"Contempt for the trivial"

If CARIFESTA is to truly go beyond supporting a status quo that continues to marginalize the majority of the Caribbean’s people and is intolerant of challenge, we must embrace our collective responsibility to acknowledge and nurture the radical, critical political promise that is our culture. As Martin Carter reminded us over thirty years ago, “it is precisely in times of crisis that we must re-examine our lives and bring to that re-examination contempt for the trivial, and respect for the riskers who go forward boldly to participate in the building of a free community of valid persons.”

From "Carifesta and Culture", an essay by Alissa Trotz in today's Stabroek News, the second in a series of columns debating the relevance of Carifesta to today's Caribbean. (My own contribution was published last week--read it here.)

Help Jeffrey Chock

Paramin blue devils in Port of Spain, Carnival Friday traditional parade, 1999, by Jeffrey Chock

Jeffrey Chock is one of Trinidad and Tobago's leading contemporary photographers. He is particularly well known for his work documenting Trinidad Carnival, theatre, and dance over the past three decades. Jeffrey's images are a crucial part of the Caribbean's cultural history, and his personal and professional knowledge of Trinidad's Carnival and performing arts is immense and irreplaceable.

Reviewing Chock's book Trinidad Carnival in the August 2006 CRB, Mark Lyndersay wrote: "His passion and intuitive understanding of the humanity that fuels the festival shine on every page." Philip Sander's review in the July/August 2006 Caribbean Beat said: "Spontaneous yet deliberate, finding the eerie in the pretty and the beautiful in the debased, and filled with faces transfigured by an emotion far more complicated than mere joy, the best of Chock’s photos are Carnival."

There are performing artists in Trinidad who will let no one but Jeffrey photograph their work. They understand his deep respect for them, and his devotion to his art. Jeffrey has inspired two generations of artists, and helped ensure their work will live on, though his photographs.

Now he needs help. Jeffrey recently suffered a major heart attack and was subsequently diagnosed with a series of medical problems requiring urgent--and expensive--intervention. Like many creative professionals in the Caribbean who have put art before income, he does not have health insurance to help in this time of crisis. It says a great deal about the affection and admiration that Trinidad's artistic community feels for him that various spontaneous initiatives have been launched to raise money to cover his medical bills. In coming weeks, there will be fundraising events of several kinds, and I will keep Antilles readers informed about these as they are announced.

Meanwhile, there are major medical bills already waiting to be paid, and Jeffrey needs cash right away. Georgia Popplewell has jump-started the fundraising process by setting up a ChipIn account, through which anyone with a credit card can make an immediate donation online--simply click on this widget:

Fundraising with ChipIn

As I write this, various well-wishers have already donated US$2,615, more than twenty per cent of the initial target of US$12,000. Donating is simple, safe--ChipIn uses PayPal's secure servers to received payments--and immediate. I urge all Antilles readers to consider making a donation, even a small one--to urgently support not just the work but the life of an important Caribbean artist.

Also:

- If you are a member of Facebook, join the Friends of Jeffrey Chock group to keep informed about fundraising efforts.

- Read a message from Jeffrey at Caribbean Free Radio, in which he explains the status of his health.

- If you would like to donate but don't have a credit card or don't feel comfortable using ChipIn, contact me directly at crb AT meppublishers DOT com (you know what to do with the AT and the DOT) and we'll arrange something.

- Finally, please forward this information to anyone who may be willing to help.

2009 CWP open for entries

The Commonwealth Foundation has announced that the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize--for books of fiction written by Commonwealth citizens during the 2008 calendar year--is now open for entries. There's full information here, including eligibility requirements, deadlines, and the official application form. Caribbean writers with new novels and short story collections, please encourage your publishers to enter them!

Georgetown journal, part 3

Much to report, dear readers, on the last two days of Carifesta--highlights include a public sparring-match between Derek Walcott and Guyanese President Bharath Jagdeo--but first I want to share some disturbing news. The Living Guyana blog is reporting that journalist Neil Marks of the Guyana Times has been fired after writing a report critical of the Carifesta opening ceremony:

Security were called in to remove Marks from the Guyana Times offices yesterday and that he was prevented from accessing his assigned computer.

Living Guyana suggests this was the result of the newspaper proprietor's connections with the PPP government. I haven't read the article by Marks that supposedly got him dismissed, but I'm shocked at the idea of cultural commentary being silenced in this way. I'm trying to get more details of the case, and I hope that the regional press covering Carifesta will ask some hard questions of the Guyana Times.

Georgetown journal, part 2

"The ghost of Andrew Salkey wants a word with you," writes FSJL, commenting on my previous post. Yes, for this series of Carifesta reports I've deliberately borrowed the title of Salkey's extraordinary 1972 book Georgetown Journal, my copy of which was the first thing I put in my bag when I was packing for this trip. I think I've argued before, here at Antilles, that Georgetown Journal is an undeservedly neglected but absolutely crucial text--a detailed, intimate record of Guyana and the Caribbean at a key point in our post-independence history--but it is also a document of the genesis of Carifesta itself.

Salkey visited Guyana in February 1970, a guest of the Burnham government, one of a distinguished creative cohort invited to witness the inauguration of the Co-operative Republic, and attend the Caribbean Writers and Artists Conference that was to set the agenda for the first Caribbean Festival of Arts, then just a gleam in the region's collective eye. He spent two weeks here, attending meetings, lectures, performances, and caught in a whirl of nearly non-stop conversation about the future of Caribbean societies and the role of the region's artists. His transcripts of these conversations form the bulk of his book--we hear the voices of, among many others, Sam Selvon, John La Rose, Philip Moore, Wilson Harris, Beryl McBurnie, Karl Parboosingh, and many ordinary Guyanese Salkey happened to fall in with. It all adds up to a rich, dense, wry, penetrating summary of the ideas and ideals that fed Carifesta 1972--required reading for anyone wishing to understand Carifesta as it has evolved over the last thirty-six years.

Anyway, back to the present, and Carifesta X. Saturday 23 was the first full day of the festival, though some elements don't yet seem to be up and running. The book fair, for instance, at which five new books were scheduled to be launched (at least according to the literary programme I got my hands on). Accompanied by my friend Lisa Allen-Agostini--writer, anthologist, also visiting from Trinidad--I made my way to the book fair site at the National Park near the Sea Wall, only to find a series of all but empty tents. There were posters and banners announcing various publishers and groups, but the book tables were bare, and the afternoon's launches had all been postponed.

The other major literary event of the day was a two-hour reading session in the evening, at the Umana Yana. Pauline Melville was scheduled to open the programme, and I would have loved to hear her, but instead I made my way to the Oasis Café on Carmichael Street for the launch of Ruel Johnson's new book, Fictions. Except--ah! the trials of publishing--the printers had missed their deadline and the books hadn't arrived. I joked with Ruel that people might think Fictions was really a fiction. So what started as a book launch turned into a good-natured liming session for the author's friends and guests. Ruel's readers will just have to wait until Wednesday, when there is a second launch scheduled, part of the official Carifesta book fair programme.

So in truth I didn't get up to much Carifesting yesterday. And, like many people I encounter around Georgetown, I'm still trying to make sense of the long, complicated schedule of events, a few conflicting versions of which seem to be in circulation. The more energetic are trying to dash from reading to performance to screening, zigzagging across the city in an effort to take it all in. I'm far less ambitious--my plan is to choose one or at most two events per day, meander slowly between venues, and enjoy frequent serendipitous meetings with friends and colleagues. Actually, it's those informal conversations that happen around and in between the official programme that I enjoy most--on Friday, for instance, I spent the afternoon with Ruel and the Guyanese litblogger Charmaine Valere, and yesterday I was given an impromptu tour of the Theatre Guild building by Ameena Gafoor, the Guyanese literary scholar and editor of The Arts Journal--followed by lunch with Ameena, Lisa, and the engineer (and raconteur) Bert Carter, who rebuilt the Theatre Guild. Today I may make another try at the book fair before I head to the grand opening of the Carifesta symposium series--featuring Derek Walcott, Edward Baugh, Ian McDonald, Cynthia McLeod, and Kenneth Ramchand.

But first--it is a grey, rainy morning in Georgetown--another cup of coffee.

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.