Links, links, links

- The first proper review in the Trinidad and Tobago press of Patrick French's Naipaul biography, The World Is What It Is--by Suzanna Clarke in Newsday.

- Naipaul's most recent book, A Writer's People, has only just been published in the US--his American publisher there is lagging six months behind his British one, for who knows what reason. Richard Eder reviews it in the Boston Globe:

"All my life I've had to think about different ways of looking," V.S. Naipaul tells us at the start of yet another footsore stage (the 29th, including novels, essays, memoirs, and ruminations) in his lifelong trek to locate an estranged self in an estranging world.

The Trinidad-born writer is 75, a Nobel Prize winner, and as touchy, coldly aggrieved, and solipsistic as ever. And as always, just as one might give up on him, come moments in this new collection when self-absorption, afflicted by genius, turns into a visionary vantage over the wider human condition.

- Geoffrey Philp is celebrating US National Poetry Month all April long by posting poems by Caribbean and South Florida poets. Most recently: an excerpt from the late Anthony McNeill's Chinese Lanterns from the Blue Child. (By the way, when is someone going to put together a book of McNeill's unpublished and uncollected works?)

- Guyanese writer Ruel Johnson solicits essays on the topic of Guyana's "Feared Generation" for a possible book inspired by this blog post.

- And Marlon James interrupts work on his third novel to post a short essay called "I'm Too Old to Rock and Roll".

"He always wore rubber slippers"

More on the late Wordsworth McAndrew in today's Stabroek News; a brief statement by Guyana's minister of culture, Frank Anthony, and a tribute by Oscar Ramjeet, which includes this entertaining reminiscence:

Mac got the headlines in the newspaper when he rode off with his English bride on his bicycle after his wedding, wearing a dashiki shirt and rubber slippers. In fact, he always wore rubber slippers to work and refused to put on shoes despite a stern warning from the GBS General Manager Hugh Cholomondeley.

R.I.P. Wordsworth McAndrew, 1936-2008

The Guyanese writer, folklorist, and broadcaster Wordsworth McAndrew--"one of the most influential advocates for the collection, preservation and celebration of Guyanese folk life", as today's Stabroek News puts it, in some ways the Guyanese equivalent of Louise Bennett--died yesterday in New Jersey, at the age of 72. The Signifyin' Guyana blog has posted a tribute to McAndrew by his friend and colleague John Rickford:

I learned a lot from Mac over the years. He had an absolute love for Guyanese "culchuh" as he put it--and an infinite interest in every variant of every tradition (queh queh, obeah, cumfa), song, story, game, way of cooking, eating, celebrating, and so on that Guyanese and West Indian peoples of every ethnic group had inherited and transformed. I learned a lot from him about how to do fieldwork well. For instance, if someone said they played a game called "Airy Dory," and asked if he'd ever heard of it, he'd either say "No," (although I knew he had heard several accounts of it already) or otherwise indicate that he wanted to hear this particular person's version. Invariably, some new detail, some local variant would emerge in the course of the narration, and his understanding of the full range and complexity (and perhaps history) of that cultural institution would be enriched in the process.

Signifyin' Guyana collects a number of other tributes here. See also this 2004 profile by Vibert Cambridge, and read McAndrew's best-known poem, "Ol' Higue", here.

"Homme-volcan, Homme-révolte...."

Chimurenga, the literary journal based in Cape Town, has posted two tributes to Aimé Césaire on its website: a poem, "Quand Aimé Césaire disparut", by Henri-Michel Yéré, and "Aimé Césaire: Le volcan s’est éteint", an essay by Achille Mbembe.

Quand Aimé Césaire disparut, les morceaux de roc étalés au sol regardaient ébahis le dos de leur briseur qui prit son envol, pris de lumière, et que l’on fût à Dakar, à Paris, au Cap ou à Fort-de-France, tous virent la même étoile allumer les horizons sans fin du possible;

Quand Aimé Césaire disparut, nous entendîmes les pleurs et les regrets d’honneurs mal répartis ; pourtant mon cœur et ma pensée complices ne sommes que le temple de son chant, constant émetteur d’essentiel....

(Look out for essays on Césaire's legacy by J. Michael Dash and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw in the forthcoming May issue of the CRB.)

Hommage à Césaire

Before Aimé Césaire, only three French writers were given the honour of a state funeral: Victor Hugo, Paul Valéry, and Colette. Both Le Monde and Le Figaro point this out in their coverage of Césaire's funeral on Sunday afternoon in Fort-de-France. Both newspapers have also posted galleries of images of the ceremonies.

Le Monde: "Fort-de-France se recueille lors des obsèques nationales d'Aimé Césaire"; gallery here.

Le Figaro: "La France rend hommage à Aimé Césaire"; gallery here.

Césaire himself chose the epitaph that will appear on his tomb; the final three lines of his poem "Calendrier lagunaire":

La pression atmosphérique ou plutôt l'historique
agrandit démesurément mes maux
même si elle rend somptueux certains de mes mots

Links, links, links

- In the Stabroek News, Al Creighton takes a look at the career of Sabga Award-winning David Dabydeen, and in the Trinidad Newsday Kevin Baldeosingh reports on Dabydeen's talk last Monday at the National Library in Port of Spain:

“Books are what we are. Long after we’ve forgotten who the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago is, we’ll remember Naipaul,” Dabydeen said. He also spoke about the friendly rivalry between the writers of the 1950s and 60s, although when he brought up Lamming, he paused and said, “Maybe I shouldn’t talk about this in public. It’s not being taped, is it?”

- In the New York Times Book Review, Paul Devlin reviews a new biography of Marcus Garvey, Negro with a Hat, by Colin Grant.

- Oops, I missed this one a little over a week ago: Ian Thomson's review, in the Independent, of Kei Miller's new novel:

The Same Earth, a humorous, bittersweet fiction, combines the fantastical realism of Márquez with the domestic comedy of Andrea Levy, to create an island saga richly brocaded in folklore and West Indian custom. Miller, himself a Jamaican, is a name to watch.

- And the Calabash International Literary Festival has released its 2008 schedule. No Junot Diaz, alas, but this year's authors include Lorna Goodison, Erna Brodber, Thomas Glave, Kei Miller, Margaret Cezair-Thompson (all Jamaican), the American poets Yusef Komunyakaa and Cornelius Eady, and, for the headline act, Derek Walcott. Your humble Antilles blogger will be in Treasure Beach the weekend of 23 to 25 May for Calabash 2008, and you can look out for not-quite-live reports here--with photos by Georgia Popplewell, just like last year.

- Speaking of Diaz, his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has won another prize--the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, "the premier prize for books that grapple with race".

- And speaking of Walcott, the current New Yorker includes a new poem of his, In Italy:

Roads shouldered by enclosing walls with narrow
cobbled tracks for streets, those hill towns with their
stamp-sized squares and a sea pinned by the arrow
of a quivering horizon, with names that never wither
for centuries and shadows that are the dial of time....

"Paris soit ce soir une ville martiniquaise"

"This evening, Paris is a Martinican city"--a rather lovely line (roughly translated) from the speech made earlier by Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, at a memorial ceremony for Aimé Césaire. Le Figaro reports:

Une minute de silence. Puis une veillée avec chants et musique créole. «Aux Antilles, la mort n'est pas un moment de pleurs mais un moment de joie. Ce soir, nous allons fêter un grand homme, un grand Français en espérant que son message ne sera pas oublié» a déclaré Patrick Karam, délégué interministériel pour l'Egalité des chances des Français d'outre-mer. Plusieurs centaines de personnes se sont rassemblées samedi sur la place de la Sorbonne à Paris pour une veillée «à la mode antillaise» en hommage au poète.

Remembering Césaire

Aimé Césaire on the front page of today's Le Monde


Some more of the tributes to Aimé Césaire that have appeared online since his death on Thursday:

For poets such as Césaire, freedom is not an abstract idea. His legacy is for us to pursue freedom (self-actualization) in the body and the mind—the abilty to realize the full expression of an individual talent unbound by race, class, creed, religion, gender or sexual preference.

For if the goal of any life is freedom, then Aimé Césaire was a light.

-- Geoffrey Philp, from a thoughtful short essay posted at his blog on Friday.


It is not often that politics and poetry go together, but when they do, the West Indies is as fertile an environment as any for the two to coexist. Césaire seamlessly blended his love for language, ideas and writing into his political life, which spanned almost 60 years.

-- From the Global Voices roundup of bloggers' reactions to Césaire's death, with links to tributes from Martinique, Trinidad, Senegal, Congo, Togo, and the United States; authored by Jennifer Brea and Janine Mendes-Franco.


Il est extrêmement frappant de voir qu'en Martinique chacune et chacun a un Césaire à raconter. Son Césaire. Le grand homme, il est vrai, a de quoi nourrir diversement les uns et les autres : noir, poète, élu, humaniste. Il a, peu ou prou, accompagné tous ses compatriotes de son île natale.

-- From a memoir of Césaire by Patrice Louis, Le Monde's correspondent in Martinique, and author of Conversations avec Aimé Césaire, posted yesterday at the Le Monde website (in French).


We have all been marked by the universal import of Aimé Césaire’s call for human dignity, watchfulness and responsibility.

-- From UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura's statement on Thursday.


Très émus, mais dans une ambiance sereine, souvent joyeuse, les habitants de Fort-de-France et des autres communes de l'île, tous âges confondus, ont applaudi le passage du fourgon transportant la dépouille de Césaire en chantant, en scandant son nom ou en brandissant des portraits du poète. Des inscriptions «Merci Papa Aimé» ou «Merci Césaire», avaient été tracées à la peinture sur les trottoirs et des portraits du poète collés aux murs.

-- From a report in Le Figaro on the first stage of Césaire's funeral procession in Fort-de-France yesterday (in French).




Césaire's autograph, dated November 2005, from the collection of St. Lucian poet John Robert Lee