A year of Antilles

It's been a year, dear readers--a year today since Antilles was launched as the CRB blog. Your humble blogger has not always been as regular or as prolific as he'd like--magazine production schedules and travel often get in the way--but I'd like to think that over the past twelve months I've done at least a half-decent job of providing news of the Caribbean literary scene and supplementing the coverage of the print magazine. Along the way I've managed to interview a couple of writers (look out for more interviews in coming months) and file reports from Calabash 2007 (I'll be at Calabash again this year, doing the same), and otherwise tried to make Antilles a sort of portal for literary websites, writers' blogs, reviews of Caribbean books from all over the world, etc. I'm afraid I can't promise to be more regular or more prolific during the year ahead, but I do have a few possible innovations up my sleeve....

(One of which is the Antilles book of the month: see immediately above.)

And many thanks to all of you, Antilles readers, especially those who over the last year have livened the blog with your comments--whether those took the form of questions, suggestions, criticisms, or adulations.

"We have lost the habit of caring about writers and books"

The recent passing of two very different regional poets, offers an opportunity to consider the diminishing role of literary culture in the contemporary Caribbean....

The deaths of Aimé Césaire and Wordsworth McAndrew inspire an editorial in today's Stabroek News about the role of literature in the contemporary Caribbean.

"The beauty of the people's first language"

In the current issue of the Guyana Review, Allan Fenty shares his memories of the late Wordsworth McAndrew:

You would have hardly known from Wordsworth that he had been “a QC boy.” Not that he was modest, but he communicated his preference for “the University of the streets.”

That is why he traversed the entire country exploring and unearthing authentic folkloric beliefs, rituals, proverbs and unique creole which we tend to describe as “creolese.”

How high in esteem he held up the creole. An actual quote from him was -- “if we throw out creolese, we throw out a vital part of ourselves.” So on his old, reel-to-reel tape recorder, forever in that battered knapsack, he recorded the beauty of the people’s first language.

Also, admirers of McAndrew have set up a memorial blog, with links to articles about him, examples of his work, etc. And Guyana president Bharrat Jagdeo has announced that Carifesta X, which Guyana will host in August, will pay special tribute to McAndrew and his legacy.

May 2008 CRB: sneak preview

I am happy to report, dear readers, that the May issue of the CRB--which has occupied most of your humble Antilles blogger's attention in recent weeks--is now in the hands of the printers, and will shortly be in the hands of subscribers. With this issue, the CRB in its current incarnation is four years old (it feels far longer). Looking back at the sixteen issues we've published in that time, I'm pleased to note the ways in which the magazine has grown--in size, scope, subject matter--but also that we've remained faithful to the original aim, the original ideal: to provide a forum for serious but not solemn discussion of Caribbean books and writing for an audience of avid, curious readers. The May issue, at sixty pages, will be our biggest yet, and I also feel it's one of the strongest we've published so far.

And what might you look out for in this new issue? An insightful consideration of C.L.R. James as philosopher of cricket and literary critic, by Brendan de Caires; a review of three new books containing the work of ten "emerging" Caribbean poets, by Vahni Capildeo (herself one of our finest young poets); a rhapsody (that seems the best word) on Gordon Rohlehr by Anu Lakhan; also reviews of Lorna Goodison's new memoir, a biography of Trinidad-born political activist Claudia James, a collection of photographs of Afro-Cuban religious rituals, a personal account of Trinidad's 1990 attempted coup; tributes to the late Aimé Césaire by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and J. Michael Dash; an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir by the late E.A. Markham; a wonderful essay on Frank Collymore's role in the evolution of West Indian literature, by Edward Baugh; poems by Fred D'Aguiar and Sassy Ross; a review of a recent exhibition by the young Trinidadian artist Rachel Rochford; a portfolio of images from the Curator's Eye III show that just opened at the National Gallery of Jamaica; and even more. By now, dear readers, those of you who do not yet subscribe to the CRB must be looking for the link that will let you do just that; here it is.

Archie Markham remembered

Thanks to Antilles reader Alastair Bird for pointing me to two recent obituaries of E.A. Markham; one, unsigned, published a few days ago in the Telegraph, and the other by Peter Fraser in yesterday's UK Guardian. Fraser includes this tidbit:

Normally efficient, especially in his writing, he seemed to attract things that went awry, whether they involved banks, transport, institutions or the West Indies cricket team. In time, these mishaps settled into anecdotes for others and often stories or poems for him. Perhaps this was the world demonstrating to him that it too could go against the grain. Characteristically, he supported Arsenal while most of his family backed West Ham.

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.