Coming Late to the Party

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And not knowing whether I will take part because I can barely keep up, but:There's a reading challenge going on this year that I'd like to alert people to, just in case.It's the Africa Reading Challenge:

Participants commit to read - in the course of 2008 - six books that either were written by African writers, take place in Africa, or deal significantly with Africans and African issues.  (Read more if you like!)You can read whatever you want, but of the six books, I recommend a mixture of genres. For example, you might select books from each of the following:
  1. Fiction (novels, short stories, poetry, drama)
  2. Memoir / autobiography
  3. History and current events

I also recommend reading books from at least 3 different countries.  The challenge is for 2008, but if you feel like jumping in now: karibu sana!

There's help for the challenge.  For example, there's this list of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century, compiled by a committee selected by the Zimbabwe Book Fair and published on the web by Columbia University Libraries.And here's the list put together by the challenger.Here's my own list of books which I've read by Africans/about Africa.  It's partial because of my memory, and you'll notice it's pretty old (mostly mid-20th century), and it includes only those books I finished (there are several, like Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, Ngugi's Petals of Blood and Matagari and Okri's The Famished Road that I started but didn't finish).  Some of them I know pretty well, others not so well.  Some I read in the original French, but can't remember the name anymore.  Several are not here, because I have to go dig them out to remember them. But if they are here, be sure they stuck with me.

  • Achebe, Things Fall Apart, A Man of the People, Morning Yet on Creation Day
  • Armah, The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born
  • Sembene, Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu (God's Bits of Wood)
  • Oyono, Houseboy
  • Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman, The Lion of God, The Bacchae of Euripides*
  • Ngugi, A Grain of Wheat, Decolonizing the Mind
  • Fugard, Master Harold and the Boys, Siswe Bansi is Dead
  • Head, A Question of Power
  • Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

*Edited to get Soyinka's play title right - it's the Bacchae, not the Bacchus of EuripidesAnd of course one of the most influential books about Africa (and the whole colonial world, for that matter):

  • Conrad, Heart of Darkness

It's time, I think, to refresh my reading list anyway.  If I decide to participate (some things will help me decide, like, oh, CARIFESTA) I will do so here.Till then, I offer the challenge to you all.EDIT: Here's a bonus to the challenge - Siphoning Off A Few Thoughts' link to Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay "How To Write About Africa" in Granta 92.My favourite bit:

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

There's a whole lot more.

"Red"

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Geoffrey Philp reads a poem here, called "Red". It's about being in between.As Philp writes:

And while this poem does not adhere strictly to the form [the ghazal], it did allow me to play with the word "red," which at the start of the poem refers to a biracial person or "half-caste."

  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3dO8DKZr3g&w=425&h=349]

Reading Michael Ondaatje

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It's May, which means that in a few weeks my nephew Jaxon will be a year old, and it'll be a year since I went to Montreal, and a year after it was decided that we would not be hosting CARIFESTA X, and a year more or less since I started reading Ondaatje again.Now it may not seem that all those things are connected, but trust me, they are. Last year things changed. I'm not sure that elections are supposed to make life in a country so different, especially not in a country where the difference between political parties is really no more than a few degrees right or left, a leader, and a set of initials -- but nevertheless the difference between this year and last year appears vast. And at the same time it's the same. It still matters what colours you wore this time last year, when really it shouldn't. We are a nation trying to stay afloat in this roughwater world, after all, and that's not changed; but we still care who won, we still care what letters we prefer. I thought the silliness would ebb away after elections. Apparently I was wrong.What this has to do with Ondaatje is not immediately apparent. Let me put it this way. Last year I discovered -- or rediscovered, not sure -- my affinity for his work. It was something I discovered back when I read The English Patient and then went out and bought his other books, some of them anyway: In the Skin of a Lion and, later, Anil's Ghost. Ondaatje doesn't write novels fast, and so there was time to savour each of these: five years between Lion and English Patient, and then eight years between English Patient and Anil's Ghost. And then, last year, Divisadero.I read The English Patient all the way through, though I now remember the film better than the book -- such is the magic of Ralph Fiennes' work in the former. I started to read Lion and didn't finish. I started to read Anil's Ghost on the drive back from Victoria to Nassau in 2000 and stopped when I got home, distracted by house-making and teaching at COB. And then, last year I discovered iPod books. I bought Anil's Ghost and Divisadero from the iTunes store and listened to them -- Anil's Ghost all the way to Montreal, during my four hours in Philadelphia Airport. My only time in that airport and I will always remember it, and listening to Anil's Ghost and looking at the airport art and waiting for the US Air plane to take me to Canada. Listening to the book as I walked the quartiers around Rue de la Visitation, where Eddie and Tasha lived. And then coming to the end in their apartment one morning, and waiting for days to start Divisadero -- and listening to that while waiting for the plane back home.Ondaatje writes about war, always about war. In this he's like Findley, my other favourite Canadian writer. What is it about Canada, that country committed to peace, that makes its writers so obsessed war?

National Poetry Month

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I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, and am posting (irregularly) the poems I'm writing daily.

But I wanted to note that Geoffrey Philp has been doing a daily update on Caribbean poets all month long. You can find it here.

Today's is particularly good: Anthony McNeill (Jamaica):Somebody is hanging:a logwood treeladen with blossomsin a deep wood.The body stirs leftin the wind ...

He was the Greatest of Us All

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R.I.P., Aimé Césaire.Cesaire's best known works included the essay "Negro I am, Negro I Will Remain" and the poem "Notes From a Return to the Native Land."His works also resonated in Africa. Former Senegalese President Abdou Diouf said Cesaire led a noble fight against hate."I salute the memory of a man who dedicated his life to multiple wars waged on all battlefields for the political and cultural destiny of his racial brothers," Diouf said.Born June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Cesaire moved to France for high school and university. He returned to Martinique during World War II and served as mayor from 1945 to 2001, except in 1983-84.Cesaire helped Martinique shed its colonial status in 1946 to become an overseas department. As the years passed, he remained firm in his views.

--from the Miami Herald

Edit: Geoffrey Philp has an excellent article, here.

It's April

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and the USA is celebrating National Poetry Month.  Not that (a) we're American, or that (b) we should do what our northern neighbours do, but it occurs to me that it wouldn't harm us to have national months for some reason or another.The problem is that nothing our governments decide seem to stick anymore.  As soon as a different party gets into power, decisions are reversed, amended, rewritten, recast.  It's all a matter of scoring points, it would seem -- not a matter of national anything.  The PLP, while they were in power, removed the face of Stafford Sands from the $10 bill and sidelined One Bahamas in such a way that people forgot what it was/what it meant (Independence, not One Bahamas, was the priority).  The FNM this go-round have redesigned Urban Renewal and recast the move of the container port; we have yet to see what significance the thirty-fifth anniversary of Bahamian independence will bring.It all seems rather petty, and extremely absurd.And what's more, it's all in utter disregard of the wants or needs of the Bahamian people at large.But all that's by the way.  I started to write about what April's doing in other countries.  If you want, you can receive a poem a day from the Academy of American Poets.  I've subscribed.  You can also write a poem a day for NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month), and if you want a community, you can post it here.But I think it's time we started thinking about our nation, and what we want it to do.  Together.  Forward, upward, and onward.

Video Excerpt from The Children's Teeth (Ellie and Blanche)

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Relevant Excerpt:
The outside child of Neville Williams returns to the house where she was raised -- by Ellie, Neville's wife, who took her in -- and Ellie's mother, Blanche, gives her a piece of her mind. In this clip, Ellie responds to her mother. It's the end of Act I, Scene i.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-DJRo7pBt0&rel=1]BLANCHE
Nursing viper in your bosom. I tell you Ellie, you let trouble under your roof and trouble take up residence big big, I tell you that. You see? I swear by these my last years, you take this back in today you digging your own grave far as I concern and you ga have to live in it. You hear me? I's your mother but you would be dead far as I concern if you take this house, the only thing you got to hand your children, and give it to the outside child. You hear me?

DONNIE
This my house too. I got every right to be here.

BLANCHE
Ya pa dead! You een get no right to set foot in here no more.

DONNIE
I get a letter right here to prove it.

ELLIE
Letter?

DONNIE
From a lawyer. Saying Daddy leave me part of this house.

NEVILLE
Damn straight.

BLANCHE
Greedy twoface...

DONNIE
Like you ever did anything for him! You’n got no right to judge me!

BLANCHE
Well, damn!

DONNIE
Where the phone? I need to call a taxi.

BLANCHE
Carry your hip!

JEFF
I’ll carry you.DONNIE
No. I cause enough trouble for one day.
(JEFF collects DONNIE’S bags from their place in STACEY’S room.)

BLANCHE
Jeff, you— Jeff! JEFF!

JEFF
(Moves towards the exit with the bags)
Come, Donnie.

BLANCHE
Ellie, ya see? Ya see? You see how this child get alla yinna running round her like you was the Haitian and she was somebody? Is the same thing all over again. From the day she set foot in that door. She like she pull her panty over yinna head.

ELLIE
All right!! Thas enough. Momma, you is a old woman, and you did raise me from small, and I never had one reason to complain bout anything you do for me but one. But lemme just tell you this one time. When I marry Neville I marry him for me. I take him for better and for worse, in sickness in health, and I keep my vow. For me. I'n care what anyone else do, I make my vow and I keep it. And if that mean taking in his child when she'n got nowhere else to go I do that too, because I love him. Donnie is his child and when her mother leave her high and dry she become my child. I do that for him. So let me just say this once. If I want bring Donnie back into this house what Neville Williams build for me and his family, I don't care if you is the Almighty come down off the cross, I don't care if you have a stroke and die on the spot, you understand, I ga do it. Because this is his house and she is his child. You hear me? So now we ga have this party for you and I ga feed all your cantankerous friends, and I ga smile up in they face and quarm and pretend like I like them cause you is my ma. That is what we ga do this afternoon, and you ga sit right there and smile too. You understand me? So you just put on your happy face and act like you glad you turning eighty-four and thank Jesus he'n call you yet and enjoy this party I slave over, and when I ready I ga take care of Neville daughter just like I promise. Donnie, child, take care, and call me. Stacey, go get the potato salad and put out some plate. Jeff, you hurry back, hear? People coming any minute and I ga be damn if I'n ready for them when they come.
(They all stare at her. The doorbell rings. Blackout.)

The Children's Teeth - Book

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For those of you who have been noticing, I've taken the plunge into self-publication.  So if you missed the play (for shame!!), you can read it if you're interested -- simply by buying a copy of the book from Lulu.com.  I've got a handy-dandy link in the sidebar that'll take you straight to the online bookstore.

No, it's not available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.  This one's not that grand. (Why, you may ask, is Essays on Life getting such wide distribution?  Well, because the essays are being printed and read not only here in Nassau, but in Britain, being reprinted by both Bahama Pundit the New Black Magazine, and I thought there might be some interest globally.  The play, now -- that's a different story.)

Yes, it is going to be available in real bookstores in Nassau.  I'll tell you when.In the meantime, you can order it from Lulu.com.  

Getting up, getting out, getting over: Art is the way

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Over on his blog, Reginald Shepherd has posted a meditation on how he made it in the cultural world as a gay black man from an impoverished background. It's also turns out to be a meditation on why art and culture are -- or, excuse me, this is The Bahamas -- should be a fundamental part of any social agenda. As he puts it,

... if one is black, if one is gay, if one has been raised in poverty (as I was, in tenements and housing projects in the Bronx), if as an individual one has never fit into the various social contexts to which one has been expected or even to which one has hoped to belong, the burden of the distance between one’s own sense of self and the fixed and often distorted images others have of one is especially heavy.

He accepts that most people who hold positions similar to his are in fact from wealthy backgrounds. He recognizes that the world of the cultural elite (he's talking about in the USA, of course, but we'd do well to consider how global that idea might be) is a world of privilege. As he writes:

The art that saved me has so often belonged to the wealthy and privileged that it’s hard to remember that it’s not merely an ornament of power. Part of my project as a writer has necessarily (in order for me to be a writer at all) been to attempt to disentangle art’s liberatory from its oppressive aspects, to remember that those who so often own art don’t define it, that (as Adorno pointed out) art is the enemy of culture and culture is the enemy of art.

By "culture", he means, I'm guessing, the invisible structure of society that's held in place by the status quo, and by "art" he means the individual's approach to that culture, each creator's interpretation of, answer to, and redefinition of that culture. In the USA, that status quo is defined internally, from the top down, and so "culture" and "art" are quite probably at war. Here, though, that status quo is defined from the outside in. Our culture should be the fodder for our art; but without the latter, the former is slipping away. We are the hollow men, and so we use everybody's yardstick to measure ourselves except our own. We put our culture aside, we have very little art. Will we ever get up, get out, or get over?

On Publication: Essays on Life

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cover_6×9_front-essays1-a-t.gifI'm pleased to announce that I'm working preparing Essays on Life for publication in a series of books. The first one, featuring the first fifty essays published, is almost ready to go to print. In a week or so, I hope, if all goes well, it'll be available online through Lulu.com, Amazon.com, and other online bookstores. Within the month, again if all goes well, I'm hoping it can be available in local bookstores; check Logos bookstore or COB's Chapter One and to find out. But I'll keep you posted.After plenty of thought (and some trepidation), and after considering things like time and cost and bulk and other stuff, I decided to self-publish, sort of. There were several options: local publishers, who would edit, lay out, set up, and distribute the book for me (Media Enterprises, Guanima Press); local printers, like the Nassau Guardian, who would do basically what Lulu is doing for me, taking the book I give them and printing it as is, or regional publishers, like Ian Randle, who would do what the local ones would do but with a far wider immediate distribution reach, or international vanity presses, which would design the cover and the layout for a price and then provide me with a print run of a size of my choice (sort of).There were two problems with them all. The first one was time; the turn-around time for traditional publishing services is pretty long, and though the result is of good quality, it wasn't what I wanted for a collection of essays that are pretty topical in nature (though with the way in which life goes round and round in circles of ever-tightening circumference, they are showing themselves to be pretty resilient, as relevant to the new government as they were four years ago to the old).The second one was bulk. Traditional print runs require somebody -- the publisher, if you're doing it the old-fashioned way, or the author, if you're going with self-publishing -- to pay for the production of a sizeable bunch of books. These can sit around, getting dusty and (in this climate) growing mould, while you scramble to recoup your costs. If the publisher bears those, you have to wait years to get paid, because the publisher has to work to recoup its costs. All in all, not what I wanted for this book (though for other potential books, that's quite a different story).I decided to try going with Print-on-Demand (POD).I'd first heard of Lulu.com through NaNoWriMo. (For those who don't know, that's an acronym for the little idea that's taking literature by storm and getting people writing long(ish) fiction on an annual basis -- National Novel Writing Month, an idea kicked up by Chris Baty, when individuals challenge themselves to write a novel from scratch, from start to finish, in 30 days.) I checked it out and thought it was interesting, but wasn't sure about the quality of the product, or about its reach. Since then, though, I've seen books produced through Lulu, and have held at least two of them in my hands -- Rik Roots' The RikVerse, which I ordered through Amazon, and Rupert Missick's Dreams and Other Whispers.There are disadvantages to self-publishing; any serious writer will tell you that. The main one is that for anyone who wants to make a career for themselves as a writer, with all the attachments, like advances and royalties and other trappings of the publishing economy, self-publishing, especially through vanity presses, appears to many serious publishers as a mark of inexperience, desperation, mediocrity, or all of the above. For many of them vanity presses are scammers par excellence; and it's true that if you're not careful, you'll pay far more for a print run of so-so product than the thing is worth. Self-publication also suggests that the writer isn't committed enough to face the hurdles that surround the publishing industry, hurdles whose conquest can produce fairy tales like J. K. Rowling. People who are impatient are often careless, sloppy, rushed, and the quality of the work suffers. And they're not unjustified in that concept; a lot of what is self-published isn't all that good.But self-publishing has its place. One of those places is when you live in small countries with small readerships, as we do. It's generally not economically viable for a big publisher to invest in a Bahamian publication; the cost of production can't be recouped. The market is simply too small. For this reason, hundreds of Bahamians and Bahamian residents -- some of them very good writers, some of them not so good, and some of them admittedly pretty bad -- have chosen to go with self-publishing simply to meet the demand that exists for their work. Among them are big-name Bahamian writers, like Gail Saunders and Winston Saunders and Obediah Michael Smith and Keith Russell and Michael Pintard. Not bad company to keep at all.And then there are serious advantages to print-on-demand. The main one is that the desktop revolution, coupled with the new global world of business offered by cyberspace, has created a completely new way of publishing. Print-on-demand is just that; you can write and create a book that exists only in digital form until somebody's ready to buy it. That keeps the cost down, keeps the waste to a minimum, and makes the whole process easier and simpler.And what would I lose anyway? Collecting Essays on Life is more an exercise in convenience than a full-scale launch of myself as a published writer. The complete set are already available on this blog, and are still searchable (presumably) in the archives of the Nassau Guardian, where they were first published, and some of them appear on Bahama Pundit. The trouble is, if people want to walk around with them away from the computer, they still have to go through the hassle of downloading and printing them out on plain paper. Why not make it a whole lot easier by printing through Lulu so that people can order the books themselves, or so that local bookstores can buy them as they need them?So I'm coming to the end of my inordinately long-winded post, and returning to where I started. In my end is my beginning, wrote T. S. Eliot in his own (far more elegant) contemplation about words and writing, East Coker.Essays on Life Vol. I's being prepared for publication.Look for it on this blog and other places shortly.

The difficulty of writing a Caribbean Harry Potter

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And no, the above doesn't mean what you might think.In fact, this topic goes right back to the "images of savages". As Geoffrey Philp observes in his comment thread,

I was just speculating on how one kind of magic can be totally evil and another can have both good and evil, when if you look at them through archetypal lens, they share similar mythological constructs.

The difficulty in our context is quite different, though. In the first place, the Caribbean has yet to integrate its mythology into something that can have both good and evil connotations, because it's a jigsaw kind of mythology. I often think about Eliot when I think about the construction of our societies, which are literal waste lands salvaged from the residue the masters left behind when they left: these fragments I have shored against my ruins.In this kind of context, the hope of creating something with both good and evil sides to it is virtually impossible. Our ancestors -- the Calibans and the Sambos and the Coolies of our past -- were the demons against whom the angels (our other ancestors, the masters, the Europeans, the messengers-of-light) stood. We were all the Voldemorts, Harry's Xango-sign notwithstanding (and it properly should be an axe anyway; perhaps he's more like Zeus after all); our masters, were the warriors of good, not us.Until we can face up to this history of ours, name it, and beat it back into its proper place with our own fiery sticks, I wonder, as Philp does, whether a Potter-type story for children is yet possible for us.Course, Nalo Hopkinson's doing pretty well for us grown-ups. Go Nalo!

On ethnicity and literature

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An article in the UK Guardian addresses the question of race ethnicity and literature.The author argues: "Writers from Africa - or anywhere else - should not be required to be 'the voice' of wherever they happen to come from."This is a debate that's happening elsewhere in my reading, for some reason; here, on Very Like A Whale, Nic Sebastian asks, "Does belonging to an oppressed community require that one’s creative fealty be sworn to that community? What are the moral and spiritual imperatives here?"And when I gave my reading two weeks ago, someone (actually an old and dear poet-friend) remarked that my poetry was not "street". Well, I wondered, why should it be? First, I'm too old for that. When I was growing up, we had art from the "blocks", not the "street". And second, I'm not interested in it. There are more than enough people writing "urban" or "street" stuff just to fit into a mould that they imagine they're supposed to fit into because they come from a particular ethnic group or from a country that features that ethnic group, without even beginning to imagine the politics behind the creation of that mould.Those politics are for another day. But I thought that the article on ethnicity and literature posed an apt question, so go read it. Here's how it ends.

Authenticity should not be synonymous with the current trend or "voice" publishers are desperately trying to find. Surely all writers should be granted the right of imagination and the freedom of individual expression. But these fundamentals have been taken from international and British diaspora writers. In its place is a requirement to "represent" a particular community in which they have roots.A writer's background is just one of many influences fuelling their imaginations. It's not the defining quality, and we should allow writers' imaginations to roam freely around the world.

Acknowledgement of Inspiration

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Blogs are funny things. They inspire writing, but they don't always encourage the acknowledgement of other inspiration. Unlike academic writing, they are easy to dash off, seductive almost, not always conducive to the recognition of sources. Oh, they allow us to link to other blogs and websites. That's easy. But if a source is that outmoded invention, a book -- well.I've been writing and posting a series of essays on race and racism and our crippledness about it today, and calling that series of essays "On Images of Savages". I got the title from a book by the psychologist Gustav Jahoda. For anybody who wants to know more about this subject, I suggest you go look up the book, and buy it.You can preview it here, (for a limited time) and buy it from an online bookstore. Check it out. Buy it, even. You won't be sorry for the investment.

books.jpeg

By Gustav Jahoda
Published 1999Routledge
Archaeology
272 pages
ISBN 0415188555

In Images of Savages, the distinguished psychologist Gustav Jahoda advances the provocative thesis that racism and the perpetual alienation of a racialized "other" are a central legacy of the Western tradition. Finding the roots of these demonizations deep in the myth and traditions of classical antiquity, he examines how the monstrous humanoid creatures of ancient myth and the fabulous "wild men" of the medieval European woods shaped early modern explorers' interpretations of the New World they encountered. Drawing on a global scale the schematic of the Western imagination of its "others", Jahoda locates the persistent identification of the racialized other with cannibalism, sexual abandon and animal drives. Turning to Europe's scientific tradition, Jahoda traces this imagery through the work of 18th century scientists on the relationship between humans and apes, the new racist biology of the 19th century studies of "savagery" as an arrested evolutionary state, and the assignment, especially of blacks, to a status intermediate between humans and animals, or that of children in need of paternal protection by Western masters. Finding in these traditional tropes a central influence upon current psychological theory, Jahoda presents a startling historical continuity of racial figuration that persists right up to the present day.Far from suggesting a program for the eradication of racial stereotypes, this remarkable effort nevertheless isolates the most significant barriers to equality buried deep within the Western tradition, and proposes a potentially redemptive self-awareness that will contribute to the gradual dismantling of racial injustice and alienation.

R.I.P. Ousmane Sembène

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sembene.jpgSembène, the Senegalese filmmaker and novelist, died after a long illness on Sunday past.Here's more on his passing:

Ousmane Sembene, the Senegalese filmmaker and writer who was a crucial figure in the African postcolonial cultural awakening, has died at his home in Dakar, Senegal. His family, which announced his death Sunday, said Sembene had been ill since December. He was 84. (International Herald Tribune, June 12, 2007)

Here's more on his life and work:

Born on 1 January 1923 in Ziguinchor, Senegal, Ousmane Sembene is assuredly one of the most prominent figures in African film and literature. Yet little in his early experience seemed to predispose him to a career not only as a major literary figure but also as a literary figure, tout court. Primarily self-taught, Sembene has been exposed to various experiences and situations that have very often turned out to reverberate in his work. As early as the age of 15, he started earning his living as a fisherman. Beside working as a fisherman, Sembene has also served as a bricklayer, a plumber, an apprentice mechanic, a dock worker and a trade unionist -- jobs which many people may view as incongruent with, or even unlikely to be conducive to, the stimulation of literary talents. But it is this very experience which, paradoxically or not, greatly contributed in shaping Sembene as the great writer and filmmaker he has become. In this respect, Ousmane maintains that his education was a result of a training he received in "the University of Life" (qtd. in Amuta 137).

If you have never read or seen anything by him, make the effort.

Why Poetry Matters - Giovanni's "We Are Virginia Tech"

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When it's good, and when it's right, it speaks to that part of us that is deepest and most fully human. All creative art does, when it's good and when it's right. This is why those people who ignore or belittle or sideline or erase creative endeavours -- from the education administrators who decide that the creative arts are luxuries their schools can't afford to the politicians who think roads and hospitals and airports are more important -- all contribute, little by little, to the dehumanizing of their citizens.I don't want to trivialize the massacre at Virginia Tech by writing anything much about it. It has become almost too commonplace for these kinds of things to happen. Why that is we don't know; there are always easy answers -- he was bullied, he was "foreign", it was too easy for him to get hold of firearms, the university was too insecure, yaddayaddaya. It may even be that it's not as commonplace as we imagine, but the mass media, the 24-hour news stations that otherwise have to invent stories out air that is very thin, feed on real tragedies about which their audiences' feelings are not mixed. In that regard, I've since learned that the massacre was not the worst school tragedy in American history, but only in the history of television; in 1927, a man in Bath, Michigan killed 45 people, 38 children and 7 teachers, in a brand-new school. The fact that this week's massacre is being labelled "the worst" is in part a function of instant information and our need to make sense out of things that will never make sense.The thing is, tragedies aren't really measured by statistics. We think they are, and it may be a mark of our collective dehumanization that we are oddly comforted by numbers, as though they give us the ability to explain the incomprehensible. But they don't. At these times, it's art -- poetry, music, dance, theatre, painting -- that do the job we really need. Numbers speak to our brains, and lull them into thinking that they can control the uncontrollable; perhaps that's why, until Samuel came along to find Saul, Israel's God prohibited the Children of Israel from holding censuses for so long. The arts speak to that part of us that we call the soul, and they move us to behave in ways that numbers and our brains will never fully comprehend.By suppressing our creativity, and worse, ignoring the skills necessary to control and channel that creativity so that it becomes a force for good, I believe we warp it. Perhaps it's that warped creativity that leads to tragedies like this. I don't know. I do know that we are most fundamentally human when we feel, and that the manipulation of our feelings should not be left in the hands of politicians, preachers, and other abusers.So I post the video of poet Nikki Giovanni, Professor of English at Virginia Tech, delivering the closing speech at the convocation of Virginia Tech in the wake of this week's tragedy. For those of you who don't know who she is, she's one of the leading African-American poets. It is absolutely fitting that she gave the closing speech — and that that speech was a poem. Now, I leave it up to you to work out for yourselves why poetry matters.[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snuc1hDDSiI]

Tourism - a different perspective

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Top Ten Caribbean Works of Fiction (again)

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So there's now an interesting exchange going on in the comments of Geoffrey's post, where the fundamental question of how to choose the top is being debated.Frances-Anne, who, from her reference to Trinidad, isn't likely to be who I thought she might be, says:

1) I resist the idea of "best" in this context (creation) as it reminds me of school in Trinidad "Good better best, never let it rest til we make our good better" that whole anglican ethic of competition and never being good enough, that pit us against each other to be judged by someone called "Cambridge". So I'm suspicious of this judging of "best", who is judging and by what standards?2) as has been reflected above Caribbean literature though in its flowering right now, has not been widely read, so people's choices will be determined not by "best" or even "favorite" but by what was forced on them at school or if they were lucky university. Reducing choices for the most part to Naipaul, Rhys, Lovelace, and Lamming, and only in general one of each of these. Not representative.

It's a basic point, and one well worth debating. But from my point of view, canons start somewhere. At this stage, I believe that we have to start with Naipaul, Rhys, Lovelace and Lamming, just because they are the ones that get forced on us (what about Anthony? What Caribbean schoolchild hasn't read A Year in San Fernando or Green Days by the River -- Cricket in the Road being eschewed by people like us Bahamians, to whom cricket is a foreign language). The fact that we "all" have these four in common makes them representative, and is worth exploration. The questions that follow — why these four? What do they represent? What does their selection tell us? — are equally important, and even fundamental to our understanding of our Selves.What's more, the fact that we have "all" read these writers means that we are all writing in response to, or inspired by, these four. This fact is not incidental, and it's why I support the teaching of Dead White Male writers to people who want to be writers. Because the vast majority of European literature was developed in the shadow of the Bible and Homer and Shakespeare, it is fundamental for people who wish to continue in that mode to read them. For us in the Caribbean who intend to continue working with the written word as word-on-page, they are part of our canon too, or they should be. We can't understand Lamming without knowing Caliban; we can't understand Walcott without understanding Homer; we miss part of Achebe's messages if we are ignorant of Yeats, and we can't even appreciate Brathwaite as we should without a familiarity with Eliot.I believe canons are there to tell us about who we are, what we regard as literature, and — more fundamentally still — to help us understand the others. I don't believe that our oppression should make us ignore them. Know thine enemy makes as much sense today, among us all, as it ever did.

Top Ten Caribbean Works of Literature

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I linked earlier (though late in the game) to Geoffrey Philip's semi-formal survey of the top ten works of Caribbean fiction.The process was two-tiered. The first part prepared a shortlist of twelve Caribbean works to be considered. This was done by a process of online nomination -- you could enter any book you thought was worthy of the honour -- and ended on the weekend. This part is a process of voting.I find the list interesting, if a little skewed. I admit that I misunderstood the purpose of the list, and tried to restrict my nominations to books I've actually read. Result: one big gun, in particular, is missing from the shortlist that should have been there -- Wilson Harris. But if I'm honest, I have never had the strength to finish his novels, as wide and meandering as the Demerara and as dense as the Guyanese interior. The list also betrays the probable age of the submitters -- it's weighted towards the mid-twentieth century.Anyhow, go vote for your top ten Caribbean works of fiction.