Masters of the Universe?

Remember how former Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller was chided and ridiculed for wanting to hold elections on July 7 last year? 7-7-7 I did try and point out at the time that in countries like India and China it’s quite normal to schedule things on auspicious dates at auspicious times. Numbers are nothing after all if not symbolic!

Like many others I ritualistically seated myself in front of my TV screen at 8.08 pm Chinese time on August 8, 2008 to catch the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. What a stupendous show! To have pulled off such a stunning feat live, with the entire world watching, without a glitch or stutter—hats, tams and solar topees off to the mighty Chinese!

I gushed about it to all and sundry for two whole days till my cousin Susan sent me a tart email from Delhi saying: Dear Annie, I’ve been supporting the Tibet group in India, so the Beijing opening seemed stylistic and opaque, also 95,000 people were evacuated from Eastern China because of flash floods same day as the opening…and I’m not even a political person really, so Tiananmen square is always dedicated in my mind to those students.

Stick a pin.

For me it was the East showing the West what the marriage of technology, art and people can do. A show of power but one far more sophisticated than the nationalistic military parades normally on offer. With this synthesis of China’s penchant for the military, their mastery of technology and ancient flair for the artistic the mightiest nation of the east was signaling that it has reached; it has arrived. China has dramatically proven its prowess, displaying complete mastery over the universe on the very terms that capitalism uses to assess success.

At the same time the spectacular display was premised on teamwork, on large numbers of people working together, not on individual idiosyncracy so highly prized in the West. There were of course cameo concessions to the valued place of the modern individual for instance when two singers stood on top of a globe, looking like for all the world like one of those plastic couples used to decorate wedding cakes; dressed in Western clothes they theatrically lip-synched the haunting theme song You and Me, ingeniously combining Western pop and Chinese song (someone I read somewhere dismissed this as kitschy tripe).

Is this the same China that impassively stood by and allowed Tiananman Square to happen? I’m not sure but this Olympics also signals China’s opening up to the values of the West, including the notion of individual human rights I would imagine. Yet in this opening ceremony it was showing the splendour and vastness of imagination its people are capable of; the achievements of its civilization from the invention of paper and gunpowder to outer space exploration; its ability to command the heights of tradition as well as the most contemporary technology. There was something extraordinary in that display ( It’s cyberfeudalism growled Melinda Brown as we watched thousands of elegantly begowned, bewigged Mandarins juggling neon laserbeams).

Having so memorably flexed its creative muscles will China now be more willing to negotiate with the rest of the world? Will it feel more gracious toward the demands made on it by Tibet- and Darfur-watchers? We’ll find out in the sweet by and by, won’t we?

Meanwhile back home the excitement is building as Jamaica’s cassava-fed athletes get ready to hit their stride when the Olympic Track and Field events kick off tomorrow. Will Asafa finally deliver? Or will there be a repeat of the World Championships some years back when both Asafa and Usain Bolt were pipped by Tyson Gay; the best excuse I heard after that debacle was a radio announcer claiming that this was because “Jamaican men nah like Gay running after dem so dem just a let him pass”.

Some of the funniest commentary on the impending Olympic events is to be heard on my all-time favourite radio programme, Left, Right and Centre (LRC), part of the Nationwide Radio network here (Digital AM 770). For weeks now they’ve been carrying spoof ads on The Farcical News Network for products such as ‘ANDRALONE’. Here’s an example–

Intro: Bob Marley’s song “You’re running and you’re running and you’re running away…” Music fades.

Brooks: “Are you coming last in every race you run? Do you have dreams of placing 6th or 7th but can’t afford the high end drugs your friends are using? Well boost your performance with ANDRALONE, the fast-acting, low-end, generic drug designed especially for athletes who can’t seem to dig themselves out of obscurity. Build those muscles! Grow that chest hair! Get out of the blocks faster than you ever have before with ANDRALONE!

Last night the show lampooned Jamaican athletes in Beijing, imagining them upsetting Olympic Village officials by nonchalantly (Ja-style) calling all of them Mr. Chin. Missa Chin beg yu two slice a bread! Missa Chin which part di pattyshop deh? I tell you the hosts of LRC, Messrs Dennis Brooks and Damion Blake, rank right up there with Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert. Unfortunately Damion is leaving to do his PhD at Virginia Tech; he’ll be badly missed . Virginia’s gain, Ja’s loss.

Well, it’s been an intense few weeks for me lurching from deadline to deadline and trying to find a moment in between to blog when not being terrorized by my good friend Peter Dean Rickards. PD has been assaulting me at regular intervals with outtakes from his maiden music video, The System, featuring an amazing new female singer called Terry Lyn. I’m still traumatized by the first cut (trust me this is the most appropriate metaphor to use here) he sent me which involved a gory sequence of a pig being slaughtered to an unbearably cheery rendition of Fire of Eternal Glory (in her song, The System, Terry Lyn rhymes Waterhouse with Slaughterhouse).

“But I identify with the pig!” I squealed via sms.

“Pig nah die in vain! Him get videolight!” PD texted back callously.

Obviously all of this is a little premature considering that what PD refers to as the Pig Opera has yet to be released. But when it is trust me it’s going to create a sensation. Remember you heard o’ it here first!

Jamaica’s most successful products: Athletes and music. Both occupied the mainstream media in New York this past week first with Baz Dreisinger’s thought-provoking article in the Village Voice How Jamaica’s Volatile Dancehall Scene Can Avoid a Biggie vs. Tupac Tragedy; featured in this sharp critique which should be required reading for all the pontificating pundits in Jamaica who love to chant down dancehall is an in-depth profile of and interview with top DJ Mavado. With epigrammatic precision Mavado sums up the situation: “They are trying to blame a problem that they put we in on us. They are turning dancehall into a scapegoat.”

And weighing in on Jamaica’s runners, in the Wall Street Journal no less, was Colin Channer with the memorable line “Jamaica’s love of speed seems at odds with its hard-nosed commitment to nonchalance”: See ‘Cool Runnings’ Are Heating Up.

Meanwhile fingers crossed that both Asafa and Bolt prove on the global stage once and for all that they ARE, like the Chinese, masters of the universe.

The Signs are on the Walls

Ahmedabad. Bangalore. Two Indian cities rocked by bombs in the last two days. Two cities I’m intimately connected with. The former was where I grew up, where my father worked for many years at the Indian Institute of Management, at once the most avant-garde of Indian cities as well as the most retrograde. Ahmedabad, named after Sultan Ahmad Shah who founded it in 1411: Home of Mahatma Gandhi whose ashram nestled on the banks of the River Sabarmati; ISRO—the space research organization where India’s first rockets and satellites were developed; PRL—the Physical Research Laboratory; NID–the National Institute of Design; the aforementioned IIMA set up in collaboration with the Harvard Business School and ATIRA—the Ahmedabad Textile Industry Research Association for this was the Manchester of the East, with textile mills galore.

For years Gujaratis (Ahmedabad is in Gujarat state) enjoyed the reputation of being the most non-violent people in India, if not the planet. Mahatma Gandhi veritably personified the spirit of gentle, unagressive yet enterprising Gujarati-ness. That image was forever changed in 1969 when the worst Hindu-Muslim riots erupted in Ahmedabad with dozens of Muslims raped and killed in the most brutal way. Schoolmates who lived in the old part of the city where most of the Muslim population was concentrated witnessed atrocities they couldn’t forget for years. Since then the word Ahmedabad has practically become synonymous with ‘communal riots’ (as such periodic bloodlettings are termed) so it is not surprising that the city has been targeted by an avenging Muslim group setting bombs off in BJP-dominated cities.

This may explain why “the quaint and sleepy town of Bangalore” where my parents now live, the polar opposite of Ahmedabad in terms of communal relations, has also been targeted. The BJP, a political coalition of aggressive right-wing Hindu groups, has recently won state power in Karnataka where Bangalore is located. Karnataka is also one of six Indian states in which the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) is active. SIMI is widely suspected to be the organization behind the multiple bombings in Ahmedabad and Bangalore.

The word SIMI stirred up a memory. Seven years ago in Trivandrum, Kerala, I had been photographing the plethora of writing on the walls of that city. Local government elections were in the offing and i was fascinated by the symbols used by political parties. I distinctly remembered one piece of graffiti by a Muslim group that had struck me with the simple force and stridency of its message. Curious I rummaged through my old albums and found the photograph, taken in 2001. It was indeed a message from the self-same SIMI– Shahadat, by the way, means martyrdom.

Needless to say this is not what I had planned to blog about. But those distant explosions were too close to home in a manner of speaking for me to overlook. One can only hope that Kerala, the state my family is from and where most of my aunts and uncles live is not next on the list of the avenging Jehadis.

It’s not really that hard to segue to what I had planned to write about because uncannily I had meant to focus on the murals all over Kingston memorializing the many “fallen soldiers” De Marco sang about so poignantly last year. It’s a subject I touch upon tangentially in a recent article titled “’No Grave Cannot Hold My Body Down’: Rituals of Death and Burial in Postcolonial Jamaica” so when Honor Ford-Smith asked if I wanted to accompany her on an expedition to view the work of one of the muralists I jumped at it.

The muralist in question was Ricky Culture who lives in Three Miles where most of his work is to be found. On Tuesday afternoon I met Honor and Ricky at Sistren from where we set out. On our way to Three Miles I found myself driving along a series of roads that zigged and zagged in and out of so-called inner city communities under Ricky’s expert guidance . He knew these byroads from having walked them as a child on his way to school.

Ricky was incredibly lean and gentle. He had started out as a musician but times got so hard that he turned his hand to painting. With the frequent deaths in communities there was a high demand for the services of mural painters. Judging by his slender frame the living was still hard even though Ricky has produced any number of murals, including some stunning ones of Emperor Haile Selassie and his Empress at an ital restaurant called Food For Life at the Three Miles roundabout. These were the only portraits done entirely from his imagination. The rest were all produced from photographs.

His Imperial Majesty is somewhat of an obsession with Ricky as you can see. A number of his works are to be found in Majesty Gardens, home to “the poorest people in Jamaica” according to today’s Observer. At Roots Community FM the studio has a large mural of Bob Marley with locks flowing all around him like roots. Occasionally Ricky paints himself into a mural as an advertisement of his skills. What spooked me was how similar Ricky’s stance and posture was in a photo i took of him to the autoportrait.

Interestingly Ricky wasn’t familiar with the magnificent murals dedicated to Glenford Phipps or ‘Early Bird’ at Matthews Lane outside Father Zekes’ bar. Early Bird was Zekes’ brother and the Don of Matches Lane before Zekes. He was brutally killed in the early 90s and the poet Kamau Brathwaite immortalized his death in his long poem, Trenchtown Rock. A couple of years ago I produced a montage using images of this mural and fragments of Kamau’s poem (the image that is the frontispiece of this blog). The fact that Ricky had not come across the Early Bird wall painting or some others I had seen in Rosetown made me realize how territorially bound all these initiatives are. Someone should undertake to conduct a survey of just how many memorial murals there are in communities divided by conflicting loyalties all over Kingston. On our way home we stopped at Black Roses Corner to look at the memorials to Willie Haggart and ‘International dancer’ Bogle. A more complete selection of the photos i took of the murals we saw on Tuesday is available on my Flickr page.

And as if all that weren’t enough internationally notorious British graffiti artist, Banksy, whose identity has been kept a strict secret all these years was ‘outed’ by none other than photographer Peter Dean Rickards, the editor of First Magazine. Is the writing on the walls or what?

The MG Smith Conference etc

Well, the ACS 2008 Crossroads conference has finally come and gone like a tsunami that rolled ashore, lifting us off our feet and depositing us back on terra firma gasping for air as it eventually receded this Monday. At its peak the Cultural Studies conference featured 20 concurrent panels or sessions, and you had to be the most dedicated, strategic, panel surfer to experience more than a smidgeon of the entire programme.

The packed few days of the conference, from July 3-7, brought more than 400 academics from all over the world to the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI). And UWI, caught like a matron in the middle of an elaborate facial while preparing for her main event–the university’s 60th anniversary celebrations that kick off on July 12th—was her charming, gracious self, wowing visitors with her flamboyant natural beauty now enhanced by the brilliant new colours the buildings are being painted.

I view the repainting of the campus as a significant step in the repositioning of the University in the 21st century. Perhaps I’m oversensitive to colours, perhaps its my coolietude, but I don’t see why we should be so committed to what I think of as boring, institutional colours like off-white, beige and gray. UWI Press was the first to buck this trend a few years ago when it painted its new building burnt sienna. I’m told the University Buildings Committee had a collective apoplectic fit but was effectively faced down by Linda Speth, the no-nonsense director of the Press.

The Buildings Committee must have undergone a transfusion of new members since then because the Main Library has just been painted shades of turquoise. I absolutely love it but seem to be in the minority—I’m told that one colleague who otherwise champions the people dem culture demanded to know why the library was being painted “inner city blue”. I sincerely hope those responsible will remain steadfast and not water down the new colour scheme; the turquoise library nestled in the lap of the green hills beyond it looks like a gem. Look at this picture and decide for yourselves.

CARIBBEAN MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE

Back to the theme of this blog which is conferences. Academic conferences to be precise. I’ve been on a conference rollercoaster since February this year. The most memorable one was the collaboration between the University of Technology (UTech) and the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in producing a conference on “Caribbean Modernist Architecture”. Held at the magnificent Jamaica Conference Centre downtown the symposium brought together architects, curators and historians of architecture from fourteen countries. The fees were steep and I wasn’t able to attend more than one or two sessions but it was one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended locally.

To hear architects from the region talking about the trajectory modern architecture took in their respective countries was stimulating. In Venezuela interdisciplinary design and research were important and modern art—the work of artists such as Vassarely, Calder and Jean Arp—was used to complement the built environment. In Mexico architects were preoccupied with a series of responses to the question of how to come up with a Mexican nationalist architecture. In Puerto Rico there was “no history but a monumental void” and so military bases became the first sites of modernist architecture and aesthetic advancement.

THE MG SMITH CONFERENCE

In June the Centre for Caribbean Thought organized a small conference in honour of MG Smith, which started off with a no-holds barred address by Professor Orlando Patterson of Harvard University. MG was an eminent Jamaican sociologist and poet who taught at UWI, Yale University, UCLA and University College in London during the course of his lifetime. Smith gained a reputation for his work on corporation theory, pluralism and plural societies (of which he thought Jamaica was one). As a poet Smith was a member of the ‘Drumblair’ group of writers, poets and dramatists who revolved around the Manley household. Smith was particularly close to Edna Manley who ran what amounted to a ‘salon’ in pre-independence Jamaica.

Patterson, who had worked at UWI with MG in the early days openly stated his differences with Smith declaring that as a social theorist he had been a failure. There was he recalled “endless bickering” over pluralism and the taxonomy Smith employed was patently inadequate. In any case according to Patterson “West Indian societies are clearly heterogeneous,” something that would not have been obvious to Smith whose problem was that he viewed West Indian society from an “upper class perspective.”

According to Patterson Smith “should have checked out more carefully those of us who were upwardly mobile…25 years after being born in the bush I was teaching at the London School of Economics. Thirty years later I was offered a position at Harvard.” So “it simply wasn’t true that there were core institutional divisions” between Blacks, Whites and Browns as Smith’s plural society thesis posited.

Incidentally there are scholars who disagree with this view; In an article titled “The Permanence of Pluralism” Columbia University-based postcolonial theorist David Scott (also Jamaican) argued in the wake of the 1998 Zekes Riots that “the ghost of MG Smith is haunting the landscape of the Jamaican political modern”. Meaning that the total breakdown of any pretence at social cohesion, leading to the profound crisis Jamaican society finds itself in today, could have been predicted by MG Smith with his thesis that the population of Jamaica “constituted a plural society, that is a society divided into sections, each of which practiced different cultures.”

MIKE and EDNA

Patterson looked to Smith’s personal life for clues to the inadequacies of his social theory. Born to a white English-born father and a ‘coloured’ mother who died in childbirth (a pity, Patterson pointed out, as MG would have benefited from knowing her family and perhaps even produced different, better informed work) Smith was sent to JC as a child where he was subjected to ‘sadistic canings’. “Smith in fact was brought up by a corporation—I think this has major implications later on” said Patterson going on to talk of MG’s unusual relationship with Edna Manley, the mother of his schoolmate Michael, whom he was “immediately smitten by.”

This was the part where the prim and proper audience, completely unused to such candid disclosures, especially in the august enclave of UWI’s undercroft, started to squirm in its seats, as Patterson dwelt at length on the putative “consummation” of this unorthodox relationship between a young man and an older woman. If Mark (“In Praise of Younger Women”) Wignall thought that having a younger lover was a privilege reserved for older males he better think again. Many a woman could write paeans in praise of younger men too.

Having delivered himself of MG’s various shortcomings Patterson acknowledged that despite this there was a “great deal that was justifiable about this conference”. Smith had been a world-class historical sociologist whose early work on the Fulanis of Nigeria and his study of community organizations in rural Jamaica were timeless classics. MG was a meticulous fieldworker whose ethnohistories were “meticulous excavations”. His best work according to Patterson was done when he wasn’t obsessed with theorizing; the problem arose when he imposed corporatist theory on his findings.

Patterson’s thorough and honest examination of MG Smith’s work and life may have raised a few hackles but it set off several impassioned, contentious and useful conversations over the next couple of days among the social and cultural theorists gathered at Mona. The highlight though was Rachel Manley’s talk (at the opening of the library exhibit on MG Smith) called “The Mike Smith I Knew” which turned out in effect to be a gracefully executed rescue of her grandmother Edna (or Mardi as she called her) and Mike, someone who had nurtured in Rachel a love of poetry.

Consummation and consumption were preoccupations of the present said Rachel, but not of the 50s and 60s, when the friendship between her grandmother and Mike would have been at its height. She had no idea whether they had had an affair or not; if it had happened it was without her knowledge and frankly she didn’t care. What she did know was that that was “a time when you consummated independence for an island…that was the romance of the time.”

Mardi, she declared, was a magnetic woman. She flirted with everything, she flirted with Jamaica. All the young poets and artists of the Drumblair group were in love with her. But Mike’s poems and Mardi’s art—those were the consummations.

It was a consummate performance on Rachel’s part, casually delivered, without a hint of the agitation that must have been behind it. Her talk illuminated the enigmatic man in whose honour this conference was being held and brought him to life for us. The next day we went back to the tendentious business of dissecting the body of his work. One thing is for sure–whether MG Smith’s framework of social and cultural pluralism has any validity today or not, he was integrally involved in the labour of building theory, of developing conceptual frameworks, valuable academic tasks that alas, seem to have been jettisoned from the agenda of social sciences at UWI over the years.

Kingston on the Edge etc

If there’s any good news to report from Kingston its from the cultural scene which has been galvanized into action for the second year in a row by KOTE (Kingston on the Edge), an ‘urban art festival’. Titled ‘This is Art’ and dedicated to Chaos, a founding member who checked out prematurely last December, KOTE delivered “visual art shows, movie showings, plays, concerts, an art auction, open houses, digital/multimedia shows and anything else anyone can think of”.

Curiously ‘Galvanize’ was the name of a similar venture in Trinidad and Tobago which took place almost two years ago. Built around a core of nine artists’ projects titled “Visibly Absent”, Galvanize debuted in late 2006 with the aim of becoming an annual or biennial festival. “The ultimate aim of Galvanize is the establishment of a regular (annual or biennial?) series of arts programmes based in Port of Spain…bringing artists, critics, and audiences into fruitful conversations. The presence of several hundred artists and arts administrators in Trinidad in September 2006 for Carifesta IX is the stimulus for starting this project–you could say we’ve been galvanised into action by the resurrection of Carifesta–but this project is best thought of as an independent effort aimed at addressing precisely those questions that Carifesta, with its ‘Independence moment’ origins, seems blind to.”

Likewise KOTE was designed to address: “The relative lack, in Kingston, of outlets for creative and innovative artists” which “combined with the huge surfeit of talent and ideas, means that this Festival is both necessary and inevitable.” Remarkable, isn’t it that two such cultural junctures have been reached in two different outposts of the Caribbean at roughly the same time? Clearly the younger generations have decided that its high time they stake their claim on the culture pie. In years to come its possible to imagine both these events collaborating, creating a chain of creative activity across the region.

Meanwhile Carifesta X is slated to take place in Georgetown, Guyana this August and it is feared will feature the usual, by now graying suspects, patting each other on the back and clapping vigorously at the all too familiar output. Yes, vintage stuff, but unlike wine culture doesn’t always age too well, particularly when it lacks new input.

I went to most of the visual-arts related events offered by KOTE; for a brief moment in time we were treated to the kind of vibrant effervescent atmosphere we ought legitimately to expect from a well-connected and functioning art scene. For years the norm has been for each aesthetic field to operate in mutually exclusive spheres hence you rarely see visual artists at musical, theatrical or literary events and the latter are also visibly absent from visual art events.

For a week KOTE changed all that. On Monday the 23rd there were openings of art shows accompanied by multimedia performances at four of Kingston’s galleries. A small but landmark exhibit at Gallery 128 featured the photographs of the Afflicted One or Peter Dean Rickards, the innovative writer, photographer and editor of First who set off a new wave in image-making some years ago. His former protégé, Observer photographer Marlon ‘Biggy Bigz’ Reid, showcased his award-deserving photograph of the moments after a patron was shot at the British Link Up dance at La Roose some months ago.

Sunday saw the soft opening of The Rock Tower Project with a show called Artists without Borders at the Old Red Stripe Brewery downtown, an awe-inspiringly ambitious venture proposed by sculptor Melinda Brown, who moved her studio from the meat-packing district of NYC to downtown Kingston about three years ago. Following the by now classic model of renovation and resuscitation of abandoned downtown and waterfront areas by visual artists Rock Tower has the potential to intervene creatively and sustainably into the chronic decay and systematic decline of historic downtown Kingston.

Brown, originally from Australia, worked with a group of potters from Rosetown (a community near Trenchtown, Tivoli and other such locations) to produce a host of what she calls ‘Guardians’—terracotta figures displaying a blend of African, Mayan, Chinese and even Etruscan influences—made with clay from Trenchtown and nearby areas. Previously these potters produced flowerpots, which are available by the roadside in various parts of uptown Kingston.

The Rock Tower Project involves the creation of an indoor (as well as outdoor) forest of indigenous medicinal plants as a living sculpture installation. Signaling organic methods of healing and renewal the proposed transformation of abandoned, decomposing spaces into vibrant, green living areas encapsulates one solution to the myriad problems facing Jamaica. The symbolism of literally taking the masses of organic waste from nearby Coronation Market and using it as mulch and compost for the medicinal forest cannot but graphically point in the direction of a much needed regeneration and renewal of society in general.

Showing alongside the Rosetown potters are artists Laura Facey-Cooper, Scheed and Sand who is possibly Jamaica’s newest ‘intuitive’ artist. For a rather grainy slideshow of images click here:

Thursday the 25th saw the launch at the Art Centre Gallery (formerly the Olympia art centre started by A.D. Scott) of a provocative show curated by Ebony Patterson called “Taboo Identities: Race, Sexuality and the Body—A Jamaican Context”. Featuring a number of younger artists such as Ainsworth Case, Camille Chedda, Sean Gyshen Fennell, Patterson herself and Andrene Lord, the exhibit signaled the arrival of a new generation of visual artists in Jamaica and not a moment too soon. Noteworthy were Fennell’s innovative sewn canvas portraits and Chedda’s playful two-dimensional revisions of Laura Facey’s Emancipation Monument. In one you gradually notice the presence of two penises instead of one, the figures’ heads almost touching each other in what seems like a kiss, a blasphemous idea, considering that this is Kingston, ground zero of homophobes as it were.

Well, i’m fast approaching my self-imposed outer limit of a thousand words so I must draw brakes now and curtail this blog. The next thing looming on the agenda like a veritable tsunami is the Crossroads 2008 conference taking place at the University of the West Indies, Mona, next week. Check it out. Till soon!

Introducing…The Diatribalist

His is the most arresting, momentuous, invaluable blog i think i’ve ever come across. Dwight Dunkley describes himself as “a highly opinionated alien, a Jamaican living in New York” with “a stated mission to improve Jamaican media”. Calling his blog “My View of Jamdown from Up So” Dunkley also goes by the name ‘Diatribalist’. He’s only been blogcasting since May this year but trust me he’s spot on–a sharp, analytical critique of the Jamaican media is just what we need–and Dunkley provides this in his penetrating, often devastating commentary reviewing the major news media here. So what if he lives in the diaspora and not here? The detailed scrutiny he offers is all the more remarkable for that. Dunkley’s questions are hard and probing and clamour for answers. Finally someone else has noticed how shambolic the Press in this country is and has figured out a way to intervene. Kali, Jesus and Allah be praised! Please read, this is how his latest blog begins:

This is an open letter to tell all editors, journalists, columnists and stenographers calling yourselves journalists:

This blog is not your enemy.

This blog is a fan, a friend. This blog wishes you well.

This blog follows your work closely, reads your lines and then between your lines. Can this blog not be forgiven for thereafter scribbling in the margins?

For standing up for those mostly marginalized by the pigmentocratic power you wield and challenging the kleptomaniac clique your silence shields.

This blog is not your enemy.

For more click here.

As a postscript i also want to note the passing of Tim Russert of NBC News. Described as adept at conducting “the prosecutorial interview without a sharp edge” he was definitely one of the better, more congenial American TV journalists/talking heads around and will be missed by many all over the world.

Calabashing Naipaul?

…in many ways our Nobel laureates hold irreconcilable views of the Caribbean and the world. While Walcott has acknowledged the dark colonial past that begets so much of Naipaul’s pessimism, he has also dared to hope, epically, that we may somehow climb clear of our wrong beginnings. Naipaul, by contrast, has built a career around making our darkness visible. At different times the Caribbean itself seems to take different sides in the matter. Election season in Guyana is pure Naipaul, as is much of Trinidadian politics; but the West Indies team at its best, Marley’s prophetic lyricism or Minshall’s extravagant imagination all fit with Walcott’s vision. Who among us can confidently dismiss Naipaul, or dispense with Walcott’s hopes? And who, having read either man carefully, would wish to?

From the Staebrok News in Georgetown, Guyana, ladies and gentlemen–Brendan de Caires– with a great take on Walcott’s Mongoose. Read the rest of “Calabashing Naipaul” here…

Meanwhile the bashing (as some people see it) continues…The MG Smith conference opened at UWI, Mona, day before yesterday with a no-holds barred address by Professor Orlando Patterson of Harvard University. Stand by for a blow-by-blow account of the conference in a day or two…

On Fareed Zakaria and Salman Rushdie

I returned from San Andres a week ago, turned on CNN to catch up with the democratic race in the US and found myself tuned into a fast-paced international current affairs program hosted by Fareed Zakaria. For some reason this filled me with immense pride, especially as the show turned out to be sharp, humorous and acutely insightful—It’s called GPS, Global Public Square, and airs on Sunday at noon in these parts—refreshingly different from most such programs on the channel. What a relief too to finally have someone on American TV who can pronounce ‘Mohammed’ and ‘Muslim’ the right way.

Described as “the best in the world at boiling down – without dumbing down – complex issues” Bombay-born Zakaria was formerly managing editor of Foreign Affairs and is currently editor of Newsweek International. In GPS Zakaria manages to come across as a brain without being nerdy and displays a certain hipness when he tosses off statements such as “…and because history is cool” when introducing a videoclip on CNN’s humble beginnings however many years ago.

I can just hear my left-wing friends chiding me for bigging up a ‘”rightwinger” (which Zakaria is perceived to be) but hey if there’s one lesson we should have learnt from the last few years it is that its time we started listening to each other, no matter what party, faction, sect, subcaste or global group we align ourselves with. No one side has the privileged vantage point or all the answers and with a book called The Post-American World how could what Zakaria has to say be irrelevant? He speaks for many of us whose views thus far have been inaudible and invisible in international fora.

If Zakaria is the most recent example of a subcontinental/Asian/person from the global South to gain international visibility in a highly competitive field, Salman Rushdie–also Bombay-born–was perhaps the first, in the Anglophone world at any rate. So my curiousity was piqued when I read a harsh review of Rushdie’s latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, in the New York Times. The reviewer, an obscure American writer named David Gates, freely admitted to being afflicted by a ‘philistine cussedness’ saying “I’m probably not Rushdie’s target audience: in literature, at least, I find the marvelous tedious, and the tedious — as rendered by a Beckett or a Raymond Carver or even a Kafka — marvelous.”

Perhaps the New York Times should have asked someone more competent to review Enchantress. Or at least someone with a nodding acquaintance of and sympathy for the literary mode of magical realism. The latter does little for my gladbag either but Gates seems to use the review as an opportunity to take the mickey out of a great writer, dismissing Rushdie as a “multicultural dream weaver” whose fiction “revels in writerly self-congratulation”.

I’m hardly a great Rushdie fan myself (I don’t consider people’s sacred beliefs to be fair game for caricature; cows are sacred in my opinion and should be handled with care and respect even when they’re obstructing traffic) but Gates’ hostility moved me to read the first chapter of Enchantress the NYT made available along with the review. What, i wondered, was Gates fussing like a walrus with a sore tusk about? For what it’s worth I’ve decided on the basis of the first chapter to buy this book though I haven’t read any of Rushdie’s novels since the first three. So thanks Mr. Gates for inadvertently leading me to rediscover why Salman Rushdie has the reputation he has. Let’s hope you get there someday.

In the meantime here are two interesting quotes by the author of Midnight’s Children. As Rushdie poignantly observed in another recent NYT article on him (Now He’s Only Hunted by Cameras, May 25, 2008):

“There’s a writing self which is not quite your ordinary social self and which you don’t really have access to except at the moment when you’re writing, and certainly in my view, I think of that as my best self,” he said. “To be able to be that person feels good; it feels better than anything else.”

And this detail from the first chapter of Enchantress sheds light on the use of the word ‘coolie’ in the Indian context where it is often a synonym for ‘porter’:

“Turbaned coolies in red shirts and dhotis ran ceaselessly hither and yon with bundles of improbable size and weight upon their heads.”

As discussed at length in an earlier post the term ‘coolie’ is as overloaded and burdened as the porters signified by it who often carry baggage two or three times their weight at Indian railway stations.

There is much else to talk about; San Andres was a trip and a half and I didn’t get to blog much about Calabash, which was outstanding this year. Nicholas Laughlin gives a good account of it though in his UK Guardian blog “The distraction of Walcott vs Naipaul“. Suffice it to say for now that I think the Calabash team should invite Salman Rushdie to Treasure Beach next May. More on San Andres and the Raizales in a few days.

Walcott on Naipaul

“A mongoose charges dry grass and fades through a fence faster than an afterthought”. A beautiful line from pre-Calabash Walcott– Calabash 2008 will always be remembered for Walcott’s stunning denouement: the reading in public for the first time of his poem, The Mongoose, written specifically with V.S. Naipaul in mind.

The audience was left waiting to exhale, an inaudible gasp hovering under the tent as the Poet laureate dissed and dismissed his fellow laureate and literary giant, V.S. Naipaul in a series of the most poetically crafted insults. Aspiring DJs might want to take note–this is the stuff of great clashes—

As Channer said at Jack Sprat afterwards “A Beenie and Bounti u know”. Then who’s Kamau Brathwaite, I asked. “Capleton” said Colin without missing a beat.

“The anti-hero is a prick named Willy” intoned the Laureate, going on to describe Naipaul’s “exhausted works” as “predictable, unfunny”.

I wrote as furiously as I could, managing to capture a line here and a line there, all of them memorable if somewhat random. “The mongoose keeps its class act as a clown”; “…just as if a corpse took pride in its decay”; “small, grey and beady-eyed”; “the mongoose takes its orders from the Raj”; “the mutter from a maniacal, bitter mongoose”; “reward them with the spit of benediction”; “he told me once sex was just friction”; “now it was time to bite whatever hands had helped him.”

Coming in the wake of an interview of Walcott by Kwame Dawes, a founding director of Calabash and a poet himself, “The Mongoose” was payback for a recent Naipaul essay called “Caribbean Odyssey” in which he casts aspersions on Walcott’s talent. You can read more about this at Geoffrey Philp’s blog: Moral vs. Ethical Writing: Naipaul and Walcott

Meanwhile down here at Treasure Beach we give thanks for sunny skies and prickly poets. Willing conscripts in the enactment of a first-class literary feud we await the unfolding of Day 3 at Calabash with some relish. A mongoose will never just be a mongoose again. More anon.

Calabash Ho! (single entendre please–)

This is the time of year I like best. One week before Calabash Literary Festival and about 10 days before the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) conference, which is in San Andres, Colombia, this year. The lineup at this Calabash, though stellar, could have been more exciting as far as I’m concerned; after all living in these parts who hasn’t heard Derek Walcott and Lorna Goodison, live and in living colour, over and over again? Last year’s was a more lustrous list of literary stars, Caryl Phillips, Michael Ondaatje and Maryse Conde amongst them.

But then again I don’t go to Calabash to listen to authors and poets reading aloud so much as for the sheer delight of lingering in the vibe-rant environment created by Colin, Justine and Kwame. I happen to know that singer and poet Dingo has been sharpening his latest poem and who knows if we’re lucky he might perform it there. The open mic segment is bound to have its share of great performances bursting through the thicket of paltry, mediocre rhymesters who will insist on abusing the audience with purported poetry.

Speculation is rife as to whether Walcott will behave himself or be spectacularly rude on stage; whether he will outcuss that indomitable cusser Bounty Killa and be carted off to bad wud jail; or if the balmy St. Bess air will temporarily render him tame and pleasant (incidentally Dingo has a poem, Jamaica Land We Love, that starts like this:

I woulda cuss some claat if it coulda draw attention
to Jamaica land we love
An if dem neva start charge artiste fe it….
I woulda cuss some claat if it coulda draw attention
to Jamaica land we love.
Jamaica land we love hobbling along on three flats and de-spair).

Walcott’s main rival in the race for Curmudgeon of the Year is of course, V.S. Naipaul, about whom the New York Times wrote only today.

A book-lover’s paradise, Calabash is a boutique festival if there ever was one. Hordes of would-be writers rub shoulders with would-be readers and actual writers at different stages of their careers. The main venue was succinctly described in a recent article: “At the far end is a small stage with a podium. The backdrop is the long curve of Calabash Bay. The village mongrels often have the best seat in the house, downstage. In Treasure Beach, even the strays enjoy a good poetry reading.”

Although Dominicano Junot Diaz, the celebrated author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, couldn’t make it this year, touring the Far East as he is after winning the Pulitzer and a clutch of other awards, Calabash die-hards will remember him as one of the up and coming authors featured at an earlier Calabash—2003? 2004? See? So you never know, someone you consider a no-name author this year could well turn out to be tomorrow’s literary lion. Incidentally a recent issue of the Caribbean Review of Books (CRB) carried a great interview with Diaz by Marlon James, author of John Crow’s Devil.

Another big draw will be Beverley Manley, whose hot memoirs, briefly serialized in the Gleaner, have set the country on fire. Naturally i have an advance copy, a review copy, which i shall devour over the weekend. Hey being a critic does have its occasional advantages.

But more on Calabash after the event. I will be ensconced at a seafront villa with a small cartel of Caribbean writers and publishing mates for the duration of the festival. A description of this delightful spot is to be found in the current issue of Caribbean Beat where Nicholas Laughlin, editor of CRB, recalls an evening spent there the year before during Calabash:

“…If you are in possession of a villa, you might consider throwing your own private party. The kind that starts when someone shows up with a bottle of wine and ends, well, whenever. Perhaps your housekeeper has cooked lobsters for dinner. Perhaps two up-and-coming Jamaican novelists will start a raucous discussion of the supernatural coolie duppy, egged on by an art critic, to the scandal of a young American poet. A couple of literary journalists huddle by the pool, exchanging hot gossip. Someone slips down to the beach for a midnight skinny-dip A hotshot online media producer captures it all on a hidden mike…”

See you in Treasure Beach!

Stepping Through Sweden

When you’ve been born and brought up in the global South and continue to live there as I do you appreciate visiting places where things work the way they’re supposed to and resources are never a problem; where Plan A is what prevails (instead of constant compromises with Plan B or C); and where human chaos is ordered and contained in artful ways.

I found myself in Gothenburg, Sweden, the other day attending a two-day meeting at the Museum of World Cultures. After arriving with a swollen leg and no luggage I still had a great time — a tribute to this unusual country and its friendly people.

I’m a real sucker for sophisticated design, whether graphic or interior, and Scandinavian design is outstanding. So despite the forbidding exteriors of most buildings I found myself in a succession of beautifully designed interiors and luxuriated in them while I could. The colour schemes were as rich and unorthodox as Kanjeevaram saris—a bright orange auditorium, a magenta and pink bathroom, the most elegant fixtures—leading me to radically revise the colours of my blogsite as soon as I got back.


The Museum of World Cultures itself was a trip. Our conference room was screened off with a unique, superbly designed grill or screen consisting of human figures with outstretched arms and legs balanced on one another. The screen is an artwork created by a Korean artist named Do Ho Suh .

An exhibition called Fair Fashion drew attention to the costs associated with clothing and keeping up with the latest styles. Although wearing cotton may make us feel virtuous (it’s natural! It’s cool! It’s cheap!) the cost of keeping the world clothed in cotton is actually quite expensive, harmful and unfair to cottonpickers. Some of the facts the exhibition highlighted with the use of imaginatively dressed mannequins were as follows:

  • Cotton is the most water-intensive crop around. In order to grow a kilo of cotton, you need something like 10,000 to 30,000 litres of water.

  • A whole kilo of chemicals and toxins are employed in the production of every single kilo of conventionally grown cotton.

  • Every year 12 million pairs of jeans are sold in Sweden. Each pair weighs approximately 0.6 kg, and consists of 95 % cotton.

  • You need 0.6 k of che­micals and toxins and 12,000 litres of water to manufacture a single pair of jeans.

  • Cotton is grown in over 100 countries. The major producers—China, India, Pakistan, Brazil and Uzbekistan—are responsible for more than 80 % of the world’s cotton production. The global market price has remained rock steady at 60 cents per pound ever since the 1950s. This is mainly due to the fact that cotton-producing countries in the West, along with China and the EU, provide their domestic cotton farmers with various subsidies. As a result of this practice, cotton farmers in other parts of the world are forced to accept the low international market price.

Another concurrent exhibition “Wild Style” told “the story of how hip-hop came to conquer the world”.

This was rather fortuitous for me because the reason I was at the Museum of World Cultures to begin with was to attend a meeting of authors and editors of a text titled Creativity, Cultural Expression and Globalization. Volume 3 of the Cultures and Globalization Series published by Sage, London, the Series editors had invited twenty writers and scholars from around the world to participate in the project by contributing chapters highlighting new forms of creativity thrown up by the forces of globalization.

My chapter, titled “The Turn of the Native: Vernacular Creativity in the Caribbean” discusses the phenomenon of Jamaican music, in particular its current avatar, Dancehall. When my turn came to present my thesis it gave me great pleasure to be able to introduce the subject by citing the Wild Style exhibition that started its documentation of the story of hip hop with the following words: “It all began in August 1973, when a young girl named Cindy Campbell hosted a party at the legendary address 1520 Sedgewick Avenue in West Bronx, New York.”

As I explained, although the words Jamaica and Jamaican never appear anywhere in this narrative, the party mentioned was at the home of Jamaican migrants and Cindy’s brother, Clive, borrowed the sound system from their father, a Jamaican, to play Jamaican music at the party. Clive is better known today by his DJ moniker, Kool Herc. Everyone knows the rest. The African-Americans at the party were not receptive to dancehall music so Kool Herc started playing soul and funk hits while talking and shouting over the music in the style of Jamaican DJs. Now the party was hopping and voila, hip hop was born.

As easily as that I had made my case for focusing exclusively on the phenomenon of Jamaican music. As I went on to explain there are not many places in the world where “the masses who have been silent for two thirds of a century” have found their voice(s) as volubly and effectively as in the Caribbean; here, using the medium of music, “low-budget” people persistently neglected by both state and society, have creatively married oral traditions with the most advanced technological innovation to create a highly mobile, popular, indeed, trend-setting, product that is competitive internationally with similar products from the most advanced societies in the world.

Unfortunately in the society it was created Dancehall has still barely acquired legitimacy although there are signs that this is beginning to change. Last night on the CVM TV current affairs programme ‘Direct’ that usually deals exclusively with political and economic issues, the subject was a recent poll conducted on the subject of Dancehall. The poll conducted by Don Anderson had purported to come up with some amazing findings such as that only a minuscule segment of the population listened to or liked Dancehall compared to Reggae, and that most people thought that dancehall DJs could and ought to do something about the spiraling violence in the country.

Fortunately Garfield Burford, the host of the programme, then brought on Donna Hope and Ragashanti Stewart, two scholars who have researched the subject of dancehall quite thoroughly and by the time they had disaggregated and queried the questions asked by the Poll you realized how little the pollsters knew about the subject they were claiming to collect information on and how much their ignorance impacted on the quality of the data they had so triumphantly produced. What for example was the distinction being made between Reggae and Dancehall? If another category had been substituted for DJs, say teachers, media stars, politicians or pastors would the answers have been any different? Anderson admitted that the question could have been more precisely framed so that respondents indicated which of these categories they considered most able to influence patterns of violence in Jamaica. Kudos to Burford and Direct for focusing on a subject that is at least as important as tourism and the practically non-existent formal economy.

Well, there’s much more to say about Sweden. I was only there for four days but when you’ve had a chance to test out the medical system of a country, go shopping there (stores close at 5 pm and one isn’t bombarded with commercials and subliminal messages to shop, shop, shop) and also do the opposite, spend significant time in its premier museum (shops and museums are spaces that are fundamentally opposed I think) you do get a sense of the place and its people. The clinic was fabulously designed with its red brick and tiled lobby, with sculpted walls covered with the most fascinating, provocative three dimensional imagery.

The system was streamlined and user-friendly, the doctor was kind, what more do you want. And fortunately for me it wasn’t that expensive (I’m still trying unsuccessfully to collect from the expensive health insurance plan I was required to buy in order to get a Swedish visa). I’m much indebted to Anna Thelin, programme coordinator of the Museum, for taking me there.

The other thing that impressed me was the size of the sidewalks which were as wide as country roads in Jamaica with a lane for bicycles and a separate one for pedestrians, clearly marked. I loved the image of the father and daughter used to indicate the pedestrian lane. Sweden struck me as a place with the resources to live humanely and the imagination and good sense to do so without the bombast and waste we’re used to in this hemisphere. Skol!