Loretta Collins and the Caribbean as a Sentiment

PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF THE DAILY HERALD OF SINT MAARTEN ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 15, 2012

Modern-day San Juan is a metropolitan urban center, caught half-way between the comfort that pertains to all contemporary cities, the socio-economic tensions that are so widespread across western forms of capitalism, and the unequivocally Antillean character of its personality, awarded by much more than its proximity to the Caribbean Sea. So much is made clear by Loretta Collins Klobah in her first collection of poems, The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman, published by Peepal Tree Press in 2011.

Spanning close to thirty poems, two thirds of which have been published over the past decade in various journals and anthologies, Collins’ collection provides an intense, committed and multifarious view of the present reality from a fundamentally Caribbean perspective. Nevertheless, The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman is not a traditional compendium of lyrical ramblings designed to get the reader to join the writer in a journey of escapism away from the bitterness of real life. In this sense, the book is confrontational and often even deliberately blunt, not only in the presentation of the themes it addresses but also in the way it uses traditional forms.

Tintamarre: The Smallest Kingdom in the World

PUBLISHED IN THE FIRST ISSUE OF CARIBBEAN BEACH NEWS MAGAZINE, ON DECEMBER 2011

On Saturday, August 23, 1913, during the tense days of the Second Balkan War and the doomed prelude to The Great War, the worst armed conflict the West had experienced to that point, Le Journal, one of the most popular daily newspapers in Paris, published a long, sympathetic feature on Le Roi de Tintamarre (The King of Tintamarre). The monarch in question was Diederik Christian van Romondt, the heir and, ultimately, final member of one of the most prominent colonial dynasties in Sint Maarten, and the kingdom was no other than the small islet that lies just a couple of miles to the northeast of Saint-Martin: Tintamarre, a.k.a. Flat Island.

Flat, indeed, and readily accessible, Tintamarre has been populated at different times from the end of the XVII century, despite the fact that it is roughly one square mile in size. However, perhaps the greatest venture to take place on the island began when Diederik van Romondt decided to take his belongings and set up his permanent home there. The story goes that D. C. van Romondt, unwilling to pay the reformed Gebruiksbelasting (use tax) that would be levied on the Dutch colonies from 1908 onwards, departed his farm near Philipsburg and settled in his private island as early as 1907. As a matter of fact, a letter, written by van Romondt to the Receiver of the Government in May 1914, confirms that he had been away at Tintamarre for the previous 21 months and that he would be returning to his regular quarters the following month, with no intention of returning to Sint Maarten for reasons other than an occasional visit.

Mapping the Century with Václav Havel

PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YEAR'S SPECIAL OF THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD, ON DECEMBER 31, 2011

Last Sunday, December 18, the world was shaken by the news of the death of one of the most remarkable intellectuals to have lived in the XX century: Václav Havel. And by “the world” I mean not the literary world, or the intellectual establishment; I am not even speaking about the international diplomatic services or the hoards of politicians that seem to proliferate at a staggering pace in Europe. I mean, in general terms, the people, who largely felt they were represented through his plays, especially, of course in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia, but also, perhaps even astonishingly, in the rest of the world.

CROWDS PAY TRIBUTE TO HAVEL

In some sense, that is what you would come to expect with the death of every famous writer. Indeed, the strange connection that grows between authors and their audience hangs precisely from the sort of reciprocal empathy that allows writers to reproduce characters and situations totally alien to them, and readers to find themselves indirectly engaged with the creators, through their work. It is a more subtle liaison than, say, actors or singers have with their audience, where the rapport is direct and visual. For this very reason, perhaps, the relationship is less intense than with popular celebrities – rather a long burner, instead of an explosive reaction. Therefore, too, spontaneous expressions of mass bereavement and collective mournful tributes such as were seen in Prague over the past week are usually reserved figures like Michael Jackson or Marco Simoncelli, not to high-brow intellectuals.

Achy Obejas: Alternative to the Core

PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD ON SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2011 

 

Cuban-American might, perhaps, be the most natural label you could tag on Achy Obejas as a first point of reference for anyone unacquainted with her figure. The most natural, perhaps, but also thoroughly inaccurate – not because Obejas is not Cuban-American (she is), or because she is not just Cuban-American (that much would be obvious), but rather because she hardly falls within the stereotype usually connected to such label. Which might be a roundabout way of saying that Achy Obejas resists categorization: intellectual, sentimental, creative, analytical, politically conscious, activist, militant, Cuban, yes, but also American, and therefore Spanish but simultaneously English, so, naturally, also translator and interpreter and so on… The list could go on, but this would make for a truly terrible introductory line.

ACHY OBEJAS

So, looking for an alternative, let’s try a category of (relatively) recent coining: “1.5 generation.” Used to refer to immigrants who arrived in their host country during their childhood, this generation is often depicted as dual, insofar as their emotional and cultural attachment is shared between the two places that marked their personality. The difference between this concept and that of “second generation” (children from immigrants born in their parents’ host country) is subtle but relevant: while the latter are often described as being caught between their roots and their present reality, the personality of the former peels itself into coexisting and often overlapping portions that embrace elements from both cultures, even if those elements are seemingly contradictory. This, precisely, is what happens at many levels to Achy Obejas – not least her fiction.

Catch-22 Turns 50 – And It Still Lives On...

PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD ON SATURDAY,

HELLER'S "CATCH-18"
IN NEW WOLRD WRITER

Back in 1961, Joseph Heller, working as a copyrighter for an advertisement company in Manhattan, published his very first novel, Catch-22. He had been writing it for the past eight years, but had secured a contract to publish it as early as 1955, after the first chapter of the book was published in the literary magazine New World Writing, under the title “Catch-18.” Heller was 30 years old when he finished the novel, and the contract had been for $750 as an advance, and the same amount again upon publication. Fifty years later, Catch-22 has been translated into 20-odd languages, has sold well over 10 million copies and was featured in just about every list of the most important novels of the XX century. Not bad for a first try, right?

Improbably, however, Catch-22 was far from an immediate success, triggering largely unflattering reviews, among others from The New Yorker, and lingering somewhere in the middle of the table of book sales during 1961. The breakthrough would come the following year, with the release of the title in the UK as part of the catalogue of the publishing house, Jonathan Cape. The reception among British audiences was staggering, climbing to the top of the best selling list almost immediately and turning Heller from an average seller (30,000 copies in the first year was hardly a flop) to a cult figure, a must-read, a worldwide phenomenon, that has found its way to the core of English-speaking culture: its language.

The Caribbean Writer: A Unique Outlet for Caribbean Literature

PUBLISHED BY SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011

The cultural establishment across the Caribbean has been changing in the last few years, with a sudden rise in the attention given to literature through a number of book fairs, festivals and similar events in various islands in the atoll. Thus, at least in appearance, literary craft had gained some of the ground it had lost over the years to more stereotypically characteristic forms of Caribbean expression, such as plastic arts, or music. Nevertheless, despite this welcome resurgence, the fact that there are scarcely any regular avenues to promote the creation of new literature in the region and to divulge the works that are created remains a puzzling, as well as a troubling, reality. Within this desolate landscape, The Caribbean Writer emerges as a long-standing example of commitment and endorsement of the literature produced in the area.
 

Founded in 1986 by the initiative of Erika Waters, Professor Emeritus of the University of the Virgin Islands, the journal has been produced annually, without fault, for the past 25 years. One determining factors in the high standards of quality that it has been able to provide from its first number, published in the summer of 1987, is the outstanding talent and judgement displayed by its Editorial Advisory Board, which, from the beginning, has included luminaries, such as Derek Walcott. Apart from the Nobel laureate, who still features in the board, these days The Caribbean Writer is advised by hugely influential writers, including Kamau Brathwaite, Edwidge Danticat, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips, Zee Edgell, Merle Hodge, Earl Lovelace. among others.

Peepal Tree Press: The White Knight of Caribbean Literature

PUBLISHED IN THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMEENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD ON SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2011

Within the context of Caribbean literature and its publishers, Peepal Tree Press ranks among the most important, supportive and trusted institutions of them all. Originally established back in the mid-eighties, more as a fortuitous adventure than as a serious business project, it is now over 25 years since Rooplall Monar’s Backdam People came out of the daisy wheel printer that set in motion what would become the most respected, and, ultimately, the largest publishing house of Caribbean books, probably in the world.

More than modest, the beginnings of Peepal Tree Press were altruistic, naïve and utterly loveable. Operating from Jeremy Poynting’s garage, this, the smallest of private enterprises, moved at a fittingly slow pace, even for Caribbean standards. But slow and steady wins the race, and Poynting’s constancy in delivering the final product on time, however few products they were, paid off in due course, when a grant, first, and later a successful application for development funding from the Arts Council, meant that proper machinery and premises for the business could be procured. By the mid-nineties, almost 20 years ago, Peepal Tree Press had moved into its HQ in the number 17 of the King’s Avenue, in Burley – a less than affluent area just northeast of Leeds’ city center. That is where, to this day, Peepal Tree Press books are planned, processed and produced. 

A (Last) Day in the Life

or

Do wake me up when September ends

FINAL INSTALLMENT OF THE 'SUMMER READING' SECTION IN THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD, PUBLISHED ON SEPTEMBER 17, 2011 AND DEDICATED TO THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF 9/11

 … Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden […] where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons….

 So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five.

6.33 am: The soft, mellow female voice in the digital radio announced the dawn of a new day at the precise moment when the sun arose. Yesterday, it had been at 6.32 am. Today, the day would be at least one minute shorter; and then there was the two or three minutes he –and the rest of New York– would lose at sunset. Soon, he would have to change the setting of the alarm clock, from ‘sunrise’ to a specific time (‘6.30 am’), to allow for his daily routine.

(c) MARIE WINN

Zachary Mitkowsky already had his eyes open when the delicate female whisper –barely audible over the jaunty Gershwin melody he had chosen as background music– softly broadcasted the first news of the day to his ear: the sun has risen. The gentle clapping of his hands automatically switched on the light regulator –an inverted dimmer– which hastily but progressively raised the electric lights in his pitch-dark bedroom. It was a childish gadget but it had come with the apartment, and he kind of liked it, anyway. He jumped out of bed, opened wide the rolling curtains that covered the large window, slid the glass pane towards his far side, let in some fresh air, leaned out, turned his head to the right, had the first peek of the day of his beloved park. Refreshing.

Saint-Barthélemy: Radical Chic… with a Twist

A SHORT PIECE ON ST BARTH, PUBLISHED IN THIS YEAR'S EXPERIENCE ST MARTIN/MAARTEN

Once upon a time, the island of Saint-Barthélemy, perhaps the most exclusive, elitist destination in the Caribbean, was deemed to be worth so little, it was sold for a pittance. Indeed, more than once: in the very early days of colonization, back in 1653, Phillippe de Longvilliers de Poincy, Lieutenant Governor of the French West Indies and Bailiff Grand Cross of the Knights of Malta, purchased Saint-Barthélemy, the French half of Saint-Martin, the French portion of Saint-Christophe (modern-day St. Kitts) and the uninhabited island of Saint-Croix on behalf of the chivalric order for 120,000 livres. The venture was unsuccessful to the point where the Knights sold it back to the newly-formed French West India Company in 1664, but by this time Saint-Barthélemy was uninhabited, following a murderous raid by Amerindians in 1656, which exterminated the colonists’ settlement. Then, in 1784 the French King, Louis XVI traded the island to the King of Sweden, Gustaf III, in exchange for trading rights in Göteborg, into the Baltic Sea. 

PORTRAIT OF GUSTAV III BY A. ROSLIN

Under Swedish rule Saint-Barthélemy enjoyed a brief spell of prosperity as a free port (which it still is) and trading post, primarily, though not solely, through the slave trade. But the abolition of slavery in Sweden in 1847 brought an end to the island’s riches, and thirty years later the French were again on the buying end of a transaction involving Saint-Barthélemy. This time they paid 320,000 francs for the island. In comparison, Sweden had received a compensation of 24 million francs from France in 1814, in exchange for Guadeloupe, which, under British occupation, had been awarded to them during the Napoleonic Wars. Go figure.

Dragon’s Secret

FOURTH EXCERPT FROM MY NOVEL, ON THE WAY BACK, PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD ON SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2011

I am the Dragon, and I have come to tell you a secret.

My real name belongs to my father, Nathaniel Jones. We both bear the exact same name, the exact same curse. There isn’t even a distinguishing Jr between us. One night, many generations ago, during a family reunion somewhere in the middle of Missouri, one of the Jones women called out for Junior. At that point, father, grandfather and son simultaneously got up from the table to attend to the call. That night, it was decided that no other Jones would ever use the qualifying annex behind his proper name. Fifty years later, the second son of the youngest of the Joneses present in that family reunion filled out the forms that acknowledged the legitimacy of a baby born from a German girl with sparkly blue eyes, dubbing him Nathaniel Jones. Not Nathaniel Jones V. Not Nathaniel Jones, Jr – partly because he, the father, was himself not called Nathaniel, but Horace. Simply Nathaniel Jones.

As soon as I heard that stupid tale, at the age of eight, I, Dragon Jones, first and only son of such Nathaniel, refused to follow the unimaginative tradition of the family that abandoned my father long before the blueprints of my being could be sketched in the ducts of his testes. It was then that I acquired the identity of a man who would forever be taken for a Welsh peasant. I, Dragon Jones, am not Welsh. In fact, I’m half-German – twice: my father, half-American, really German, met my mother, half-German, really Australian, in the place where I was born: the Federal Republic of West Germany. When my family discovered the fact that a country with soaring economic growth doesn’t necessarily provide the entirety of its inhabitants with economic wellbeing, they decided to move to a place where they could put to use their Teutonic American and thick Australian accents. The closest one was England. I don’t feel identified with any of these countries; none of those nationalities seem to apply to me. However, given that very few people in England know either my real name or the bizarre dimension of my true story, very few people in England believe me when I say that I am unequivocally not Welsh (after all, is there anything more Welsh than Dragon Jones?). Nevertheless, in due time, I learned that it was better to be what I was not, than to be what people wouldn’t believe I was, so I embraced the motto rather Welsh than German (if only marginally) and stopped asserting what it was that I wasn’t.

St. Maarteners Blogging with Wild Abandon!

GUEST POST BY LISA DAVIS-BURNETT FROM THE DAILY HERALD. PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2011

It’s not the latest internet trend, but keeping a blog (short for ‘web-log’) has hit the St. Maarten cyber community and appears to be growing fast. A quick search on Google with the key words “St. Maarten blog” turns up three or four links to blogs, but that only scratches the surface. Connecting to some of these websites reveals other related blogs worth checking out.

The blogs in question are not commercial – they are personal. They are not designed to promote tourism, businesses or official agendas. Blogs are sharing one person’s experiences, thoughts, and perspective. Sharing is the key word here. In most cases, the creators of these blogs are sharing openly with the entire World Wide Web. Unlike a facebook page where only friends have access to the postings, anyone can access a blog, read the entries, admire the photos, and even leave a comment.

The Spell

THIRD EXCERPT OF ON THE WAY BACK PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 06, 2011


 
 
Bumblebee kyaan’ win no race! Is not it be donkey-boat. Bumblebee fast fast – fast as fast can be. But Bumblebee kyaan’ win no race. Bumblebee is my favourite boat. Apparently it crashed and sunk a few years ago, and it remained disabled until this season. I’ve never seen Bumblebee win anything: though it’s come second eight times in a row, it is yet to win a single race this year. And that, in Anguilla, is more than enough reason to believe there is a curse or a spell on it. The local theory for Bumblebee’s inability to win goes as follows: the new shell of the boat was designed and built, plank by plank, by Tyrone “Sharp” Rook, a crazy Rastafarian who counts among his many talents a natural gift for boat building, a relentless libido that finds no respite even in the simultaneous solace of several tourists, and an uncanny ability to communicate with disembodied spirits.



Now, Bumblebee belongs to Einar Cumbersome but to say that Sharp was working for Einar would be to misrepresent the situation: Sharp was working for himself, for the pride of it, for the joy of building the best boats in the island, and, additionally, almost as an unrelated bonus, Einar Cumbersome was paying him for it. But whatever must happen will happen, and given the characters in question and the situation in which they found themselves, nobody was even slightly surprised when a not-so-minor disagreement ensued between the two. Whether the matter in question concerned Einar’s wife, a mutual girlfriend or the rightful monetary remuneration expected by Sharp remains to be established by the irrevocable stance of popular gossip but, whatever the case, everyone agrees that Sharp had little option other than to accept Einar’s terms. He could have walked away, some might say; he could have boycotted the potential of his boat, others might argue. But that would be to ignore the artisan ethics, the long-standing tradition of pride, that Sharp had received from his forefather. As a matter of fact, that would be to forget or ignore that Sharp was not building the Bumblebee for Einar Cumbersome, but for himself. Dis my boat, he would boast once he had finished his job, dis my baby, he would shout by the bay, minutes before the start of a race – and who would dare to tell him otherwise? Certainly not Einar Cumbersome. Thus, when the inevitable happened and Sharp found his hand tied, he made a concerted effort to exceed himself and build the most decidedly unbeatable boat to have sailed the coastline of Anguilla in the history of time.

The Rendezvous

ANOTHER EXCERPT OF ON THE WAY BACK, PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 20, 2011

Nathaniel Jones approached with short, longing steps what no longer was or wasn’t his favourite bar, when from across the room a hazel lightning dissipated the doubt harboured in his heart. Sheila Rawlingson shared a table with three local men. Lunch had already been eaten, the party engaged in the final arrangements before leaving. Yah glasses; no, no: dem my keys. When the eyes of the only two people that mattered in the world locked, a sparkle of happiness shone in each of their four eyes. Sheila, yah glasses, nah! Hand outstretched. Glasses repeatedly tapping Sheila’s hand. Eyes lost in foreign latitudes. Not a word spoken. Sheila Rawlingson restrained her smile, blinked, turned away from bliss, headed in the opposite direction. Only she heard the whisper calling from Nathaniel’s mouth. She knew exactly what he had said but she did not hesitate: she opened the door of her SUV, got inside, turned the key, drove away, left no acknowledging sign.

Nathaniel Jones walked to the last table by the far corner of the deck, sat, taciturn, asked for a beer. By the time the sun set, his beer was still half-full. Come dinner-time he asked for another. He did not eat. It was not a particularly busy night: he was not disturbed until closing time. His tap came up to six dollars. Nathaniel Jones was there, all right, when the employees of the place showed up late the following morning to open the restaurant for lunch. He was their first customer, at 10.54, sixty-six minutes before opening time. He sat on the last table, by the far corner of the deck, had a beer, no lunch. He gazed blankly into the establishment; eyes wide open; mouth cracked, dry; skin burned, wrinkled; hand loosely holding a warm plastic cup. Sheila did not show up. He remained unfazed. As the sun set anew, the waitress brought him another beer; he had not finished his first yet but no human being could conceive of drinking that stale old broth. Is on de house, dis one.

The Matriarch

AN EXCERPT OF ON THE WAY BACK PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2011

Akira Andrews sat in her office, behind her desk, rejection stamp in hand, browsing Nathaniel Jones’ application just out of curiosity, when the front door was slammed open by the full weight of Gwendolyn Stewart’s plump body. “Afternoon.” Akira was startled out of her prying merely by the rarity of the sight. “Afternoon, Auntie Gwen.” Her jaw dropped, her eyes lingered in expectation, her pulse accelerated. Akira would have asked Gwendolyn to sit somewhere had she not been too afraid none of the chairs in her office would fit the size of her unexpected visitor. “Yah shouldda tell me yah coming, man.” The effort to seem natural made her drop the stamp in her right hand on the floor. She never picked it up.

Ever since her childhood Gwendolyn had enjoyed the privilege of an imposing presence, a commandeering look. The first-born Stewart of her generation, her determination and judiciousness had secured her from an early age the role of matriarch. The absolute and unequivocal control she held over the affairs of the family went disguised by her benevolent disposition towards the wellbeing of her loved ones. Thus, none of her six brothers had ever dared to entertain the thought of dispossessing her of her charge.

Cold War

A SHORT PORTRAIT PUBLISHED AS THE OPENING INSTALLMENT OF THE SERIES "SUMMER READINGS" IN THE WEEKender SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD ON JULY 30, 2011

To Sir Emile Gumbs

 

It was the time of night when the sounds of life no longer could be heard in The Valley or beyond. Not many people would have slept through the tense expectation of those uncertain times but not many either would have dared to be caught outdoors after dark. Only the isolated blast of the stones crashing against the wooden table interrupted the loaded silence of the night, sending through the blind alleys of Stoney Ground a shrill soundtrack that grew louder with every slapping of the dominoes.

Is a dangerous game dat rat playin’ goin’ ’round talkin’ to people about we like dat, and the whack of the final stone reverberated in the forced stillness of the evening. Maybe he forget he house made ah wood, or he don’ know oder wooden houses burn before. It wasn’t the end of the game; it hadn’t even been a shrewd play, but the pause that ensued made it seem like the next move already belonged to a different chapter, to another life.

Before Candace Bushnell, There Was Jean Rhys

ON OCTOBER 17, 2009

ABRIDGED VERSION PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S DAILY HERALD

Long before New York played any role in the world’s scene, Jean Rhys wrote at length about seriously complex female characters who struggled to express themselves in the denigrating society of which they were part – and who tried to come out of it with the least bit of dignity, or even self-esteem. Her location of choice was, for the most part, Paris, and her predominant subject was not so much sex, but rather (bohemian) life, and the city during the roaring twenties and the (still roaring) thirties. Nevertheless, the landscape of the internal worlds of her protagonists, plagued with longings and anxieties, with suspicions, frustrations and self-doubt, appeals to an intangible human sensibility and makes her work transcend space and time, rendering her topics uncannily relevant.

Una Marson: Woman, Fighter, Lover, Writer

PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD NEWSPAPER ON JULY 23, 2011

Una Marson is primarily known for her work during World War II for the BBC Empire Service, which designed a program to be broadcast to the West Indies in an effort to boost the patriotic sentiment among West Indians, who as recently as the late ’30s, had staged a series of radical protests, strikes and revolts that, ultimately, turned into resentment towards the empire and a deeply nationalistic feeling within each of the islands.

Marson’s program, Calling the West Indies, essentially worked as a communication bridge between the audiences in the Caribbean and the troops in England, whose written messages would be read out in the show. Until 1945, that was, when Marson, together with Henry Swanzy, an Irish producer who would radically change the literary landscape of the Caribbean, turned Calling the West Indies into Caribbean Voices.

Desorden Publico Cast Their Spell on Madrid

PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD NEWSPAPER ON SATURDAY, JULY 9, 2011

It’s a Friday night in Madrid, a city that does sleep, but it is generally during the daytime. They call it siesta. At night, Madrid is a lively as any city – and I say this not because I have been to every other big city in the world, but because it isn’t conceivable that much more can actually happen during day or night.

MADRID BY NIGHT, (c) REBECCA SNYDER

This specific Friday night, however, Madrid is positively rocking, because it’s the Gay Pride weekend and street parties have been organized in virtually every square of town. Ever the salmon, however, (swimming against the tide – get it?) I decide to ignore every single celebration I come across on the road, on my way to a nostalgic gig in the Sala Heineken, one of the best reputed musical joints in the city.

Andrea Levy: Jamaica in My Mind

PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD NEWSPAPER ON SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 2011.

Over the past decade, Andrea Levy has worked her way to the top of the British literary establishment with her thoughtful and troubling novels, which recurrently deal with the Jamaican experience of hardship, be it in the form of the shameful discrimination immigrants have suffered in post-WWII Britain, or, in the case of her latest book, The Long Song (Headline, 2010) through the ignominy of slavery and its repercussions, immediately after it finally came to be abolished.

Born and raised in London, Levy turned to literature only when she was in her late thirties, publishing her first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin’ in 1994. Levy herself has linked this late shift to the fact that, at the time, she failed to find material from English writers that represented her experience, growing up in a predominantly white society as a black English person. Thus, the background to her first three novels was taken, precisely, from her own experience, setting her fiction right at the heart of working-class England in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Always close to the anecdotal, Levy is capable of gesturing towards the general conditions that lie at the bottom of the workings of society through particular situations or circumstances that have great resonance on the reader’s mind.

The Other Caribbean Nobel Laureate: Juan Ramón Jiménez and His Puerto Rican Affair

PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD ON MAY 28, 2011

JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ

Juan Ramón Jiménez was born in the small town of Moguer, near Huelva, on the south-western coast of Spain, all the way back in 1881, when there was very little in the form of Caribbean literature. Nevertheless, a long life with its fair share of twists and turns landed Jiménez and his wife, Zenobia, on the pristine shores of Cuba in the mid-30s and later took the inseparable couple to Puerto Rico. Indeed, he had been living in San Juan, teaching at the university, for over five years, when the Swedish Academy decided to award the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature to the venerable Spaniard, who had been closely linked to the island, and to the Latin American literary establishment, since his decision to flee his war-stricken Motherland in 1936.

Originally intending to carry out studies in Law, Jiménez traveled to Sevilla in 1896. Nevertheless, what he found in the city was his passion for art and literature, rather than the discipline required to complete a degree. Following a number of contributions to Vida Nueva, one of the small magazines, so prolific at the time, published in Madrid, Jiménez was invited to the capital by Rubén Darío, one of the most important figures of Spanish Modernism, then as now. That is how he made his incursion in the small literary world of the capital, attending meetings at cafés and salons with the likes of Valle-Inclán, Azorín or Pío Baroja. But Jiménez’s nerves were frail at their best, and he found the pace and nature of life in the capital too much to take, so, after publishing his first two collections of poems, Almas de violeta and Ninfeas (both from 1900), he returned to his natal Moguer.


Tragedy, however, awaited Jiménez at home, where, just a couple of months later, his father would suffer a fatal heart attack. Juan Ramón Jiménez fell into a deep depression and developed an obsessive concern for his own health. He spent several years between France and Madrid, from one sanatorium to the next, before returning to his hometown in 1905. His family’s economic situation had worsened considerably and he sought refuge in the idyllic countryside of the region. It was there where he conceived, and perhaps even lived, the episodes that would later form his most famous volume: Platero and I.

The Nine Lives of Ernesto Sábato

PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD ON SATURDAY, MAY 7, 2011

Ernesto Sábato (1911-2011), the last survivor of a great generation of Argentinean writers that included the likes of Julio Cortázar and Juan Rulfo, passed away last Saturday, April 30, in his home in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he had been secluded since 2005 for health reasons. At 99 years of age, Sábato had hardly been the focal point of the cultural establishment in the past two decades; however, his compact oeuvre (he only wrote three full novels) counts among the most accomplished and most intellectually charged material written in Spanish in the XX century, offering insightful routes into the darkest, deepest corners of human nature.

Born in Rojas on June 24, 1911, Sábato developed a highly successful career as a scientist and was a recognized and committed political militant long before he ever turned to write a single page of fiction. Graduated in Physics from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, he obtained his Ph.D. in 1938, by which time he had already fallen in and out of favour with Argentina’s Communist Party. He worked at the Currie laboratory in Paris in 1938, was transferred to the MIT in Cambridge before the break of WWII and taught at the Universidad Nacional La Plata from 1940 onwards. Like so many physicists, however, Sábato was drawn towards the philosophical/moralistic implications of the discipline and, under the influence of his Surrealist friends, found his research period at the Currie lab frustrating and unfulfilling. This developed into a full-blown crisis that distanced him from his early communist tendencies and made him turn away from science, in the direction of art (concretely, painting and literature).

Repetition, Iteration and the Performance of Caribbeanness in Kamau Brathwaite’s Poetry

PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MARRTEN'S DAILY HERALD ON SATURDAY JULY 10, 2010

Within Caribbean literary circles, Kamau Brathwaite (née Lawson Edward Brathwaite, Bridgetown, Barbados, 1930) stands among the most important, influential, prolific and respected names, alongside, for instance, Walcott and Naipaul, the two Nobel laureates in the region, as well as Lamming, or Glissant – all members of the same remarkable generation of writers, who, quite suddenly, put Caribbean literature “on the map”. Excluding Glissant, whose Martinican heritage naturally put him on a different – if parallel – course, all these writers were largely enabled through two discrete, though equally important, initiatives to disseminate and encourage the production of literature in the (English-speaking) Caribbean: one of them was the BBC’s radio broadcast Caribbean Voices; the other was Frank Collymore’s audacious magazine, BIM, launched in Barbados in 1942. It was in the latter that Brathwaite (at the time still Edward) found a suitable outlet to voice his first poetic exploits. While Brathwaite himself has acknowledged that there is little of his mature style in his early BIM pieces, he has also asserted that had it not been for the support of Frank Collymore he would have dried up before he had even started.

In 1950 Brathwaite traveled to Cambridge, UK, where he completed his undergraduate degree in History. He stayed in England until he was sent to Ghana (then known as the Gold Coast) on an educational assignment by the Civil Service in 1955. There, he witnessed the creation of the nascent country (officially declared in 1957), experienced first hand the traditions and culture of a people towards whom he felt infinitely more closely related than towards the British, and first became aware of the deeply-rooted connection between Africa and the Caribbean – a connection that, in his view, is far more practical, more alive, than the merely historical relation of standing on opposite ends of the same criminal passage.

By the time Brathwaite returned to the Caribbean, in 1962, he was a changed man with an ambitious project. His analytic mind, along with his flourishing academic career (he was engaged by the University of the West Indies (St. Lucia) in ’62 and moved to the Mona Campus (Jamaica) the following year), allowed him to give formal shape to his interpretation of the Caribbean experience as a lifestyle closely akin to West African tradition and values. At the same time, however, the recognition of the African influence in the most quotidian details of life in the Caribbean also led to the discovery, by contrast, perhaps, of the more than palpable European presence in the customs of the region. In my view, these are the premises upon which Brathwaite’s lifelong quest rests.

Eugenio Montejo: Chronicler of Time, Admirer of the Moment

ABRIDGED VERSION PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF THE DAILY HERALD, SINT MAARTEN ON JUNE 13, 2009

SPANISH VERSION PUBLISHED BY LETRALIA ON JUNE 15, 2009: http://www.letralia.com/212/articulo05.htm

Upon the first anniversary of the death of the most outstanding of Venezuelan poets, we pay tribute to his fine literary career.

Eugenio Montejo (1938 – 2008) – conjurer of words, curator of the language, suitor of life and compulsive observer of the wanderings of time – built throughout his career a literary corpus that is more dense than vast, more beautiful than intimidating, integral and yet defiant. His contributions are sure to count among the most valuable ones to the literature, the folklore and the tradition not only of Venezuela as a country, but of the Spanish language as the common cultural ground shared by many countries.

For Montejo, the creation of an individual identity is necessarily shaped by the two-way relation between the self and the environment where it is found, such that the individual recognizes itself as the meeting point between history and what lies ahead, the instant of interaction between the future and the past. In this sense, the individual becomes the catalyst of this exchange, both essential to the transaction and, at the same time, a passive element of it, like a passenger, ‘aboard, almost adrift’.[1] Only if we bear this in mind can we understand the paradoxes evident in statements such as those from ‘El rezagado’ (‘The Straggler’), who declares that ‘Through this road my funeral has already passed / With its pathetic speeches / … I follow it from afar / As the years go by’,[2] or from ‘Mis mayores’ (‘My Forbears’), who ‘Underneath my skin look at each other’ and ‘come and go inside my body’.[3]

Montejo gestures towards a related concept in his third collection, Algunas palabras (Some Words) (1976), when the narrator of ‘Vecindad’ (‘Neighbourhood’) walks through the city together with his body, ‘Him bearing the shape of my parents/ Their blood, their substance/ I, with what is left of their dreams’. This idea won’t reach its full potential for almost another twenty years, until the narrator of ‘En el parque’ (‘At the Park’) sees his son play – ‘The son that awaited me here on earth / Before I was born…’[4] The message Montejo wishes to convey becomes clearer when this idea is combined with his teachings in ‘Lo nuestro’ (‘What Belongs To Us’), where he explains that ‘Yours is the time that your body spends / With the tremor of the world, / The time, not your body. / Your body, dyed by the sun, was here dreaming.’[5]

Montejo is concerned with the multiplicity of the self and the paradox of being, of existing. For him ‘There is not one path over the sea / Without its opposite, / There are no ways to be and not to be where one goes’.[6] That is why he suggests in the same collection: [7]

Never to be the one who leaves nor the one who comes back

But something between the two

Something in the middle;

What life takes away, and it’s not absence

What it gives, and it’s not dreams

The lightning it leaves in between the hands

The crack in the stone.

Yet, despite his intimations and advice, despite the dejection prevalent in his work, Montejo’s poetry is most palpably inflected with the anxiety of an intellectual who has something to say, but who, beyond anything else, is most concerned with saying it well. It is here where the crucial distinction between the artist and the thinker must be made, and it is precisely such distinction which firmly places Montejo within the literary tradition of the Spanish language: a poet committed to the exploration of the truth, of the mysteries of life and love, of the burden of history and of culture - but above all, a poet.

His devotion to the written word is wholehearted, to the point where:[8]

What is left to us in the word, when something remains:

What we come to say, if we say it,

If our dream is long enough,

Shares the tremor of the corolla

Before the abyss.

The undefeated light congealed when it blossoms

Outside the realm of time.

Out of Montejo’s entire corpus, the tension between structure and content, between intellectual proposition and linguistic experimentation, becomes most palpable in the 1972 collection, Muerte y memoria (Death and Memory). For instance, in the remarkable poem “Orpheus”, the assertions put forward by the words on the page are repeatedly questioned by conditional clauses which are placed somewhere, neither fully inside nor fully outside the poem, by the framing brackets:[9]

Orpheus, whatever is left of him (if anything’s left),

Whatever on Earth might still be able to sing,

Which stone, which animal does it manage to move?

… Orpheus, whatever in him dreams (if anything dreams),

The utterance of plenteous destiny,

Who hears it now, on their knees?

… He comes to sing (if he sings) to our door,

Outside all doors. Here he stays,

Here he builds his home and serves his time

Because we are Hell.

It is precisely this concern for the written word, this inclination towards linguistic experimentation, which leads Montejo to explore the possibilities of heteronomy. This technique allows him to deploy, just like his beloved Fernando Pessoa before him, a complex imaginary world in which a number of characters push, not without a sense of humour, the boundaries of formal constraints that trouble his mind. Among these characters Blas Coll constitutes the most important persona: the undisputed centre around which the rest of the intellectual scene of Puerto Malo gravitates, he is a conscientious typographer devoted to the analysis of words and to the development of an optimal written language that could compress the content of a full sentence into a single syllable. El Cuaderno de Blas Coll (Blas Coll’s Notebook) is the only one of his writings that ever gets to see the light of day. Little more than a compilation of aphorisms, assertions and opinions, it is a faithful reproduction of the spirit that guided the long discussions that he and his followers (among them Montejo’s remaining heteronyms: Lino Cervantes, Tomás Linden, Eduardo Polo and Sergio Sandoval) entertained during those mythical evenings of studious experimentation.

While Coll advocates for the dissemination of the concept in its pre-linguistic shape and Cervantes is concerned with the transcription of some of his master’s reductive exercises into La caza del relámpago (The Chase for the Lightning), Sergio Sandoval and Tomás Linden, the Swede from Patanemo who ‘wrote in Spanish with eighteen vowels in mind’, seek to highlight, with more or less success, the artistic merit of traditional structures, such as, respectively, the couplet and the sonnet. Meanwhile, Eduardo Polo carves a name for himself as an author of children’s books with his Chamario, published in 2004. Thus, the creation of an alternative intellectual circle allows Montejo to delve into diverse genres and to develop an additional facet that eventually complements his poetics without compromising the coherence of his proposition.

Passionate about pebbles, enamored with the music sung by stones, Montejo was a poet of cities: he paid tribute to the Caracas of his childhood; he mused about some distant Lisbon, home to its very own Ulysses; he wrote about the mythic Ithaca, inhabited by us all. He was awarded the Venezuelan Literary Prize in 1998 and the prestigious International Prize for Poetry and Essays Octavio Paz in 2004. But his legacy will be carved in far greater terms than simply literary. Eugenio Montejo was a gentleman, in the most positive sense of the word: his bearing was humble and his manner kind; he kept a low profile even after international fame finally greeted him – late, too late – when a passing reference to one of his poems in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film, 21 Grams, immediately made the headlines.

A few years after that, I was fortunate enough to have an exchange with the maestro, in relation to an insignificant literary occurrence I had produced based on Lino Cervantes’ La caza del relámpago (The Chase for the Lightning). The generosity, courtesy and good nature showed by Montejo towards a complete stranger far overshadowed his humbling erudition during the short course of our correspondence. Still today, his note of gratitude remains the only compliment I have ever received by which I have been flattered.

His teachings will continue to open new paths in Latin American poetry for many years to come. The memory of such remarkable human being will outlive him by much longer than one year. So will the uncomfortable sense of dearth that comes with the loss of one of his kind. We will never know why the best ones are always the first ones to depart, but in a vile attempt to find solace in pointing fingers, it might be convenient to emulate Montejo and to blame it all on the snow, on its absence - that, and the coats we never remove from their hangers.

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[1] ‘A bordo, casi a la deriva’. ‘Terredad’ (‘Earthdom’), originally included in the 1978 collection that bears the same name. (This and all further translations mine).

[2] ‘Por esta calle ya pasó mi entierro / con sus patéticos discursos / … lo voy siguiendo desde lejos / al paso de los años’. From Partitura de la cigarra (The Cicada’s Score) (1999).

[3] ‘Bajo mi carne se ven unos a otros’; ‘van y vienen por mi cuerpo’. From Trópico absoluto (Absolute Tropic) (1982).

[4] ‘El hijo que me esperaba aquí en la tierra / antes de yo nacer…” From Partitura de la cigarra (The Cicada’s Score).

[5] ‘Tuyo es el tiempo cuando tu cuerpo pasa / con el temblor del mundo, / el tiempo, no tu cuerpo. / Tu cuerpo estaba aquí, teñido al sol, soñando.” From Adiós al siglo XX (Farewell to the Twentieth Century) (1992).

[6] ‘No hay un solo camino sobre la mar / sin su contrario, / no hay maneras de estar y no estar donde se viaja’. ‘Partida’ (‘Departure’), from Terredad (Earthdom).

[7] No ser nunca quien parte ni quien vuelve

sino algo entre los dos,

algo en el medio;

lo que la vida arranca y no es ausencia,

lo que entrega y no es sueño,

el relámpago que deja entre las manos

la grieta de una piedra.

‘Mudanzas’ (‘Mutations’)

[8] lo que nos queda en la palabra, cuando queda:

lo que venimos a decir, si lo decimos,

si nos alcanza el sueño,

tiene el temblor de una corola

ante el abismo.

La invicta luz que se coagula al florecer

fuera del tiempo.

‘Al aire Náhualt’ (‘To the Náhualt’ Air’), Adiós al siglo XX (Farewell to the Twentieth Century).

[9] Orfeo, lo que de él queda (si queda),

lo que aún puede cantar en la tierra,

¿a qué piedra, a cuál animal enternece?

… Orfeo, lo que en él sueña (si sueña),

la palabra de tanto destino,

¿quién la recibe ahora de rodillas?

…Viene a cantar (si canta) a nuestra puerta,

ante toda las puertas. Aquí se queda,

aquí planta su casa y paga su condena

porque nosotros somos el Infierno.