Georgetown journal, part 1

Dear readers: are there any of you left? I didn't exactly plan for Antilles to go into hibernation for so long. But what with offline deadlines and travel commitments and the general press of life, it's been, I fear, two and a half months of silence. Shall we agree to call it a vacation of sorts? Since my last appearance here I've actually been working on the August issue of the CRB--running a bit late, alas, but finally gone to press now--and meanwhile what ought to be the major arts event in the Caribbean this year has snuck up on us. That's Carifesta X, of course, the tenth Caribbean Festival of Arts, hosted this year by Guyana. I say "ought to be" because the precedent set by the previous Carifesta, two years ago in Trinidad and Tobago, is not exactly encouraging. But Guyana seems to be going out all with their preparations, and there is too the fact that this is Carifesta's original home--Guyana hosted the first Carifesta in 1972, and a combination of national pride and national nostalgia seems to be at stake.

Well, success, failure, or in between, I'll witness it first-hand--for as I type this I am in Georgetown, and in fact have been for the last four days. I'm not a member of any national delegation, but have come here under my own steam to represent the CRB, in the first place, and to take in as much of the festival programme as I can, with an emphasis on the literary and visual arts events. In fact, I've just been watching the Carifesta opening ceremony live on TV--an extravaganza involving a thousand dancers, dozens of musicians and singers, colourful allegories of Guyanese history, and a forty-foot leopard. My other major achievement today was getting an all-events Carifesta pass at the festival secretariat--many of the events are strictly admission-by-ticket only, but I hope this pass will get me into the key ones. (After I saw her in action this afternoon, the Carifesta liaison officer dealing with foreign visitors won my immense respect--talk about grace under pressure!)

But to be truthful the events I'm most looking forward to over the next few days are not necessarily ones you'll find on the official Carifesta programme. Often, the best parts of big arts festivals like this are the encounters that happen informally if not spontaneously on the edges--random meetings, casual conversations, pleasing coincidences. And it seems there are moves afoot, led by the young Guyanese writer Ruel Johnson, to organise (on very short notice) a sort of festival fringe. If it happens, I'll certainly seek out the fringe events, and maybe even get more involved than merely spectating--stay tuned for updates. Ruel is also launching his new book of short fiction tomorrow, and he's asked me to speak then for a few minutes--it'll be an ex tempore performance, since I haven't seen the book yet! So look out for a few notes on that tomorrow evening--and I will try to post here a couple times a day, even if briefly, until I leave Guyana on Wednesday night (I'm going to miss the final couple of days of Carifesta, sadly, because of another travel obligation).

DW vs VSN: addendum

Today's Caribbean Magazine programme on the BBC Caribbean Service runs an interview with Derek Walcott, in which he talks (briefly) about "The Mongoose" , his anti-Naipaul poem that has made headlines around the world (the Walcott segment starts about three and a half minutes into the audio file). At one crucial point, the sound quality is poor--as if he started speaking before the microphone was properly pointed his way--but it sounds as if Walcott is saying something like, "The poem is not very good--but it's abusive enough for what I wanted."

Of course, I could be mishearing. But I think most people who heard Walcott read "The Mongoose" at Calabash--or listened to an audio recording after the fact, or read some of the lines transcribed--must agree that, craft-wise, this is very far from Walcott at his loftiest. As a friend of mine remarked that afternoon in Treasure Beach: "It sounded like something he wrote on the back of an envelope over breakfast." The truth is, coming from an absolute master of poetic technique, "The Mongoose" does seem dashed off, at best. Discussing the Walcott-Naipaul "spat" with a friend via email earlier, I even found myself suggesting that Walcott had deliberately written a bad piece of verse, as a way of heightening the insult to Naipaul. Far-fetched?

More certainly, "The Mongoose"--and the choice comments the two writers have exchanged over the years--do fall squarely into a very Caribbean tradition of (male) public sparring. Interviewed a few days ago by the BBC, Naipaul's biographer Patrick French pointed out that Naipaul and Walcott both grew up listening to calypso, and their barbs do resemble the picong--sharp, insulting comments--traditionally traded by duelling calypsonians. Colin Channer similarly compared them to the dancehall rivals Beenie Man and Bounti Killa. There is definitely an element of performance about their rivalry, an element of theatre--with West Indian literature as their stage. (And a fortnight before Calabash, I imagined the two literary eminences in a stage performance of a different kind.)

Naipaul has thus far declined to comment on "The Mongoose", but Walcott's ire will perhaps be further stoked by the publication of the American edition of A Writer's People (lagging six months behind the British). Reviews are appearing in the US press even now. My eye was caught today by this one, written by David Rieff for the New York Times. I rather liked this passage, especially its concluding phrase:

Is there really an essentially English way of seeing and an altogether different Indian way of seeing, as Naipaul asserts in "Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way," the first of the book's two chapters on India, part reminiscence about his family's roots, part portrait of Gandhi? And are there also, as Naipaul suggests in pages on his native Trinidad, still other ways, one black, the other immigrant Indian? One may question Naipaul's premise, but it in no way negates that he is a very great writer. And even if, in this book, his oddly skewed and more than a little self-referential views take up too much space, his work over the past half-century entitles him to those views, especially since they may have been the fertile mistake from which his best writing has emerged.

Calabash retrospective

What happened, dear readers? There I was, two weeks ago, promising coverage of Calabash--then silence, and meanwhile the festival has come and gone. It's not that the Calabash weekend was too uneventful to write about--far from. The opposite, perhaps: there was so much going on that I never found the free minutes to sit down and blog, and then before I knew it Calabash was over and I was on my way to the Caribbean Studies Association conference in San Andres.

Luckily, some of my friends and colleagues and others did a better job. Georgia Popplewell recorded a group of Calabash housemates--myself included--discussing the events of the first day and a half, and posted an entertaining podcast over at Caribbean Free Radio. (Be warned: we'd all had a few drinks before she switched on the microphone.) The podcast also includes a short interview I did with the Jamaican writer Thomas Glave, who was the very first reader on the Calabash '08 programme, and who opened the festival with a stirring and timely denunciation of Jamaican prime minister Bruce Golding's recent homophobic comments. Look out for further CFR/Antilles podcasts incorporating interviews with Lorna Goodison and Kei Miller, both of whom read at this year's festival.

Chris Lydon of Radio Open Source was also prowling round Treasure Beach with a mike, and he too has posted a series of Calabash podcasts. The first contains, almost in its entirety, Derek Walcott's Saturday afternoon interview and reading--the Calabash headline-stealer, thanks to the final poem Walcott read, a vitriolic attack on V.S. Naipaul called "The Mongoose". In Chris's second and third Calabash podcasts, he interviews a range of writers, Jamaican and foreign, about their work and their perspectives on the political situation in the United States.

The poet Kwame Dawes--one of the Calabash triumvirate, along with Colin Channer and Justine Henzell--returned to Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog, to give his own inside perspective on the festival, in four installments: one, two, three, four. His take on the Walcott event--it was Dawes himself who interviewed Walcott on stage--is especially interesting. In another post, Dawes writes:

I have now learned what I suspected would happen after Walcott’s scathing poem about V.S. Naipaul. That it was a headline stealer, that the scurrying around taking place after the reading and interview, and the gathering of folks with their laptops around the almond tree shaded lobby of Jake’s which is one of only two wired areas of the resort compound, meant that reporters were sending dispatches to the Jamaican papers and the international papers about this. Colin, Justine and I smile wryly at this. Calabash will be making headlines this year and this thanks for Walcott’s poems.

And that's exactly what happened. The highlight of Calabash '08 for me was the Sunday afternoon reading in which, in an spine-tingling crescendo, the poets Aracelis Girmay, Jackie Kay, and Kei Miller one after the other galvanised the massive crowd under the big tent, raising pores and dampening eyes. But it's Walcott's "Mongoose" that's stolen the world's attention thus far, with reports appearing in the UK Observer, the Telegraph, and the New Statesman. Your Antilles blogger was even asked to write about the Walcott-Naipaul rivalry for the UK Guardian's books blog--where I tried to hint that readers might profit from searching out some of the other writers (eg Girmay, Kay, and Miller) whose readings made this year's Calabash such a delight.

In fact, it was the Jamaican writers in this year's festival--Glave, Goodison, and Miller, but also Erna Brodber amd Margaret Cezair-Thompson--who I most enjoyed seeing and hearing. There was a specially joyful rapport between them and their huge home audience, a current of language and love that flowed back and forth through the Calabash tent, that energised the whole weekend down in Treasure Beach. I've been to three Calabashes now, and by far I enjoyed this one the most. I've even, dear readers, booked my place for next year. Perhaps at Calabash '09 Antilles coverage will be a little more timely.

C minus 1

Longtime Antilles readers may remember that last year, with the help of my friend and colleague Georgia Popplewell (and her camera), I not-quite-live-blogged the events at the 2007 Calabash International Literary Festival. Well, I am once again back in breezy Treasure Beach on Jamaica's St. Elizabeth coast, and looking forward to taking in--and blogging about--Calabash 2008, which starts tomorrow evening.

I've actually been here in Treasure Beach since Monday--once again staying at the gorgeous Villa Lyric. I'd like to say I've been catching up on my reading, but really I've been deeply engrossed in "the pages of the sea," as Derek Walcott put it. Georgia is once again my villa-mate; so is CRB editorial board member (and good friend) Annie Paul; CRB contributor Jonathan Ali; CRB friend David "Oso" Sasaki; and CRB friend and man-of-mystery Alastair Bird. We're all looking forward to this year's Calabash programme, which includes appearances by Jamaican writers Lorna Goodison, Erna Brodber, Thomas Glave, and Kei Miller--plus Walcott himself, in his Calabash debut. The action starts--under the big tent, on the seaside lawn, at Jake's--tomorrow night at 7.30, and we'll collectively be doing our best to convey something of the atmosphere of Calabash '08 to Antilles readers not lucky enough to be here. So check us out over the weekend!

"A beautiful writer"

That his name was perhaps not as familiar outside literary circles as it deserved (he was always well respected by other authors: Salman Rushdie called him "a beautiful writer", and to Edward Blishen he was "simply one of the most astonishingly good novelists of our time") may be because Roy was not one to parade details of his personal life in public, believing that his work should speak for itself. As he explained in "Art and Experience", his 1983 Edgar Mittelholzer memorial lecture, delivered in Georgetown: "The price the artist pays for his egotism is a high one. On one level egotism obliges him to create, while the same egotism threatens to destroy him. Success not only goes to his head, it remains there, creating demands he cannot hope to satisfy. I am acutely aware of all this and therefore try to shun gratuitous publicity."

-- From Margaret Busby's obituary of the late Roy A.K. Heath in today's UK Guardian. There is also appended a moving personal note by Anne Walmsley, Heath's first editor (and good friend of the CRB).

Further: the Literary Saloon offers excerpts from three reviews of Heath's novels.

No proud native son

If the measure of a writer’s success is the ire he provokes, then V.S. Naipaul is a spectacular success in Trinidad.... “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies,” Naipaul wrote in “The Middle Passage” (1962) -- the first sign that he wasn’t going to play the proud native son. A fresher wound came in 2001, when Naipaul omitted any mention of Trinidad from his initial press release after winning the Nobel Prize, which many here saw as a deliberate rebuff.

This weekend's New York Times Book Review includes an article by David Shaftel on Naipaul's often fraught relationship with the island of his birth--from his portrayal of Trinidad in his early books to the controversial events of his visit in 2007. In his piece Shaftel quotes no fewer than three people connected with the CRB: our frequent contributor Georgia Popplewell, the magazine's editor Jeremy Taylor, and (though Shaftel doesn't name him) our contributing editor Brendan de Caires, who reviewed Naipaul's latest book, A Writer's People, in our February 2008 issue.

R.I.P. Roy A.K. Heath (1926-2008)

The Stabroek News reports today that the Guyanese novelist Roy A.K. Heath--author of The Murderer, The Shadow Bride, and eight other novels--has died in London. The Guyana Arts Forum, in a press release, says: "As a novelist, Heath represented a liberal imagination in his reinterpretations of the experiences of the diverse strands of humanity he found in the society."

Could it be Derek!

Browsing through the current issue of the London Review of Books, I come across the following, in a review by Tony Wood of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms:

Perhaps the most brilliant piece in ‘Sluchai’ is the pseudo-play ‘Pushkin and Gogol’. Gogol falls onto the stage from behind the curtain and lies still; Pushkin enters, trips over Gogol and falls, crying: ‘What the devil! Could it be Gogol!’ Now Gogol gets up, walks and immediately trips over Pushkin, who gets up again, only to trip over Gogol. And so on until the two exit the stage, each still exclaiming his annoyance at tripping over the other.

I find myself giggling at the thought of an adaptation of this playlet featuring not Pushkin and Gogol but our own Naipaul and Walcott....