In My Own Words...Joanne Gail Johnson

“Nuff Respeck!”

My Caribbean Children’s Books are “Self Organized Learning Environments”

Joanne Gail Johnson

It enthralls me that children can really know some things; and very important things I mean.

Today I sit and pay attention to life just as I did as a child. My one-eyed cat, Sweetheart, is curled around the computer mouse, not-so-patiently waiting for some love. (The cat and me too!) Outside my picture window is a picture, worthy of its window: the buxom northern range bathed in a sea of golden light. The ordinary life of neighbors can be heard in the mowing of grass and raking of leaves. Their cars swishing by on the main road I cannot see, remind me that I am grateful. I am grateful for the simplicity, the stillness of these writing hours when the dishes and unmade beds can wait…

During this time, I commune with what I know. I feel confident that there is a housewife in Milan, a billionaire executive in Tokyo, a farmer in Jamaica, a drug trafficker in Bombay and a children’s book author in Wales with whom I have much in common.

I know we each want respect.

We may pursue it in a variety of ways and fulfill it to varying degrees, but the desire itself is universal. It is this ‘sameness’ that I tap into before I explore the infinite palette of details; before the characters in the story at hand are defined and named; before the ins and outs of a plot unfold. Potentially, it is my awareness of that resonant quality of universality that lends foundation to even a few lines of “silly” rhyme. It is what gives a children’s author the courage to hone her craft.

I heard it said that V.S. Naipaul, in a lecture at U.W.I. during his two million dollar, 2007 visit to Trinidad, responded to a question about Caribbean children’s literature by saying something to this effect: “There is no such thing. Children are in fact not capable of understanding any work which could qualify as literature.”

This amounts to hearsay, I know. But I will address the thought itself and will acknowledge first that the tone of the word “literature” spoken in the mouth of a Nobel Laureate dictates a very capital and intimidating “L.” Even so, I will risk a bit of adventure. I can admit here that it took some time to refer comfortably to myself as an author, with or without a capital A. (Or any other superlative letters tacked to the end of my given name as proof that there is indeed some measure of craft supporting my “smaller” creative choices - seeing that, from a novelist’s perspective, I don’t actually write as many actual words for my audience.)

I dare add that we are learning today so much more about that race of humans we call “Children.” They are so very much like the others called “Adults.” It has been said that a good children’s book will bring out the child in an adult and the adult in a child. Many works considered  “Classics” today, achieve this: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnet to name a few.

Allow me now, to Google search instead of Oxford Dictionary the word “literature”…

Many definitions are provided, (including one I never knew - “a card game for six players”):

· Creative writing of recognized artistic value

· Published writings in a particular style on a particular subject

· The art of written works - Literally translated, means "acquaintance with letters" (from Latin littera letter)

My work, thus far, may be more akin to that of Sugata Mitra’s “Self Organized Learning System” than to any man or woman of letters. My professional and creative goals include a strong intention to cultivate in Caribbean children, the habit of reading; indeed, learning for the sake of pleasure. In my humble opinion, picture books are unsurpassed as teaching tools. I write by conceiving visually and depend on illustrations not because it is ‘easy’ to do so, but to create a shared schema through which I may communicate concepts well beyond the temporary reading level of my audience.

Since 1998, Macmillan-Caribbean has published a number of my children’s books, easy readers, and stories. I embrace the privilege whole-heartedly and recognize that I am just beginning. I have not even approached writing anything of the capital “L” type yet. Even so, no one sets out to write something “easy” or inconsequential, at least not I. On the other hand, I certainly never intended to pen the next great West Indian classic, even in the context of - if Mr. Naipaul will allow – children’s literature. One must concede, at the very least, working authors in my field prepare the ground for passionate, discerning adult readers who will keep Mr. Naipaul and other “serious” West Indian novelists, poets and journalists in business.

Writing children’s books is for me the fulfillment of a deep, childhood knowing that I, and by extension “all ah we,” deserve to have books that reflect the diverse and unique Trini-Caribbean world we see and hear. Quite-o-quite-o, way back when, I was convicted of our cultural worthiness, and this was long before I read Miguel Street, my first Naipaul classic. This was when Enid Blyton and Beatrix Potter were walking me through English country lanes. Far more than a peep through their foreign windows, they gifted me with that universal awareness of the feeling of RESPECT.

Joanne’s latest children’s book is a contemporary Caribbean version of the Aesop’s fable, The Donkey and The Racehorse” (Macmillan-Caribbean). It hit stores in December 2010 and is now available online at Amazon and in Trinidad at R.I.K. Books. Wholesale orders at www.macmillan-caribbean.com

http://meaningfulbooks.blogspot.com/

http://islandfictionserieseditor.blogspot.com/

http://livingmetaphors.blogspot.com

www.caribbeanchildren.com

About Joanne Gail Johnson

Born, bred and based in Trinidad, Joanne is a published children's author of a number of contemporary Caribbean books, readers and stories with Macmillan-Caribbean; and is the series editor responsible for acquisitions of Macmillan's 'tween' novella series Island Fiction. Joanne is also the founding Regional Advisor of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Caribbean South Chapter. She is a dynamic storyteller, and facilitates both “Relevant Reading” and “Core Creativity” workshops for students and teachers; including volunteer readers of the Comforting Words Mobile library at Mt. Hope Children’s Hospital.

As children's theatre facilitator, she has worked with UWI’s Creative Arts Centre, and The Trinidad Theatre Workshop. As an actor, Joanne was last seen on stage in Walcott’s Remembrance, which the Nobel Laureate himself directed in St. Lucia and in Trinidad; and on the small screen in the ever-popular Earth TV Caribbean soap series, Westwood Park. These days Joanne tours schools and libraries regionally, and recently visited St. Maarten and The Bahamas.

In 2009, she authored a tertiary level course in Creativity for CREDI - Catholic Institute. Last year, 2010, St. Francois Girls’ College produced her young adult play The Last of the Super Models, which she also directed, on a national stage at Queen’s Hall. In the 90s, her company SUN TV LTD pioneered indigenous cable television in Trinidad producing over 700 hours of 100% Caribbean content; and in 2003 created www.caribbeanchildren.com: The First Ever Website for Caribbean Children.

This year SUN TV launched its own imprint Meaningful Books with its inaugural title Pink Carnival. Joanne’s work is generously supported by the NGO, Creative Parenting for the New Era: "We are convinced that Joanne's focus on nurturing the emotional intelligence of children through her books is a powerful contradiction of the violence many children experience daily in their homes, schools, on the streets and in the media." Joan Bishop MA, CEO

***

Related articles

• New children's book celebrates Caribbean, Latin American produce (repeatingislands.com)
• Trini author rewrites the alphabet with local flavours (caribbeanbookblog.wordpress.com)
• Children's Books About Caribbean Christmases! (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• Literature about the Caribbean (repeatingislands.com)

In My Own Words...Michèle Voltaire Marcelin

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don't know how or when,

no they were not voices, they were not

words, nor silence,

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

And so it was, as Neruda recounts.  Poetry summoned me. It called me by name and seduced me.  The solitary child, I  answered her siren’s call and became her subject. I have loved her since. I loved the poets I met in pages of books before I knew any living ones. I loved their language, whispered or clamored; the way in which I felt my wings unfold, spread out and gather flying strength when I read poetry.

Why do I write? Because it is a summons as well. It is a “call and response” from me to me, from me to the world and from the world to me. A call to witness an event or a feeling. I wrote first because I fell in love; and as Plato said, "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet."  And I continued writing because I was to become a witness and testify to events that changed our world.  I am a woman of color born in Haiti.  These past months, with curses and catastrophes upon my island, it was difficult not to despair. Each day brought its share of disaster: Sorrows came not single spies but in battalions...

Then by chance I discovered these verses by French resistance poet René Char . That is what life does: sends us fragments of hope serendipitously, so we can go on when we think we cannot.

Make haste to transmit your share of wonder, of rebellion, of goodness

so you are not lagging behind life

the one denied you everyday by people and things

the one you obtain

here and there some fragments of

at the end of merciless battles..."

(Common Presence)

So this is why I write. As a way to defy darkness, misery and fear, violence, treacheries, delusions. And what goodness and wonder and rebellion I have to share is my art. That is what we do as artists: we share our passion, our need to create beauty to respond to life's cruelties, to let its mark be there on the edges of this harsh, violent world. Nothing is more powerful than beauty in a wicked world. It is the only thing that makes life tolerable.

Dostoevsky said “Beauty will save the world” and Russian poet Joseph Brodsky responded "Probably it is impossible to save the world already, but to save the separate man is always possible". But the world consists of people, and if we each are able to reach just one?

"We are luminous, we human beings. We are alight in that we have been given a light through our creator, through a gift of nature..."

So we must share that light, combine it with other lights to dispel darkness and chaos. In a world filled with headlines of disasters and fear, we need to turn to art for a place to nourish the heart and soul. So against darkness and in haste, I write to share my light.

Ars Poetica by Michèle Voltaire Marcelin

"on days when all seems dark, when the world pours in and your pain blows words out of my mouth, i look at opened windows and running trains with a craving hard to explain, but i rush by quickly, eyes shut tight, and count my breaths, and when i catch a glimpse of myself, a talking shadow in full light, hair blowing and blind, i must seem, not knowing my left from my right, always lost, but as i stand here, in my age of reckoning, a woman at the end of her history, i tell you i know i have found myself.  i have found happiness where i did not seek it and grief has come frequently when i did not expect it, and come to stay, like an unwelcome guest you cannot turn away, and it has marked me to allow my heart to break with tenderness and make me part of humanity. and i give thanks for the voice i have been given, for the little song i can sing, for the light i can add to everyone else’s, for i have tasted it all, the bitter, the sweet and what was forbidden me, but i am alive, and have learned to live in this world which is beautifully hopeless and hopelessly beautiful, and if i am remembered at all, it will be because whatever else is true or false, and because i have craved its light, i have unflinchingly faced love and embraced it."

About Michèle Voltaire Marcelin:

Michèle Voltaire Marcelin  is a writer, poet, performer, and visual artist who has lived in Haiti, Chile and the United States. Her first novel “La Désenchantée" was published by Cidihca in 2006. Since then, she has published its Spanish translation "La Desencantada", and 2 other books of poetry and prose: "Lost and Found", and "Amours et Bagatelles".

Her work is also included in 2 poetry anthologies published in France: “Terre de Femmes” (Editions Bruno Doucey) and Cahier Haiti by Revue d’Art, Littérature et Musique (RAL,M).

Maya Angelou declared her poems "stunning" in an interview on OprahRadio: http://www.oprah.com/oprahradio/Haitian-Poet-Michele-Voltaire-Marcelin-Audio

And author Edwidge Danticat wrote: "The seventy-four poems in Michèle Voltaire Marcelin's "Lost and Found" are as sensual as they are lyrical, as tender as they are incandescent. Make sure you are sitting down, or better yet lying down, with your beloved and a glass of wine, as you read them. Your heart -- and your love life -- will never be the same."

Featured as one of the poets of the NewsHour on PBS (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june10/poet_02-05.html), she has performed her poetry solo and with jazz bands at the Brooklyn Museum, the MoCADA, La MaMa theatre, Cornelia Street Cafe, the United Nations, the Segal Theatre, and other venues. This Port-au-Prince born artist  writes in 3 languages and currently lives and teaches in New York. 

More information about Michèle and her work can be found on the websites: www.lidous.net  and http://www.pen.org/author.php/prmAID/791

Click on the following links to listen and watch Michele recite her poems:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFsiX6PzZOs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VRzQml8VRo&feature=related

***

Michèle Voltaire Marcelin will be reading at the Miami Book Fair International.

Saturday, Nov. 20, 10:00 a.m., Room 3314 (Building 3, 3rd Floor)

http://www.miamibookfair.com/events/michele_voltaire_marcelin_on_emlost_and_.aspx

In My Own Words: C.M. Clark

C is for Cat: The Poetics of Embedment

Sometimes poetry begins for me with a cat sleeping at my shoulder. Something about that vibration plowing in and out with the breathing, up one furrow, down another. Someone once said “verse” begins with the plowed line, the seeded line: along one row, then the deliberate deliberated “turn” onto another.

I have had too many years of breaking down poems and poetry, snapping that loose thread that holds the seamed cloth and pulling until knit and purl unravel into wavy yarn, like tangled wet hair, no longer pliant, no longer young.

Poems are my high school sweethearts, just me and the words holding hands in the hallways. Then, there is no moment more exciting than the one ready to uncork, the next word appearing unwilled, just stunning chance at work. The days and months turn of their own accord. I meet you at the bus stop in the Fall. We hurry aboard, impatient to press against each other, wool to wool, those chillying days. We ride our bikes the long miles in the Spring, sometimes never arriving, distracted by the lure of daffodils aiming skyward, tangents along a line. Then the prom, and the unimaginable, unanticipated day after – postpartum blues in an off-kilter key. There’ll be others, we know. But then, there was only the silence, table for one, there, on the blank page.

I don’t hate poetry, but I don’t always love it, either. Maybe poems now are my mature relationships, the willingness to choose this, choose you – over and over. We are the trajectories of our choices. We can amble like a sine curve, or meander randomly, hoping, knowing daffodils will wait at the path’s turn to fallow field. But barefoot footprints leave no mark. Nothing to mourn, nothing to say

There was one boy who especially liked the daffodils. Since they only bloomed briefly, the window of opportunity was small, especially after a colder than usual Winter, and forecasts for a shorter than normal Spring. How that boy reveled in all that yellow! For him, even the oncoming of everything green was eclipsed. I don’t know if that field still exists. Maybe it was just some poem, after all.

Now in the Spring I wait for the frogs to start crooning. They are my new boyfriends, maybe even my prince among them. I found my poem this year among the mangrove roots, tangled like wire, like old fishing lines, like lines deleted from erased stanzas.

“F is for Frog”

The frogs were out tonight in full chest, the buffos and the croakies bask

and buzz in the hollows, camouflaged in canal bank boudoirs, slim

and complicated with water weeds, grass

cuttings and spring pollen. Frog song trails

like a lariat snaking, lashes

out toward neighboring boglands and those

closer to the bay, outshining

by virtue of their affinity to salt.

Fascinating this glamorous rumbling in the mangrove, and flexing

their thickened throats, the call comes

for a compatible partner in these early nights of not yet

spring. Dry spring looming and pulsing frogs.

Rainclouds still dry as dust. Will

one more spring find me? Is it

possible? I still know the knife surface stir,

that stir, that stir that swells, the upswell

of clamor in this dry intermission, where everything’s

denied, but nothing’s

desired. That’s the dust

of midlife, the lily’s sonorous dust, the frog throat rasp

the dust of dry, scraped calluses,

petrifying biopsies of old skin

samples, my own dry fading. Out beyond

invisible evening, abandoned nests give way,

some fiberglass threads caught

in the branches, tracing slivers of violet sky. And

the angled silence. Why do people die in the spring?

How can they?

Is it a sightless stare,

a last squat thrust toward life, or

pouring out what’s left, emptying

the glass of seed, chewed rind? I finger aromas

of dry old pages, dusty

words, where there had been books

once. But now the frogs are awake

and alert. And they won’t stop, or be stopped. Neither fish

nor fowl, they blink

without mercy.

Who says cats are fickle? This cat sits by my shoulder until I make a move. She is loyal to the purr, fierce-knit in the face of my doubt. She keeps her claws sheathed, pats me with her pads. But the claws are there. Unseen, unspoken, embedded within the purr, but present like the one verb that makes the poem pop.I guess there’s the lesson – Lick your fur to lie flat, wake up when food appears and keep a sharp eye for lizards. They’re tasty, but hide in unsavory corners.

About the Author

C.M. Clark’s poetry has appeared in a variety of publications, including Gulf Stream magazine, the Florida Center for the Literary Arts anthology Write Here, and she is a frequent contributor to the online journal, Asili. She has also been involved in a number of multimedia collaborations with other artists, including “COMPLEMENT/Art Basel,” a video project, as well as “Now Taste This,” an annual event pairing poets and local gourmet chefs. Her work has been published in the recent collection The Blue Hour, and in the artbook Pillow Talk, a joint project with painter Georges LeBar. For several years running, she has appeared at the Miami Book Fair International as part of the Write Out Loud reading series. Clark lives in Miami, Florida, with her husband.

***

Jamaicans at Bread Loaf: Diana McCaulay

Bread Loaf is the oldest writers’ conference in the US.  Each year since 1926, writers gather in the mountains of Vermont at the Bread Loaf Inn and surrounding cabins where they hear readings from some of the best writers of contemporary fiction, take lectures and craft classes from skilled teachers and meet with publishers, agents and editors.  I’ve wanted to go to Bread Loaf since I knew of its existence, but being admitted is not easy and it is not cheap.  I managed it this year due to the publication of my novel Dog-Heart, and was proud to be one of two Jamaicans among over 200 writers – the other, poet Millicent Graham, who was the Fairbanks International Fellow and one afternoon, gave a powerful reading from her new collection of poetry The Damp in Things, published by Peepal Tree Press in the UK.  I sat in the audience, thrilled to hear a Jamaican voice in a packed lecture hall of mostly Americans.  Her books had already sold out.  Big up, Millicent!


The strangest thing about the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference was this:  I did not read a single book in the ten days I was there.  This may not sound so unusual – ten days is not a very long time – but I can hardly remember any such period of my life when I did not read at least one book. 


I read other things, of course – the workshop submissions of my colleagues, handouts for craft classes, the New York Times (a little treat to myself), The Crumb (Bread Loaf’s daily broadsheet to help you keep track of the many and marvelous events of each day).   But no books.


I bought books though, more than a dozen.  There was a little bookshop, which stocked the essentials – the books of the writers who were there, small fans (those rooms were hot!), gadgets to convert three-pronged  to two-pronged plugs, extension cords (one electrical outlet  in the room), ear plugs (nearly everybody had a roommate) and Claritin (there was a meadow across the street, blooming in profusion).   A full Bread Loaf survival kit.  So my reading lies ahead, now that I am home.


Why didn’t I read any books?  There simply wasn’t time; because there was so much to learn, so much to listen to, so much to experience.  Each day started with a lecture at 9.00 am, our two-hour workshops on alternate days until lunchtime,  a special talk at 1.30 pm, craft classes at 2.30 pm, readings at 4.15 pm, dinner at 6.30 pm, readings at 8.15 pm and again at 9.30 pm.  A test of stamina, both physical and mental.  It was my brain that churned, struggling to hold on to all that I was hearing.  I am a writer without formal education, a writer of instinct, a writer who comes to writing via reading and I was hearing much for the first time – the difference between acute and chronic tension, the importance of choosing the point of telling, the dangers of authorial intrusion, the nature of voice.  Hearing these principles in lecture was a kind of homecoming for me, a naming of literary traditions I had absorbed through a lifetime of reading but had no words for. 


Some lessons – the most talented and successful of writers look wrecked in the morning as they are flossing their teeth in the bathroom.  Producing gorgeous fiction or poetry does not necessarily mean you are a nice person.  You can relinquish your BlackBerry and the world will still find you.  It is possible to overcomplicate everything about writing – but in the end it comes down to one thing – do your stories draw people in and keep them reading, and if they don't, why not? 


Every evening after dinner, I left the crowded, noisy dining room, where many of the Fellows (definition of a Fellow - books in print, winners of literary awards) were waiters – yes, waiters – and walked across the meadow of wildflowers, through the woods to a small river.  


On the second afternoon, I followed the path of the river and came across a flat bank, where there were dozens of towers of small rocks, some four feet high.  I was charmed by this, imagining people like me, far away from home, lonely in the heady, literary atmosphere, making a little pile of rocks to say, I was here, even briefly.  I made my own pile, knowing it would be washed away in the first good rain.  Later on in the week, I learned a woman’s children had made the piles – I much preferred my own narrative.  The piles of stones made me think about perception and the stories behind the things we see – our job as novelists is to engage with those stories.  And after the walk to the river, I would emerge into the bowl of the meadow, the forested mountains on all sides, the sky full of the colours of sunset.  What an immense privilege to spend ten days doing nothing but thinking about words and their products, about the ideas behind words, about the methods of bringing words to the waiting page…       


First published by the Jamaica Observer, Bookends, Aug 29 2010.


About the Author


Diana McCaulay is a Jamaican writer, newspaper columnist and environmental activist. She has lived her entire life in Jamaica and engaged in a range of occupations – secretary, insurance executive, racetrack steward, mid-life student, social commentator, environmental advocate. She is the Chief Executive of the Jamaican Environment Trust and the recipient of the 2005 Euan P. McFarlane Award for Outstanding Environmental Leadership. Dog-Heart won first prize in the 2008 Jamaican National Literature awards.

***

Related articles by Zemanta

• Save the Date: Miami Book Fair International (2010) (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)

New Book: Till I'm Laid to Rest by Garfield Ellis

In this compelling novel, Till I'm Laid To Rest , Garfield Ellis' first novel with Nsemia Inc. Publishers , we meet Shirley Temple Brown a young woman who has survived some of the hardest social and political times Jamaica has seen. But now she is finally tired of just surviving, she wants to thrive and she knows she must leave Jamaica in order to do so.


She makes the decision to leave Jamaica for a new start in Miami. Not long after arriving in Miami, she begins to see what the glare of the sun and the bright lights have kept hidden: elderly American retirees living out their last days in the warmth and comfort their youth never afforded them, while being cared for by complete strangers; drug dealers hungry for their slice of the American dream, sexual predators, con artists and murderers.


Alone in a place where standing still is sure death, Shirley is determined to succeed or be laid to rest!


About the Author


Garfield grew up in Jamaica, the eldest of nine children. He studied marine engineering, management and public relations in Jamaica and he completed his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Miami, as a James Michener Fellow.


He is the author of four other books: Flaming Hearts, Wake Rasta, Such As I Have and For Nothing at All . His work has appeared in several international journals, including: Callaloo, Calabash, the Caribbean writer, Obsidian III, Small Axe and Anthurium. He is a two-time winner of the Una Marson Prize for adult literature; has twice won the Canute A. Brodhurst prize for fiction and the 1990 Heinemann/Lifestyle short story competition.


Till I'm Laid to Rest (in manuscript form) was 1999 winner of the Una Marson Award for Adult Fiction.


Here is what others say about Till I'm Laid to Rest:


"Ellis writes with grace and power." ~ George Lamming


"This story reveals much about the culture of poverty, human nature and survival ... The author handles contemporary social issues with such skill that there is no detraction from overall enjoyment. The proverb 'stealing from thieves makes God laugh' comes alive in the events. The author's sense of time and place is powerful and convincing." ~ Jennifer Amoah


"Where this story is original is the way it weaves a love story with someone who is involved in illegal activities and a woman torn between whether to stay with him or leave." ~ Sarah Kibaalya


"It is clear that these characters want the same things those who continue to leave their homes, families, communities and even their countries want: the chance to improve their futures. What separates us from these characters is the lengths to which they are prepared to go in order to improve their circumstances." ~ Patricia J. Saunders


"Garfield Ellis makes us see and hear people distinctly. In scene after scene character and tension are communicated in nicely nuanced dialogue." ~ Mervyn Morris

***

Related articles by Zemanta

• In My Own Words: Garfield Ellis (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• Fiction: "The Constant Color of Suffering" by Garfield Ellis (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)

What is a Caribbean Classic?: Opal Palmer Adisa

Defining a Caribbean Aesthetic: The Making of a Caribbean Classic

By Opal Palmer Adisa

When we think about Caribbean literature, we must include the oral literature that was shared with us in the tales and folklores and which many contemporary writers revise, update, and incorporate in their poems, stories, and drama. To discount this tremendous body of work is a mindless disregard of our ancestors and we stymie our literary evolution as a people, creating an aborted trajectory.


Similarly, as we look to define and erect a Caribbean classic, we must be mindful that the whole notion of classic in the modern sense is erroneous because the Greeks are cited as the stamp. However, as educated people, we know that the Egyptians are the forerunners; their formidable library at Alexandria was raided and destroyed by the pillage of war--much like what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then, of course, there is Timbuktu that also served as a foundation. History aside, or rather, history as cautionary guide, a classic is a work that sets the standard, serves as a archetype and is not restricted to a certain era --in other words, the work can be said to be timeless because regardless of how much time has passed or how things have changed, the work serves as a light allowing us to see,  understand, and make inferences not only about the time period in which the work was set, but how it continuously references and illuminates our understanding of the present moment in which we find ourselves.


Of course, with regards to the Caribbean, a classic would have to speak to the socio-political conditions of the people and be dogged in its revelation of hope and viable alternatives. It must demonstrate, to the nth degree, the Caribbean ethos, delineate our cosmology, excavate a self that is so often hidden from us, and speak with authority to the possibilities of new realities and self-determination.


Most importantly, a Caribbean classic should give us a protagonist that represents and/or identifies with the seemingly ordinary Caribbean person, yet who in someway leads an introspective life and strives to rise above her/his socio-physical surroundings.


While it can be argued and debated that such criteria for a classic, favors a specific agenda, which it does, and which all classics do, I believe as Caribbean people we have to forge an identity and standard that speak to the specifics of who we are, and even more importantly, where we want to go, even if that path is not yet defined – machete in hand, we clear the path as we go along. In addition, to the above, a classic work of literature should have literary merit: assiduous mastery of language, unique and representational characters, descriptive details, multiple layers of meanings, and for me, very personal and, I strongly believe essential for the Caribbean, a sense of hope. 


Given our young history as producers of literature, we hold our own: two Nobel laureates, Neustadt International Prize, Guggenheims, and many Commonwealth prizes. Equally as impressive is the larger number of recognized writers who continue to produce excellent work despite our economic straits, access to higher education in the region, our total population, and median age. Still, we accomplish and compete, and can say with pride we have literary works that are part of the Euro-American canon, and which also set the bench-mark for the Caribbean canon.


Consequently, I offer the following four texts as Caribbean classics, and will go so far as to say they should be included in any survey course on Caribbean literature. The History of Mary Prince serves as the first account of the life of a black woman to be published in England. Its historical merit is unprecedented, but the details and vigor of the telling is also impressive. Then, we have another autobiography, by yet another intrepid woman, Mary Seacole, the Caribbean’s own Florence Nightingale--a herbalist, and shrewd business woman whose financial acumen allowed her to travel to the site of the Crimean War and where she became a beloved caregiver to soldiers on both sides. Her explorations and brave story are chronicled in the Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857).


Moving to the 20th century, we have Edgar Mittelholzer, the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean, and the author of twenty plus novels. My favorite from among his body of work and I think one of his best is, Corentyne Thunder (1941). Who can read that text and not root for Ramgolall, an empathic protagonist, if ever there was one. Lastly and noteworthy, is Sylvia Wynter’s Hills of Hebron (1962), in which Wynter speaks to and for the nation of Jamaica.


These are some of the seminal Caribbean classics that shimmer still today, and which will captivate and send future readers on a quest to learn more about Caribbean writers, culture and its people.

***

About the author:

Jamaican born, Dr. Adisa is a poet and prose writer who brings extensive editorial experience to the anthology. She has published 14 books, and her writings have appeared in over 200 journals and anthologies. She is also a much sought-after speaker and has traveled throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and the Caribbean.

She has been recognized for her work in the form of many awards and honors, among them the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for her poetry collection Tamarind and Mango Women and the Master Folk Artist Award for Storytelling from the California Arts Council. She has also received awards for both poetry and fiction from The Caribbean Writer and has served as an Advisory Board member of The Caribbean Writer since 1998. Her interview with renowned poet Kamau Brathwaite appears in Volume 23 (2009). Dr. Erika J. Waters, founding editor of The Caribbean Writer said she was "delighted the magazine was in such capable hands."

Adisa, who has a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, most recently was a professor at California College of the Arts. She previously taught both graduate and undergraduate courses at several universities including Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University.

***

Related articles by Zemanta

• Interview With Geoffrey Philp @ Caribbean Literary Salon (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• The Vistas of Caribbean Literature@ UWI (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• Call for Papers: "The Islands in Between," 13th Annual Eastern Caribbean Islands Cultures Conference (repeatingislands.com)

In My Own Words: Heather D. Russell (2010)

As with any book, I arrived at Legba’s Crossing:  Narratology in the African Atlantic (2009) through a journey marked by crossroads (life’s experience), pathways (routes/roots), intuition (intrinsic commitment to justice and light) and divine inspiration (strictly a calling).  The following reminiscences reflect some of these:


- I remember the first time I met Damballah, powerful Haitian loa of the sky.  I met him as an undergraduate at Rutgers, reading a John Edgar Wideman novel.  I felt an instant spiritual/ideological connection, BUT I was also just meeting Sambo, Mammy, Jezebel, I mean I had seen them all over…but understood them now.  I wrestled with these counter-narratives:  the debased, dehumanizing, distorted representations of black people and how these images have been used to oppress us…and then, in stark contrast, this god…African, New World, powerful, philosophical, resistant, hidden.  Could/would the one be used/useful to subvert the other?  I could not answer that question definitively then…until I met Legba…


- As a lover of literature, I have never cottoned to linearity.  Grand narratives, neat, tidy endings, building chronologically or even teleologically -- always bored me.  I remember sophomore year, the first time I read Tristam Shandy and Eliot’s The Wasteland…I would not read in quite the same way after…and still…I had not yet gleaned how chronology and linearity were political tools, how these had been used to misrepresent, to distort, to silence, to simplify my history.


- Long before the death of the author was proclaimed, I was always infinitely more intrigued by the experience of reading a novel than the actual details revealed in it! Did it surprise?  Did it refuse to conform to my expectations?  WHO WAS I, at the end of the novel?  I suppose I have always been a non-con-form-ist!


- Legba’s Crossing is an attempt to theorize the revolutionary potential of the experience of reading…


- Growing up in Jamaica as the daughter of a Baptist minister from Free Town, Clarendon, a theologian and a Garveyite, a historian and advocate for the spiritually/materially dispossessed – I was taught by both of my parents to be inquisitive -- to question the status quo, to live a life in which works on earth were the most important manifestation of spirituality.  In 1976, my father was called to the historic East Queen Street Baptist Church in downtown Kingston where I began attending.  I was viscerally struck by social class inequity as a very young child.  My father had established a free medical and dental clinic for the community, housed at the church.  One day, when I was about seven-years old, a woman came for some treatment, but was, according to the deacon that drove her out of the churchyard, improperly dressed.  It was my earliest memory of the pervasive classism that is so deeply entrenched in Jamaica…I would later understand how color, colonialism, sexism, classism, poverty, violence, invisibility were interwoven…


- Legba’s Crossing is the culmination of years of research (some formal, some informal) -- It is a study in African Atlantic form, philosophy, aesthetics, history, politics, literature and the struggle of black people to live lives of dignity, decency, equity and fairness. 

- In Legba’s Crossing, I examine literary texts, all of which engage key historical moments of black subjugation and resistance and which through their narrative structure, break with traditional forms governing time, space, narration, and conventional Western knowledge structures.  Diasporic and cross-temporal, my work includes analyses of:  the C19th Xhosa cattle killing in South Africa, US Reconstruction, the Grenada Revolution and invasion, Independence and post-Independence movement in Jamaica, Trinidad, US Civil Rights, and “globalization and race” in its African diasporic contexts. 

- Legba’s Crossing is an attempt to examine the radical, democratizing, revolutionary potential of form…

- Invoking the Haitian loa Papa Legba, who is the “god of the crossroads” --   as the sign of such African Atlantic narrative intervention -- I explore the philosophical, epistemological, and ethical concepts embodied by this god.

- I met Papa Legba, first through Henry Louis Gates’ The Signifying Monkey, who examines Legba’s West African corollary:  Eshu-Elegbara.  By the time I had read about Eshu-Elegbara, Yoruba god of the crossroads, god of divine purpose, meaning, interpretation, I was not only viscerally interrupted, BUT for the first time, after being inundated with European theory, philosophy/ers, in graduate school, I realized that so much of current African Atlantic cultural production made much more sense once I understood Legba’s principles:  indeterminacy, nuance, contradiction, flexibility, Legba’s mandate that the human being must struggle with/for understanding, apprehension, divine purpose.  Jazz made more sense with Legba.  Our propinquity towards improvisation, disruption of flow, linearity, chronology.  Hip-hop made more sense with Legba.  African diaspora literature made more sense with Legba. 

Legba’s Crossing:  Narratology in the African Atlantic is my humble attempt to pull together some of the aforementioned tangled skeins of meaning…àshe.


For ordering information see:
http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/legbas_crossing/0/1

or
http://www.amazon.com/Legbas-Crossing-Narratology-African-Atlantic/dp/0820328677

***

About the author:

Dr. Heather Russell’s research interests examine narrative form and its relationship to configurations of national/racial identities. Her latest book, Legba’s Crossing: Narratology in the African Atlantic, was published by the University of of Georgia Press. She has also published in African American Review; Contours; The Massachusetts Review; and American Literature and has essays in a collection on John Edgar Wideman, Jacqueline Bishop’s, My Mother Who is Me, and Donna Aza Weir-Soley and Opal Palmer Adisa’s Caribbean Erotic.

At the undergraduate level, Dr. Russell regularly teaches C19th and C20th African American  Literatures; Major Caribbean Writers; Black Citizenships and Black History and the Fictive Imagination. For the graduate curriculum, she teaches African Diaspora Women Writers and Narratives of Enslavement and Resistance.

***

You are cordially invited to attend the launch of 

Legba’s Crossing:  Narratology in the African Atlantic

by Heather Russell, Ph.D

March 27, 2010

South West Regional Library (SWR)

Pines Center

16835 Sheridan Street. Pembroke Pines, FL 33331

  

1-5pm (reception from 1-2pm)

RSVP:(954)257-8731 or russellh@fiu.edu

Sponsored by:South Regional/Southwest Regional

***