's book of photographs Moko Jumbies: The Dancing Spirits of Trinidad.

- Also from February 2005: Anu Lakhan on Gordon Rohlehr's A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso.

Marlon Griffith, Jaime Lee Loy, and Nikolai Noel: La Fantasie

From the pavement outside, 43 Norfolk Street looks like many other modest houses in the east Port of Spain neighbourhood of Belmont. It is a simple single-storey structure with a galvanize roof, decorative fretwork along the eaves, potted palms on either side of the front door. Only the fresh coat of white paint gives away the house's newness. Two weeks ago, this was an empty lot of land, overgrown with razor grass. The little white house has sprung up not quite overnight, but almost. And for three days--or, rather three nights, from 25 to 27 February--it is home not to a respectable working-class family, but to La Fantasie, an ambitious project by three young artists, Marlon Griffith, Jaime Lee Loy, and Nikolai Noel.

The title plays off the name of the posh neighbourhood, just north of here, where the prime minister lives. For most Trinidadians, giving the name "La Fantasie" to a house is a bitter joke, rousing memories of the hundreds of millions spent to construct the new prime ministerial palace, which opened in late 2007. It also pokes sardonic fun at the fantasy of social and economic progress peddled by the current Trinidad and Tobago government. The country is wealthier than ever in its history, and vast sums are spent on public works projects of dubious value, while the crime rate soars and basic infrastructure--for education, health, transport--crumbles.

The windows of the little house at 43 Norfolk Street are tightly shuttered. Just inside the door is a heavy black curtain, which the visitor must grope past. You find yourself in a room crowded with old furniture, its walls, floor, and ceiling painted black, the only light coming from a pair of eerie video projections. Using one of the flashlights hanging from a nail beside the door, you explore the nooks and corners. A trail of blood leading to the fridge, more puddling on the top of the stove. The flashlight has an ultraviolet lamp built in. Flick the switch: drawings appear on the walls and furniture, done in flourescent ink. Evidence of violence, betrayal, despair. A house of horrors. A haunted house. A haunted nation, trapped between a fantasy and a hard place, with a trail of blood leading to...?

Virtual Yardies

You may recall, dear readers, that in the August 2007 CRB I interviewed writer and lit-blogger Geoffrey Philp. Our conversation ranged over various issues confronting Caribbean writers who explore online media, and it ended with Geoffrey's description of his most recently completed work:

NL: You recently announced that you’ve completed the manuscript of a new novel, “Virtual Yardies”, in which the story is told “entirely as blogs, IMs, and e-mails”--with a mystery plot, no less, in which a group of Jamaican bloggers are stalked by a religious zealot. What inspired this, apart from your own blog?

GP: The idea was a spin-off from another recently completed novel, “Zone of Uncertainty”, which is being shopped around. I realised that the “lost daughter” character lived in the world of blogs, so I wanted to carry that idea a bit further. I also asked myself, what would an epistolary novel look like in 2007? The plot needed something to propel it forward, and given the duplicity and anonymity of the web, it seemed a natural fit for the creation of my Jamaican “Cotton Mather” character who will take God’s law into his own hands and kill the unrighteous: “fornicators, adulterers, men who lie with men”.

One important note. Because it’s also a love story, the characters alternate between IMs and emails, depending on their level of intimacy.

Geoffrey's twenty-first-century "epistolary" novel has now gone live, via a series of blogs he's set up, each belonging to one of his fictional characters. Virtual Yardies starts here, and the plot will unfold in the coming days and weeks....

"England suddenly felt tropical"

I took a phone call one mid-morning, when I was lazing in bed, wondering whether to get up and face the bleak wintry day. The phone call was the warm, lyrical voice of the Director of the Sabga Awards, telling me that I was their Arts and Literature laureate for 2008. Needless to say, England suddenly felt tropical, and I arose from my bed.

--David Dabydeen, speaking about his recently announced Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence, in an interview with John Mair in the Stabroek News.

SN: What does getting this award mean to you?

DD: It means that I can have a greater regional presence, in terms of access to media, individuals etc. It will also encourage me to visit more of the islands. It offers me a degree of protection against acts of malice. And I can buy crates of red wine as well.

The money will be spent on paying off some of my mortgage, so I can have a secure home on earth; some will be spent on the poor in Guyana, a kind of bribe to get to heaven.

Caribbean books on NBCC shortlist

More prizes.... this time the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Awards, the finalists for which were announced in San Francisco yesterday. There are no fewer than four Caribbean-related books on the shortlist: Edwidge Danticat's memoir Brother, I'm Dying and Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao--both of them CRB books of the year!--plus Trinidadian-American Arnold Rampersad's biography Ralph Ellision and Dominican-American Julia Alvarez's cultural study Once Upon a Quinceanera.

The NBCCA winners will be decided and announced in March.

Sabga Award for Dabydeen

The winners of the 2008 Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Awards for Excellence were announced yesterday--and the arts and letters "laureate" is David Dabydeen, one of Guyana's leading contemporary writers, professor at the University of Warwick, an important figure in the field of Caribbean studies--and a member of the CRB's editorial board. Congratulations, David, from Antilles and the CRB.

The other 2008 laureates are: James Husbands of Barbados, for science and technology; and Annette Arjoon of Guyana and Claudette Richardson Pious of Jamaica, both for public and civic contributions. All four will come to Trinidad in April for the awards ceremony.

(Dabydeen has a new novel, Molly and the Muslim Stick, due later this year; three of his earlier novels were recently reprinted by Peepal Tree Press; his latest books are The Oxford Companion to Black British History, co-edited with John Gilmore, and an edition of the poems of the nineteenth-century Guyanese poet Egbert Martin.)

Meanwhile, elsewhere....

- Marlon James lists his favourite music of 2007--and resents his prose being described as "lyrical".

- Sharon Millar resolves to read all of Naipaul in 2008, but first she tells us why she loves Oscar Wao. (There's a short story by Junot Díaz in the 24 December, 2007, New Yorker.)

- Tobias Buckell gives an update on his forthcoming novel, Sly Mongoose--it's at the copy-editing stage. (If you can't wait to find out more, check out the video trailer he uploaded last week.)

- Reviews of Caryl Phillips's new novel, Foreigners, are starting to appear all over. Here's one by Donna Bailey Nurse in the Toronto Globe and Mail, another by Michael Fischer in the Miami Herald, a third by Howard Frank Mosher in the Boston Globe.

- And the January/February issue of Caribbean Beat offers a slew of book, film, and music reviews.

Great Brits?

Not content with a mere "best of 2007" list, the London Times (or at least its literary staff) has named what it considers "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"--better yet, ranked them in order of "greatness". "What better way to start the year than with an argument?" they ask.

Philip Larkin tops a list in which poets are otherwise rather sparse; Orwell, Golding, Hughes, and Lessing round out the top five; Michael Moorcock brings up the rear; someone called Salman "Rusdie" finds himself at number 13. But the reason we note this squib here at Antilles, dear readers, is the presence on the list of two of "ours"--V.S. Naipaul at no. 7 and Derek Walcott at no. 31. Naipaul--who has lived in Britain for fifty years, been tapped on the shoulder by the Queen, etc.--no one can argue with, but Walcott seems a little out-of-place here. He is not a British citizen and has never lived in Britain; the Times explicitly excludes Seamus Heaney from the list on the grounds of nationality, so why do they lay claim to a St. Lucian?

(Also, there is something seriously wrong with any list that ranks J.K. Rowling above Bruce Chatwin.)