Montague

José Lezama Lima: A New Tradition for the New World.

2012-02-11T11:28:00.001-04:00

PUBLISHED BY THE WEEKENDER SUPPLEMENT OF SINT MAARTEN'S THE DAILY HERALD ON SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2012

José Lezama Lima has long been one of the most intriguing and enigmaticfigures among the large number of Latin American writers who were elevated toreverential status following the editorial boom of the 1960s. Almost arbitrarily put togetherwith the likes of Juan Carlos Onetti, Alejo Carpentier and Julio Cortázar, orthe much younger Gabriel García Márquez or Mario Vargas Llosa, Lezama Limashares little with these writers, other than having profited from an editorialfashion that placed him, and the others, in the center of the attention of theliterary world.

That is how Lezama Lima’s only novel, Paradiso (1966) came to be the signature work by asingular, complex and hermetic writer whose greatest contribution was certainlynot in the world of fiction. Which is not to say that Paradiso is without its merits. Notoriously difficultto read, Lezama Lima’s novel closely follows the life of José Cemí, whosedevelopment take us through a large number of autobiographical references andsimultaneously seeks to build a universal stereotype of mankind at large. Or,rather, of the American man –a member of a new society, shaped in great measureby its environment and in equal proportion by the dizzying blend of races andreligions and customs and traditions that ultimately have led to the creationof something altogether different.

It is due, perhaps, to the very fact that this new society in this NewWorld is entirely different to everything else known to the Western man thatLezama Lima’s prose is so self-consciously charged with descriptive details atevery level, making the progress of the story itself hesitant, at best. Moreconcerned with the creative role of a demiurge, Lezama Lima’s technique isstretched to provide a visual portrait of what he ultimately considers to be atropical paradise. Literally opening new avenues of discovery into a previouslyunseen, un-described, un-represented world, the Cuban writer seems to revel ina richness of language, in a proficiency of graphic details, that derives intoan excessively ornamental prose.

Nevertheless, the argument has been made that Lezama Lima’s Baroque narrativeis the product, not of a self-complacent indulgence but rather of theexuberance of the nature and the peculiar reality of everyday life in theCaribbean, both of which could not possibly, could not reasonably be describedwith the traditional use of a language that for so long had been steeped in theEuropean tradition. In this sense, Paradiso’s greatest challenge might also turn out to beits boldest and most incisive contribution to the literary tradition of LatinAmerican and, indeed, Caribbean culture.

Be that as it may, by the time Paradiso came to be finished, and published, LezamaLima had long established himself as one of the most prominent figures in theliterary scene of Cuba and beyond. Famously slow in his progress during theproduction of his novel, Lezama Lima would describe himself as an amateurnovelist. Indeed, it is rather as a poet, and also as a lucid essayist, that hisreputation has been built. Which itself is a telling fact when it comes tounderstanding, or even just facing, the style of Paradiso.

But if Lezama Lima’s novel is the product of a confident andaccomplished cultural figure whose standing and career allowed him the luxuryof coming up with a literary extravagance, where lies the merit that affordedhim such opportunity? Born in 1910 to a Colonel from the Cuban Army, LezamaLima was a young man during the time of Gerardo Machado’s government.Democratically elected as President of Cuba, Machado became increasinglydespotic, even during his first term. Indeed, figures of the intellectualestablishment, such as the pre-eminent writer, Alejo Carpentier, wereimprisoned during the late 1920s for their dissent against Machado’sgovernment. It was against this backdrop that Lezama Lima’s creative veindeveloped, intricately linking it to a political stance.

Following the tense clashes of 1930, the ousting of Machado in 1932 and theoccupation of the university of Havana by Batista’s troops between 1935 and1937, Lezama Lima endeavored to publish a literary pamphlet within the academicinstitution. It was the beginning of Verbum, a vehicle for poetic expression shelteredbehind the façade of the university’s Faculty of Law. Although Verbum only lasted three numbers (before someonefinally noticed there was hardly any material connected to legal issues in it),it has often been singled out as the starting point of an intellectual movement(to avoid the heavily charged term of “revolution” in a Cuban context) thatcame to its climax in the integration of art and literature through another ofLezama Lima’s magazines: Orígenes.

Verbum would befollowed by similarly short-lived efforts in Espuela de plata (1939) and Nadie parecía (1942). By then, however, Lezama Lima’sintentions had been polished to the extreme, as he exploited the combination ofpoetry and visual arts from the times of Espuela de plata onwards to evince a form of expression thatwould simultaneously represent and identify the character and nature of Cubaand its people.

Which takes us to Orígenes, perhaps Lezama Lima’s greatest accomplishment. An independent magazinefocusing on literature and art, Orígenes provided an outlet to the creative force within the island, which sawthe emergence and establishment of a new “tradition,” of a particular andeasily distinguishable style, that has come to be inextricably linked withCuba. By the time the first number of Orígenes cameout, in 1944, Lezama Lima hadalready published two collections of poems, Muerte de Narciso and Enemigo rumor. Similarly, many of the primary figures whopublished their work in the magazine, such as Wilfredo Lam or Amelia Peláez,had already established themselves firmly at the center of the creative circle inthe country. And yet, Orígenes provided an enviable medium to bring together the talent and theimagination of writers and artists alike in the formulation of a coherentaesthetic that ultimately came to be regarded as genuinely original anduniquely Cuban.

MUJERES (1958) BY AMELIA PELÁEZ

LA JUNGLA (1943), WILFREDO LAM

Orígenes came to anabrupt end in 1956, but not before firmly enunciating a visual and literaryproposition that successfully mapped the reality of the New World. In thissense, Lezama Lima’s efforts through the following decade in his constructionof Paradiso can be seen asthe synthesis of the creative program he had developed over 12 years with hismagazine. Thus, his novel could be considered the final effort to blend art andliterature into one: a written form of visual expression pertinent only to the natureand the people of the Caribbean. Now, there’s an ambitious project, if I eversaw one!

Ambition is not always a good thing, and Lezama Lima might have tried toachieve the unachievable. Nevertheless, there is something commendable,something unquestionably beautiful, in the concept of a pure artistic map tochart the entire Caribbean. Only that already merits him a place among thegreatest Caribbean writers of the XX century – don’t you think?

Loretta Collins and the Caribbean as a Sentiment

2012-01-23T07:23:00.000-04:00

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 betweenthe comfort that pertains to all contemporary cities, the socio-economictensions that are so widespread across western forms of capitalism, and theunequivocally Antillean character of its personality, awarded by much more thanits proximity to the Caribbean Sea. So much is made clear by Loretta CollinsKlobah 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 publishedover the past decade in various journals and anthologies, Collins’ collectionprovides an intense, committed and multifarious view of the present realityfrom a fundamentally Caribbean perspective. Nevertheless, The Twelve-FootNeon Woman is not atraditional compendium of lyrical ramblings designed to get the reader to jointhe writer in a journey of escapism away from the bitterness of real life. Inthis sense, the book is confrontational and often even deliberately blunt, notonly in the presentation of the themes it addresses but also in the way it usestraditional forms.

The extent to which Collins is prepared to stretch the boundaries ofestablished conventions is palpable from the very onset, even before reachingthe first poem, as the epigraph on the opening page is taken from “Profesiónesperanza,” a true salsa classic, made famous by El Sonero Mayor, Ismael “Maelo” Rivera, one of the greatestartists to have graced the profession all time. It is true, perhaps, that bynow there is hardly much transgression in opening or dedicating a book of poemsto a musician – after all, the list of singer/songwriters, from Marley to Cohenor Dylan, who have been fully incorporated into the establishment of recognized“artists” is extensive and ever growing. The decision to do so, however,remains a distinctive statement, and, indeed, a precept intended to guide,inform or complement our reading of the text.

ISMAEL RIVERA: "PROFESIÓN ESPERANZA"

Thus, with Maelo’s smooth, grave voice and the contrasting rhythms of“Profesión esperanza” still reverberating in our head, we delve into the firsttwo poems of the collection, “Cereus of the Night Passages” and “La MadonnaUrbana” (a previously unpublished piece), the two items in which LorettaCollins most emphatically, and perhaps also most successfully, ventures intothe next of her linguistic experiments: the blend of Spanish and English.Again, there is nothing unique, or even innovative, about this blend – hundredsof thousands of people communicate this way on a daily basis, and culturallydiverse writers have been proposing this form of expression for some time –other than the fact that, paired with the rhythm of salsa and the presence ofIsmael Rivera, it almost forces readers to wrap their tongues around thedelicate cadence of foreign words and to embrace a meaning that often willremain obscure to many.

The significance of Collins’ combination of languages is obviouslyenhanced by the poetic form in general, and by her specific manipulation ofsounds and rhythm, which largely dominates the reading experience. Nevertheless,beyond concerns for language and music, Collins’ poetry is highly engaged withissues of personal and collective consequence that crowd her work withanecdotal references. In this sense, her activism, which is central to thetopics she explores, is often directed towards the issues of crime and safetyin San Juan, of political scandals on the island and, primarily, of excessiveuse of force or widespread abuse by members of the police in Puerto Rico, notleast during the clashes that recently took place at the Río Piedras campus ofthe university, where she is a Professor.

LORETTA COLLINS

Deeply emotive at various levels, The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman sometimes serves as a simple vehicle toventilate Collins’ most virulent forms of anger, indignation and, also, desire.However, like the writer herself, the collection is never rooted to a singleplace. Rather, it roams from island to island, from setting to setting, with anacute and prevalent connection to the Caribbean, almost as a sentiment, insteadof a geographic area. This is precisely the ingredient that links experiencesof genuine friendship in the less affluent suburbs of London with helplesspanic during the passage of a hurricane in Carriacou. This, too, allows for therational exasperation at the state of affairs in Puerto Rico to coexist with theancient spiritual cult for María Lionza, the Queen, in a collection that iscomplex, and yet unitary.

I am often asked whether a book is good or bad: fortunately, these termsare neither absolute (what’s good for me might not be for you), nor are theyterribly helpful, at least when it comes to literature. Thus, TheTwelve-Foot Neon Woman is alot more than good (or bad): it is diverse and, like most poetry, it isessentially emotional; it is musical to the core and infectious at that,although it is also experimental and, consequently, full of surprises, some ofwhich fail to live up to their expectations. On the balance, however, I wouldsay its rewards fully outweigh its shortcomings, so this one counts among therecommended.

Tintamarre: The Smallest Kingdom in the World

2012-01-15T10:18:00.000-04:00

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

On Saturday, August23, 1913, during the tense days of the Second Balkan War and the doomed preludeto The Great War, the worst armed conflict the West had experienced to thatpoint, Le Journal, one ofthe most popular daily newspapers in Paris, published a long, sympatheticfeature on Le Roi de Tintamarre (The King of Tintamarre). The monarch in question was Diederik Christianvan Romondt, the heir and, ultimately, final member of one of the mostprominent colonial dynasties in Sint Maarten, and the kingdom was no other thanthe small islet that lies just a couple of miles to the northeast ofSaint-Martin: Tintamarre, a.k.a. Flat Island.

Flat, indeed, andreadily accessible, Tintamarre has been populated at different times from theend of the XVII century, despite the fact that it is roughly one square mile insize. However, perhaps the greatest venture to take place on the island beganwhen Diederik van Romondt decided to take his belongings and set up hispermanent home there. The story goes that D. C. van Romondt, unwilling to paythe 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 earlyas 1907. As a matter of fact, a letter, written by van Romondt to the Receiverof the Government in May 1914, confirms that he had been away at Tintamarre forthe previous 21 months and that he would be returning to his regular quartersthe following month, with no intention of returning to Sint Maarten for reasonsother than an occasional visit.

By that time vanRomondt had already built the Manor House that for many years to come woulddominate the landscape of Tintamarre. A spacious wooden structure surrounded byvast stone walls that sectioned the perimeter of the island into well-definedareas, van Romondt planted Sea Island cotton on the largest parcel, processedit in his own gin and grew copious amounts of cattle and goats in smallerplots. His labor force was largely constituted of Anguillian men who would bepaid in the local currency, a hybrid made of standard one-cent Dutch coins thatcirculated in the island from 1913 onwards, which they could use to purchasegoods in the local shop, or trade in for half the value, should they wish toleave the island.

MARY'S FANCY MANOR HOUSE

Eventually, DiederikChristian van Romondt made his way back to “Mary’s Fancy,” his farm in Dutch Cul-de-Sac,which to this day lends its name to a neighborhood by Philipsburg. Despite allthe love letters he is said to have received following the piece in LeJournal, back in 1913, hespent much of his life with Miss Josie, his West Indian partner who shared hislife until his death, in 1948, and whose decision to bequeath the farm upon herown passing away, ten years later, to her two closest aides, Ronald Webster andAndy Peterson, had tremendous repercussions in the history of neighboringAnguilla.

But that is anotherstory, and before that the fate of Tintamarre was sealed, anyway, when vanRomondt, following a tradition of many centuries, sold his property, not tocompeting Dutch families in the island, but rather to a trader from FrenchSaint-Martin, Louis Fleming.

Because, if the mostambitious venture ever to take place in Tintamarre was van Romondt’s estate,the most romantic was, undoubtedly, Remy de Haenen’s airline, CompagnieAerienne Antillaise. Having leased the island from Mr. Fleming in 1946, deHaenen, a half-Dutch, half-French adventurer who resided in St. Barth since1938, decided to operate the first airline in the French Caribbean from thenaturally advantageous Tintamarre, where the flat ground required littleconditioning to turn it into an airstrip, and the flat bay seemed perfect for aflying boat seaport.

Having broughtaviation to St. Barth in 1945, where he landed for the first time with hisRearwyn Sportster in what many years later would become Gustaf III Airport, deHaenen was no stranger to flying. Thus, as early as 1946 he began servicing thefive-island-cluster with a small fleet that included a Vought OS2U Kingfisherflying boat, with which he delivered the post into Saba, a 6-seat StinsonJunior S, and a 10-seat Stinson SM-6000 Trimotor, capable of making the longerjourney to Guadeloupe.

CAA BOUGHT OLD S-41Bs (PICTURED) FROM PAN AM

This was all back in the day when regulation was scareand lax, and de Haenen was able to fly between Puerto Rico and Dominica withrelative ease. At least one of CAA’s aircrafts, a Sikorski S-41B flying boat,was designated with the fake registration number F-WIAA (F-WI as in French WestIndies), and safety measures were often totally disregarded by the airline.

Almost inevitably, itwas precisely this daredevil attitude, which today enhances the whole storywith the appealing hue of romance, that ultimately spelled the failure of theenterprise. More through negligence than ill fortune, CAA became involved intragic accidents during the first six months of 1947, which cost the lives ofthree of its pilots, Roger Gantheaume, “Zouzou” Saintonge and Frank Griffin, aswell as three of its aircrafts (one of the Kingfishers, the Stinson S, and anewly acquired Vultee BT-13). By the end of that year the airline ceasedfunctioning and the most farfetched dream ever conceived in the island was onits way to destruction.

Today, many hurricanesand more than half a century later, the remains of a depleted fleet ofaircrafts blends on the flat surface of Tintamarre with the vegetation, theformer airstrip and, perchance, a lingering portion of what once was a mightystone wall to trace the scars of its eventful history. Tintamarre – a seeminglyunremarkable place that, nevertheless, carries with it the distinct scent ofadventure: no wonder the latest initiative linked to the island involves a lineof perfumes carrying its name – if they are anything like their namesake,expect them to be bold, passionate and risqué!

Mapping the Century with Václav Havel

2012-01-09T08:43:00.000-04:00

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 thenews of the death of one of the most remarkable intellectuals to have lived inthe XX century: Václav Havel. And by “the world” I mean not the literary world,or the intellectual establishment; I am not even speaking about theinternational diplomatic services or the hoards of politicians that seem toproliferate at a staggering pace in Europe. I mean, in general terms, thepeople, who largely felt they were represented through his plays, especially,of course in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia, but also, perhaps evenastonishingly, in the rest of the world.

CROWDS PAY TRIBUTE TO HAVEL

In some sense, that is what you would come to expectwith the death of every famous writer. Indeed, the strange connection thatgrows between authors and their audience hangs precisely from the sort ofreciprocal empathy that allows writers to reproduce characters and situationstotally alien to them, and readers to find themselves indirectly engaged withthe creators, through their work. It is a more subtle liaison than, say, actorsor singers have with their audience, where the rapport is direct and visual. Forthis very reason, perhaps, the relationship is less intense than with popularcelebrities – rather a long burner, instead of an explosive reaction.Therefore, too, spontaneous expressions of mass bereavement and collectivemournful tributes such as were seen in Prague over the past week are usuallyreserved figures like Michael Jackson or Marco Simoncelli, not to high-browintellectuals.

Then again, Václav (pronounced Vatslaf) Havel was not yourstandard, everyday intellectual. Born in 1936 to a well-to-do family in Prague,Havel’s life was fundamentally altered at several points by some of the most significantevents of the XX century, a turbulent period of time, to say the least. Assuch, his extraordinary tale provides us with an enviable tool to draw a roughand somewhat tragic picture of the history of the West in the past century.Because, even though Havel was 75 when he passed away, his infancy was shapedby what came before him: by the Great War and the dissolution of the HabsburgEmpire, which resulted, among other things, in the creation of a new country,Czechoslovakia, and a new rule, within which his family flourished.

The general debacle of World War II hit Czechoslovakiain the face, effectively disintegrating the country and incorporatingmodern-day Czech Republic into Germany even before the outbreak of the conflict.But the end of the war, far from harvesting the fervor of victory and liberationthat could be seen across much of Europe, brought uncertainty of another kind,in the threatening shape of a communist regime that came to power in 1948.Inevitably, Czechoslovakia was aligned with the eastern bloc that gravitatedaround the Soviet Union, and the measures that were originally conceived toattain the greater good of the masses soon became inexorable dogmas used asmuch to intimidate or punish specific portions of society as to achieveconstructive results.

It was within this less than ideal environment thatthe young Václav grew into an adolescent. Victim of the spiteful discriminationof the communist agenda, his education was cut short by the State when he was15 years old on the grounds that he was too “bourgeois” (a synonym of “theenemy” in communist jargon) to merit further instruction. Forced to work fromthat early age, Havel became an apprentice in a pharmaceutical laboratory andworked as a taxi driver to fund the evening school where he completed hissecondary education. Further education was no easier for Havel: banned as hewas from pursuing any artistic subjects, he started a degree in Economics andstudied Drama by correspondence. By the early 60s, he was working in a smalltheater in Prague, and just a few years later he would write and produce hisfirst and most famous piece, The Garden Party.

These details are important to appraise the literarywork of Havel, not only from a personal point of view, but to place it withinthe wider context in which they were produced. From the early 60s, up until thePrague Spring – a turbulent period of political reform in the country which wasviolently brought to an end by Soviet intervention in August, 1968 – Havelacted as an intellectual non-conformist, who exploited the resources availableto him in order to portray in the most vivid form acceptable to the regime, theshortcomings and contradictions inherent to the communist political structurethat governed his country. In other words, initially Havel worked from within,in order to try to change the system organically.

Often referred to as a major exponent of AbsurdistTheater, Havel’s use of the nonsensical is more grounded on the reality he wasforced to live (and therefore, is more fundamental) than the trademarkAbsurdism of Beckett or Ionesco. In this sense, Havel makes no great claimsabout human nature or religion, but rather condemns the futility of the growingbureaucratic machine within the communist establishment; attacks the flagrantopportunism of indoctrinated civil servants, trained to pledge theirunquestioning allegiance to the resolutions of the party, no matter what;exposes the emptiness of highly specialized idiosyncratic terminology; and,ultimately, reveals the collapse of the sort of dialectic conceptualizationthat was the cornerstone of Marxist ideology. Today, this might all soundterribly outdated, but back in 1963, the possibility of publicly performing aplay, The Garden Party, that successfully covered all those points was notonly far-fetched, it was incredible risky.

THE INCREASED DIFFICULTY OF
CONCENTRATION, ORBIS (1968)

Havel’s plays up to 1968 (The Memorandum (1965), The Increased Difficulty ofConcentration (1968)), all deal with these issues in ways that escape reduction to asingle plotline, precisely because, in the end, in these plays, like in dailyroutine in communist Czechoslovakia at the time, nothing happened at all.Following the repression of 1968, Havel entered the next stage of his life,escalating to the status of underground dissident, as his plays no longer wouldbe allowed to be performed. In a sense, then, the politicization of Havel’swork was almost forced upon him, ultimately turning him into one of the primarypromoters of what came to be known as the “Charter 77,” a subversive politicalgroup led by intellectuals, whose primary aim was the toppling of the communistregime. During this period, Havel’s drama, much of it autobiographic single-actplays (known as the Vanek plays, including Audience, Protest and Mistake), as well as the politicalmanifesto of Charter 77 had to be disseminated through clandestine means, suchas the samizdat, a carbon copy of the manuscript typed on onion paper.

Eventually, Havel was singled out by the authoritiesand sent to prison for four and a half years in 1979. He was released for illhealth in 1983, and from that point forward he would establish himself as alucid non-fiction writer, with his Power of the Powerless standing out as one of hismost notable books. The world was taking yet another turn, the darkest days ofthe Cold War were coming to an end, and soon enough Czechoslovakia would beswept by the demise of communism. And Havel, again, would be in thick ofthings.

PRESIDENT HAVEL ADDRESSES
HIS PEOPLE

Personable, likeable and renowned, he emerged as theideal candidate to lead the transition from the totalitarian regime of old to anascent democratic tradition. Havel’s career as a dramatist was practicallyover, although he would still write a lot of non-fiction, especially during thefirst years of his political career. But primarily, he would refashion himselfas a charismatic, if somewhat unorthodox, statesman. Famous is the anecdote ofhis reaction when he first got to the Presidential Palace in Prague: stunned byits size, he got a scooter and drove around the premises repeatedly! Lessamusing was his share of the responsibility in failing to keep Czechs andSlovaks happy together (perchance an impossible task) which ultimately led tothe disintegration of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Nevertheless, the balance sheet of his politicalcareer will always feature as a major plus his role in rekindling the embers ofdemocracy, which had burned vigorously in his home country during the intra warperiod, and which have established themselves firmly in both the contemporaryCzech and Slovak political systems. After completing his second term asPresident of the Czech Republic, Havel retired from politics. He would stillhave time, in his later years, to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming acineaste, filming a version of his play, Leaving, earlier in 2011.

Persecuted and revered at different times, Havel wentthrough practically every stage conceivable for a modern man during hislifetime. His affinity towards the people, however, was not a learned trick:from his earliest plays, he was always able to connect with his audiencethrough a subtle, almost unintelligible humor, to the point where they appeal alot more than they narrate. Today, a nation mourns and the world shares itsloss, because what is left, his work, is less striking, perhaps less relevantthese days, than what is gone, his life – what fellow Czech intellectual, MilanKundera, has labeled his greatest accomplishment. And who could disagree,considering what a life it was!

Achy Obejas: Alternative to the Core

2011-12-26T07:43:00.001-04:00

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 tagon Achy Obejas as a first point of reference for anyone unacquainted with herfigure. The most natural, perhaps, but also thoroughly inaccurate – not becauseObejas 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 thestereotype usually connected to such label. Which might be a roundabout way ofsaying 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, butthis 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 intheir host country during their childhood, this generation is often depicted asdual, insofar as their emotional and cultural attachment is shared between thetwo places that marked their personality. The difference between this conceptand that of “second generation” (children from immigrants born in theirparents’ host country) is subtle but relevant: while the latter are oftendescribed as being caught between their roots and their present reality, thepersonality of the former peels itself into coexisting and often overlappingportions that embrace elements from both cultures, even if those elements areseemingly contradictory. This, precisely, is what happens at many levels toAchy Obejas – not least her fiction.

Born in Havana in 1956, her parents immigrated to the United States whenshe was only six – which, perhaps, makes her a tad young to be of the generation1.5 … maybe she should be included in generation 1.7, or 1.3, depending on theway you look at it! Either way, Obejas’ parents settled in Michigan City, starting her passage through the mid-west, which saw herstudy at the University of Indiana and live in the great metropolis: Chicago. In other words,far, far away from the stereotypical Cuban-American triangle of Havana, Miamiand New York/New Jersey. Which is not to say she distanced herself from herheritage: on the contrary, Obejas has embraced Cuba as the foundation of heridentity, but she has done so (perhaps she was forced to) in a distinctlydifferent way. So much is palpable in her latest novel, Ruins, published by Akashic Books in 2009.

Set in the summer of 1994 and with the backdrop of the mass exodus thatfollowed the lenient policy established by Castro’s regime that year, Ruins carefully maps the miseryprevalent in Havana after the fall of communism, which became the primaryreason why so many thousands sought asylum in the U.S., despite the perils ofthe sea for travelers who often launched themselves into the Caribbean waterswith little more than a precarious raft (balsero,as Cubans would come to be known, comes from the Spanish word for raft, balsa). However, rather than taking thetraditional view on the subject, the perspective of a future exile, longing fora better life abroad, or a nervous family member in Miami or the Keys, awaitingthe arrival of a cousin or a lover delivered, quite literally, by the tides,Obejas chooses the far less habitual, and also less popular, impersonation of a“loyal” comrade, still faithful to the revolution after 35 years of failure.

Ruins thus becomes the journey of an individual,whose life is affected directly by the “desertion” of seemingly everyone aroundhim, not because of the circumstantial changes this will bring in his routine,but because direct confrontation with a different (an “other”) reality producesa shift in the behavior of the protagonist, in the values he upholds and,therefore, in his person as a whole. Obejas’ depiction of this character issymbolic from his very name, Usnavy, a common name across the Spanish-speakingCaribbean, taken from the ships or members of the U.S. Navy who might have wroughthavoc or lust across through land and sea, and translated into the vernacular Uss-nah-vee everywhere from Cuba to Venezuela.

CUBAN BALSEROS, ASYLUM SEEKERS

Forced by his principles to help his best friend in a time of need,Usnavy becomes involved in the former’s preparations to set off towards Key West with his wifeand baby. Seemingly incorruptible, Usnavy is faced for the first time with theconcept of yearning – an emotion he cannot understand, because he has alwayshad everything he needs. Except, at the end of the adventure he has more,because his friend leaves him a bike, which he can now give to his 14-year-olddaughter. On his way back from the expedition, with one bike on each hand,Usnavy comes across a collapsed house that impedes his progress. Curious, heputs the bikes aside and scavenges for a lamp, which turns out to be highlyvaluable. His bikes get stolen, but by the time Usnavy realizes that the lampcould give him a good head start into buying a new bicycle, he discovers themeaning of the verb “want”.

This marks the turning point in the internal struggle of theprotagonist, whose integrity is questioned (by himself) as soon as he realizesthat by being loyal to his friend he was betraying his community. But Usnavyturns out not to be incorruptible, after all, and suddenly the precepts he hadheld as true for so long, despite the mock and scorn of his friends, prove tobe nothing more than the rubble from the collapsed house where he found hislamp on the first place. Indeed, Ruins isfull of allusions, metaphors and symbols that link the Revolution at large withUsnavy’s character, his love for a great lamp that hangs in his small shack,his fascination with the glass that refracts the light that comes from the lamp,rather than for light itself, the grandiose style of the lamp contrastingsharply with the state of despondency in which he and his family live, and soon.

This constant game of parallels ultimately harms the overall effect of Ruins, rendering it somewhat moralizingat times and predictable at others. Nevertheless, the redeeming features inObejas’ voice more than make up for flaws that are understandable, if alsoavoidable. Straightforward, natural and free-flowing, Obejas’ narrativeencapsulates the best of the duality of her own identity. Both sympathetic andcritical of the Cuban establishment, she manages to incorporate fully idiosyncraticconcepts, such as salao (a Cubanversion of “extremely unlucky,” linked through the supernatural to the notionof fukú, explored by Junot Díaz in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,which she translated into Spanish) within a more general context, available toall. Similarly, her translation into English of the very specific rhythm ofCuban conversation is not only accurate, it is admirable. Along the same lines,she freely inserts Spanish words in her narrative (plaza, derrumbe, etc), noteven distinguishing them with italics (as she does with salao, for instance), and thereby staking their claim to being anindistinguishable part of the English language (sharing the same status asturquoise, for example).

Undoubtedly at her best when inspecting the nuanced details of seeminglyinnocuous routines, Obejas truly shines in the short story genre. So much isevident from her earlier collection, Wecame all the way from Cubaso you could dress like this? (1994), where she explores in sevenspellbinding stories tropes as common as the great American dream, or the greatAmerican road trip, emptying them from their standard meaning and loading themwith a new, different code. Similar moments of genius occur in Ruins, less frequently, butoccasionally, for instance in her description of the games of dominoes in whichthe old men engage for hours on end, or in her reproduction of thegood-natured, savvy interaction between Usnavy and Virgilio, an expert glassmaker who fixes the found lamp and procures him previously unimaginable riches.

From her depiction of America(the land of plenty, of opportunities, of an “other” life, where you can, ifyou so wish, transform your sexuality and go from being Reynaldo, to beingReina), to her use of language, Obejas is constantly asserting herself both asAmerican and as Cuban. Except that, just like Usnavy’s story serves as anexcuse to look into the wider picture of Cuban reality, Obejas also asserts therights of the community to which she belongs when she voices concerns of herown. Because, ultimately, she is constantly challenging her readers to(re)think their positions in relation to the most basic principles that governour attitudes towards each other. Which is to say that her fiction is theultimate expression of her activism: a relentless questioning that is neitherangry nor histrionic but that, in end effect, permeates to every level of ourlife.

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

2011-11-30T07:05:00.001-04:00

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 anadvertisement company in Manhattan, published his very first novel, Catch-22. He had been writing it for thepast 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 thecontract had been for $750 as an advance, and the same amount again uponpublication. Fifty years later, Catch-22has been translated into 20-odd languages, has sold well over 10 million copiesand was featured in just about every list of the most important novels of theXX century. Not bad for a first try, right?

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

A “catch-22” situation is one in which a personhas no way of coming out on top, a “no-win” situation, a dilemma in which allalternatives are equally damaging. The expression, of course, found its way tocommon parlance from Heller’s creation, where a group of airmen stationed inthe Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of Italy, during World War II are forcedto take part in a progressively larger amount of combat missions before theyare allowed to go home. The number of flights they are required to completeincreases at the same pace as they fly them, which means that just as soon asany of them reaches the limit, or comes close to it, it is increased again.Thus, given the circumstances, the only way for a serviceman to merit theticket home is if he were to be deemed crazy by the Group doctor, who is onlyallowed to carry out an examination upon anyone who shows up voluntarily. Thecatch is that showing up voluntarily with claims of madness to stop flyingcombat missions is considered a rational act of self-preservation, which meansthe soldier cannot be crazy, even though the Group doctor is perfectly awarethat anyone willing to fly yet another dangerous mission into enemy territorymust be insane and, therefore, would theoretically qualify to be sent home.

The perfect efficiency of catch-22 makes it avaluable tool for the army, and therefore reoccurs time and again throughoutthe plot of the book, especially during the opening 200 pages of the novel,where Heller’s voice is most poignantly critical of the intricate bureaucraticmaze that holds together a military establishment, where, for instance, aquintessentially mediocre person, such as Major Major (that’s his name!) risesquickly through the ranks until reaching the status of Major, based on no meritwhatsoever, other than the fact that the US Army could not pass on the uniqueopportunity of boasting having a MajorMajor Major. The result is a genuinely hysterical storyline that moves at atorrid pace, developing an unnatural environment of ineptitude where reverselogic is the rule and where madness is the rod by which normalcy is measured.

HELLER SERVED DURING WWII

Made complicit through unrestrained andincontrollable laughter, the reader willfully suspends judgment as shewitnesses the erection of a wholly implausible picture through the deploymentof an entire army (quite literally) of quirky characters, all of whomcontribute uncanny anecdotes while interacting with each other in an entirelydysfunctional way. Heller’s satirical tone is exquisitely balanced betweenscorn and humor, granting him license to build the peculiar atmosphere of acombat post where every character must be slightly deranged to risk their lifefor a higher, collective, cause.

One of Heller’s greatest accomplishments in Catch-22 is that, despite the non-linearplot, the constant repetition of the story, and the recurrence of certainnarrative strategies, such as the multiplicity of narrative voices, eachbutting into the other one’s tale, his satire remains entertaining throughout,steering away from the dangers of becoming excessively repetitive, orunnecessarily bitter.

YOSSARIAN, PORTRAYED
BY ALAN ARKIN IN THE FILM,
CATCH-22 (1970)

At the same time, however, the light, somewhatjocund treatment of World War II is progressively transformed to mirror theevolving mental frame of the characters in question. Thus, what seems like anextremely funny book for 200 pages becomes a more sluggish read, as Hellerloads the narrative with burdening devices, such as four, five, six adjectivesin each description. Still, a book about the greatest conflict the West hasever seen only enters its first moment of true sadness some 350 pages into thetale, when the Group suffers its first meaningful casualty. From that pointonwards, the true extent of the tragedy of the war gains prominence, as, one byone, the protagonist’s buddies begin to fall, victims to ill fortune, the enemy,or their own incompetence, and leaving poor old Yossarian (the main character)on his own.

Without giving the end away, and in a totallysimplistic interpretation, Yossarian’s final crossroads faces him with thechoice between the sort of “immoral logic” that throughout Catch-22 has led to the preposterous circumstances it so vehementlycondemns, or hopeless individual sacrifice. Boldly, he decides to step outsidethe framework within which his story has developed, finally escaping the loop ofmadness into which he has enticed the reader. After close to 500 pages ofextravagance, Yossarian’s moment of acute lucidity comes when he finds thecourage to act rationally.

Nevertheless, Heller’s greatest legacy, and thereason why Catch-22 is, fifty yearson, still one of the most important books written in English, is not the moralof his story but rather the boldness and the inventiveness of the narrativestrategy he formulates. Written between 1953 and 1961, Catch-22 incorporates the sentiments of a generation that stood ata crossroads in the social history of the United States. Rather than channelingthe generalized sense of frustration and the quest for individuality into atale of coming-of-age, like Salinger’s Catcherin the Rye, or an outlandish road trip, such as Kerouac’s On the Road, Heller extrapolated thecircumstances that caused such yearning and created a brilliant metaphor toreproduce society at large, and the sense of utter incomprehension thatprevailed in people of Yossarian’s generation (a generation that included DeanMoriarty (On the Road) and HoldenCaulfield (Catcher in the Rye)).

JOSEPH HELLER

Heller’s sense of dissatisfaction, not with hisexperience during World War II, but with his place in the American society ofthe 50s, is taken further – as far as the way to tell a story. Therefore, thedynamic, cartoonish and seemingly chaotic (only seemingly – upon closerscrutiny Heller’s structure is much tighter and thought through than, say,Pynchon’s, a few years later) discourse developed in his novel is not onlyunusual: it is, at its core, subversive. Heller might not have been the firstwriter to use such artifices in a work of fiction, and he might nor have beenable to follow the prowess of Catch-22 withanything comparable later in his life (to borrow his words, though, “whohas?”). But he was certainly capable of synthesizing the different tensions,ideas, ideals and contradictions of an unbelievably complex generation into asimilarly complex, but equally mesmerizing, book. To Heller, the greatestmiracle possible in the environment of Catch-22is to fight impotence, to take control of the situation and to assume moralresponsibility for our actions: a message that, surely, resonates loudly thesedays.

Despite its age, Catch-22 remains uncannily modern in form and in content. That iswhy, still today, it is much more than a classic: it is, and rightly so, cult.

The Caribbean Writer: A Unique Outlet for Caribbean Literature

2011-11-14T17:42:00.001-04:00

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.

The latest edition of the journal, published in the summer of 2011, is an ambitious collection of over 600 pages dedicated to Haiti, on the wake of the tragic set of earthquakes that rocked the country towards the end of 2010. Incorporating photographs and interviews, book reviews, original narrative and poetry, this issue truly encompasses much of the integrating effort that, over many years, has characterized the publication. Nowhere is this more evident than in the choice to produce the vast majority of the material in English and French, as a gesture towards Haiti and the Francophone Caribbean. This initiative was neither original (Casa de las Américas produced a multilingual journal for years, for instance) nor unique, given that The Caribbean Writer has in the past published work in its original language. Nevertheless, it is one thing to publish one or the other piece in, say, French or Spanish, and another thing altogether to produce a full volume of this extension in two languages – an effort that amounts to publishing two books, really, and which, in the words of its editor, Opal Palmer Adisa, took a village to bring to fruition.

The silver anniversary edition of the publication is the second one produced under the tutelage of Palmer Adisa. It includes over 100 pages of poetry, beginning with a touching piece by Kamau Brathwaite. From the selection of verse, however, it is the distinctive voice of Andre Bagoo that stands out the most, with two poems that, despite being far apart from each other in the layout of the book, call out forcefully with the same strength. Similarly, a selection of fifteen short narratives, fictional and otherwise, is capped with a heartfelt story by Edwidge Danticat, perhaps the most notorious Haitian writer of her generation. Among those fifteen tales, the lone French original, a piece by Haitian writer and scholar, Évelyne Trouillot, bears special mention, as it offers English-speaking readers a rare view into the talent of an outstanding artist, little known outside French Caribbean quarters. Other highlights include an edifying conversation with Earl Lovelace, a vivid exchange with Elizabeth Nunez and an exhaustive list of reviews of Caribbean books published in the past year, with contributions from a wide array of personalities, from Geoffrey Philp to Kwame Dawes.

Almost inevitably, the volume is dominated by the sense of loss, suffering and injustice that is derived from the accounts of life in Haiti in the past century, or so. Nevertheless, as a piece of work what truly binds together this edition of The Caribbean Writer is the obvious care and dedication put into the furnishing of the final product, evident to the reader from the first contact with its lavish front cover (an evocative design by Pasko Mérisier). This very reason makes even more irritating and surprising the fact that the English texts are riddled with simple mistakes that condition their reading.

Nevertheless, rogue possessives and apostrophes notwithstanding, the quality, diversity and thoroughness of The Caribbean Writer make it a seminal publication for anyone concerned with literature in the region. Because, if the initiative to create the journal in the mid-80s came from a conspicuous shortage of outlets for upcoming or even established writers at the time, such scarcity has become even more alarming through the commendable effort of the University of the Virgin Islands and its Cruzan campus, where The Caribbean Writer is produced. As the publication celebrates its 25th anniversary, perhaps moving into the next stage, producing multi-lingual editions and reaching farther within the discrete traditions of the Caribbean, the onus is still there, present, prescient, pressing, for others to take similar risks and to help to develop a fully operating literary establishment. Some progress has been made in the past ten years, to be sure, but not enough to call literature anything other than a nascent market in the region. It is up to no one, other than us, to make that change.

Peepal Tree Press: The White Knight of Caribbean Literature

2011-10-24T06:27:00.001-04:00

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

Withinthe context of Caribbean literature and itspublishers, Peepal Tree Press ranks among the most important, supportive andtrusted institutions of them all. Originally established back in themid-eighties, more as a fortuitous adventure than as a serious businessproject, it is now over 25 years since Rooplall Monar’s Backdam Peoplecame out of the daisy wheel printer that set in motion what would become themost respected, and, ultimately, the largest publishing house of Caribbeanbooks, probably in the world.

Morethan modest, the beginnings of Peepal Tree Press were altruistic, naïve andutterly loveable. Operating from Jeremy Poynting’s garage, this, the smallestof 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 fewproducts they were, paid off in due course, when a grant, first, and later asuccessful application for development funding from the Arts Council, meantthat proper machinery and premises for the business could be procured. By themid-nineties, almost 20 years ago, Peepal Tree Press had moved into its HQ inthe number 17 of the King’s Avenue, in Burley – a less than affluent area justnortheast of Leeds’ city center. That iswhere, to this day, Peepal Tree Press books are planned, processed andproduced.

17 KING'S AVENUE, LEEDS

WhenI called, just a few weeks ago, on that run-down blue door – a weathered bluethat must have been deeper, darker, once upon a time – I had to double-check tomake certain this was the right address. The number 17, seemingly painted byhand next to the threshold, suggested I was in the right place, but it was onlyonce I peeked through the post flap and I saw the cases and cases of books,that I knew, for certain, I was where I wanted to be.

Iwas welcomed, warmly and generously, by Jeremy Poynting and Hannah Bannister,the alpha and the omega of Peepal Tree Press. Even before I took the flight ofstairs to the first floor, as I negotiated the maze of books and boxes sprawledall over the ground floor, I could tell that sometime in the past that largeopen-plan layout had housed a press where earlier books had been printed. Butthe days of mechanical printing are counted, if not gone, and these days PTPoutsources all its books to a digital printer, Jeremy tells me, where, due tothe overall volume of the business, they get the best possible rates with totalflexibility with regards to the size of each individual print run.

BACKDAM PEOPLE

Whichtakes us to the current business model: “We now print just a few hundred copiesof our new books – maybe 400, 500. This keeps us going for the first two, threemonths at least, and after that we do small reprints, also in the hundreds, aswe see fit.” Considering Jeremy claims on the website of Peepal Tree Press thatthe first edition of Backdam People, the company’s very firstpublication, had a run of 400 copies, this almost sounds like the story hasgone full-circle. Except these days Peepal Tree Press not only has 25 years ofexperience behind its back, it also can profit from the low-risk strategy ofhaving small print runs without compromising the benefits traditionally likedto mass-production: no storage problems, no conservation concerns, and,crucially, no added printing costs, despite the constant reprints.

Thisexplains the company’s claim that it publishes between 30 and 40 books per year– a staggering number by traditional standards, but not if you consider theclever way in which they are taking advantage of (post)modern publishingstrategies. “Like every publisher – Poynting tells me – we have to look at whatis going to sell. But we are also concerned, and I guess in this respect we arelucky that we can afford to be, with what is going to stay, with what books aregoing to stay alive.” Jeremy’s motivation, still today, 25 years on, or perhapseven more so, precisely because of them, seems to be far more ethereal than youwould expect. With obvious satisfaction, he tells me about Anthony McNeill, aJamaican poet with great potential who died young in the 1990s, but not,according to Poynting, without leaving behind some admirable lines. A selectionof his poems will be published by Peepal Tree Press in the coming year, despitethe fact that sales are not expected to reach far into the hundreds. But thisis the sort of thing you can afford to do with flexible printing patterns, lowcosts, minimal overheads and sincere affection for Caribbeanculture.

Canthis be profitable, though? Jeremy explains how continued support from theBritish Arts Council has enabled Peepal Tree Press to expand beyond bookpublishing, to organize workshops, to develop a parallel writing program, to reachout to the community and, in short, to become something close to a foundation.“Would you not be able to survive without external funding, then?” I press him.Jeremy takes a breath, lingers momentarily for what feels almost like one ofthose long pauses, typical of Harold Pinter’s drama, and then, pained, he tellsme: “We would, probably, be able to survive. But we would have to cut out allthe activities we carry out aside from publishing, and we would have to concentrateonly on the core business, and we would have to cut down our overhead costs,which wouldn’t be much of a cut, anyway, because we already work withincredibly small overheads. We made a small deficit on the book publishingbusiness last year, and evidently we would not be able to cover a deficit everyyear, but yes – the answer to your question is yes, we would be able to survivein some form or another without external funding.” I let out a sigh of relief,and I am not too certain, but I could almost claim that so did he.


JEREMY POYNTING, FOUNDER OF PTP

So,with the present situation covered, and the comforting knowledge that the ArtsCouncil is still backing the enterprise, I delve into what I really came tofind out: what next for Peepal Tree Press? Where is the company heading: is ittime to consolidate, to pack the bags, to slowly wind down, or is there stillthat hunger for more, that craving to keep going and reach higher in Jeremy andHannah? The answer is very much the latter. As soon as I enunciate thequestion, Jeremy’s eyes, closely set together and sheltered by hisold-fashioned spectacles, glow with excitement.

Hetells me about the Caribbean Modern Classics division, a venture that since2009 has brought back to life many of the most iconic names in Caribbean literature, from Salkey to Selvon, of whomeveryone has heard, but few have actually read. Not best sellers, but longsellers, is how he describes them, and I sense a touch of satisfaction when hesays it, as if that is what he means when he talks about the books that willstay alive. And now Jeremy is away – it seems like there is no end to the listof the company’s new projects: attracting young readers seems to be a priority,“because there is obviously a big market, there,” and the resources of thepublishing house are already committed to this end. Another area of focus inthe future will be Caribbean drama, an aspectso far highly disregarded in the regional publishing landscape, despite thefact that it has been an immensely fertile ground in the past. Hence, theModern Classics series might well turn in the direction of theatre in the nearfuture and provide us with some emblematic works. And, finally, there is theprospect of bringing out a new series of translated material, extending therealm of Peepal Tree Press’ competence from the English-speaking Caribbean to a region-wide circle encompassing French,Spanish and Dutch traditions, as well.

Thatis all I needed to know: not only have I been reassured that the greatestbenefactor of Caribbean letters is relativelysecure in its position (as secure as anyone can be, in these times), but now Ialso hear its future efforts will be geared towards a form of integration,towards creating a pan-Caribbean corpus. Well, for me, that is plenty. That ismore than enough.

A (Last) Day in the Life

2011-10-12T19:01:00.002-04:00

Do wake me up whenSeptember 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.

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.

6.45 am: Time for your run, athlete. The mellow intonation of the female digital voice was sharper without the contrasting musical overlap. There were forty-eight different vocal options stored in the small artefact, half of which were female. Zach had tried them all the day he returned from the corporate Christmas dinner –or whatever it was they called it, nowadays– last December, with a couple of whiskeys too many, and a wrapped surprise present under his arm: he had refused to open it in public to avoid any unfavourable reaction, any unnecessary confrontation. As soon as he heard the kind, delicate tone of option seven, he knew there was no point in listening to the remaining forty-one candidates. But he had done, anyway; just for the sake of it; just for the sake of equal opportunity. By the end of the evening –of the selection process–, option number seven had been set up as his morning call for the next day. He hadn’t changed it since.

He tied up the laces of his sneakers –the ones Andy Roddick had used in the US Open, with the inflatable airbags, the adjustable side panels– tightly, with a double bow; he had the last bite of his banana, the last gulp of his energy drink; set off down the two flights of stairs, leaving behind the squeaky trail of his rubber soles sticking to the polished granite floor. Zach’s jogging was invigorated by the sight of the Park. Once past the gates, he ran along the lake, through Park Drive South, onto Olmstead Drive and back towards The Terrace. The final push always –purposely– left him out of breath. He rested his hands on his knees, panting, gasping for air as he looked out, over the trees, towards the city, waking up to the buzzing tune of his heartbeat. No matter what the day had in store for him, this was almost certain to be the highlight of the next twenty-four hours, when he would again find himself among the reddened leaves, the chirpy birds, the morning dew.

7.28 am: The front door smoothly –silently– slid shut. Zach had –he knew– two spare minutes. He removed his clothes gently (with no hurry), re-hydrated himself with plain, mineral water. Two wayward drops escaped the glass, landed on the unopened envelopes from yesterday’s post. Problems hadn’t yet taken possession of Zach’s mind, until the name of Jim Hawkins crawled into his consciousness, troubled his perfect life. At least 100 seconds had gone by, still no sign of his favourite friend. The vibrating silent alarm on his satellite watch went off exactly at 7.30 am: three correlated, independent signals from outer space synchronised his watch hourly. The clock on the digital radio cannot, really, be trusted. But she is adorable, that soft, caring voice.

7.31 am: You made it back home, tiger. Come have a shower. Zach was already in his bathroom, caressing his bristly cheeks with the throbbing tingle of the three interlocking circular blades of his electric razor, when he heard the sweet prompting of the latest of twelve reminders he had saved on what was quickly becoming his most intimate acquaintance. He had only discovered the particular allure of the machine’s garrulous r since he programmed this announcement. He loved the way that mellow whisper turned sensual when it said ‘tigerr’. It reminded him a little of Lauren Bacall’s provocative accent in her early films with Humphrey Bogart –To Have and Have Not, maybe The Big Sleep. Not that he was a particularly big fan of Lauren Bacall. On the contrary, what most appealed about the voice was its impersonality: the fact that it seemed at once so human, and yet so different to anyone in particular; the fact that it lacked a face. Until it uttered the sensual ‘tigerr’, that was. But then, that sudden, partial recognition only made it more intriguing, even more sensual.

Zach took a close look at his smooth face in the magnifying mirror. Content with the thoroughness of his morning shave, he bathed his hands in a fountain of scent, splashed the dripping excess on his aggravated facial pores. He can keep his freaking car, if he wants to. I never use it, anyway. He slapped his square jaw bone repeatedly, adopting the congratulatory gesture of an older mentor upon his achieving apprentice, more to enliven the high image he had of himself than to tame the slight sting –grown ordinary with routine– of the aftershave on his skin. Besides, what’s a couple of months in a forty-eight month contract? His reflection in the mirror still spoke to him, when Zach got under the electric showerhead.

7.57 am: Zach stood in front of the mirror –hair gelled into tiny, perfect spikes–, wearing his usual Tuesday outfit –uniform: light blue shirt, dark grey suit, black shoes. He had chosen an audacious yellow silk tie for the day, was crafting the knot around his neck, when the landline rung. The phone, in fact, didn’t ring: it announced in a terse –cybernetic– voice a call for Mr. Mitkowsky. I’m so glad I caught you. Zach was always, every day of his life, at home before 8.00 am. I know you’re going through a rough patch. The last thing you need right now is me demanding things from you. Mary Anne’s apologies were always so much worse than her arguing. She would sound so patronising, so pathetic. Zach had kept a relatively stable, long distance relationship (Mary Anne lived in Boston) for over a year, but things had got particularly tense of late –during Zach’s ‘rough patch’– not least due to her insistence to move in together in either one of the cities. I’ll go see ma for a bit and when I get back things will be better, you’ll see. ‘Ma’, of course, lived in L.A., and going to se her ‘for a bit’ inevitably entailed a bitter-sweet fortnight of childhood melancholy and familial annoyance that never failed to exasperate. Basically, her call amounted to Mary Anne’s equivalent of a cordial, temporary truce –what lovers call ‘a bit of time’. I really have to go, Zachary. The plane is starting to move now. Mary Anne’s piercing voice reverberated in Zach’s room long after he had put down the earpiece, loading the air he breathed with the uncomfortable weight of an unsolved affair, an unattended issue.

7.59 am: Zach disguised his rage from himself, but, in fact, Mary Anne’s call had sent his temper through the roof. He once again stood in front of the mirror, doing his tie, when the digital radio let him know it’s time to go, Zach. The machine’s short, clipped pronunciation of the a in ‘Zach’ reminded him of Mary Anne’s formal ‘Zachary’, drew a sneer of contempt from his thin lips. The emotion showed on the tightened top of the knot of his tie. He undid it, tried it once again. The kind recorded voice caught him out one more time, a minute later. Have a good day… tigerr. The pause in the sentence gave away the fact that the ‘tiger’ was a later add on to the original message but Zach thought it emphasised even further the odd appeal of the radio’s locution. It replaced the sneer with a grin, repaired his mood, at least to the point where he could tie a perfect knot around the collar of his shirt –albeit on his third attempt. Zach Mitkowsky set out to work at 8.01 am that morning, one minute behind schedule.

8.26 am: Queues on the road; queues to get into the building; queues to get into the lifts. Seventy-three. He had wanted to walk to work but it would have taken him too long, and he was already late. Besides, the cool, fresh air of the morning had turned warm and heavy. He had flagged a cab a couple of blocks down his road. West 90. The driver had taken a roundabout route. It’s the traffic. It’s always the traffic. Then, suddenly, from Columbus Green to the Twin Towers it’s thirteen bucks fifty. Keep the change. He should have taken his car. Seventy-three. Morning Mr. Mitkowsky. At least he still had an efficient secretary, who actually got to the office before he did. There’s a pile of memos on your desk, sir. And Mr. Powell, from Bank of America, has already called you twice. There seems to be an inconvenience with your mortgage. His thanking sigh got lost in the thump of the closing door. I hate this door. Credit cards, creditors, Powell, Hawkins. Nothing important. Nothing positive. He sat behind his desk, placed the memos in the bin –together with yesterday’s bunch– made a phone call, began some productive work.

8.46 am: Zachary Mitkowsky was not looking out of his window when the overpowering impact that instantly killed Mary Anne, together with another eighty passengers, eleven crew members and an unknown number of workers on the levels immediately adjoining the forty-eighth floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, was felt. He sat, imbued in his paperwork, immersed in the details of his latest project, his newest proposal, when the violent shaking under his feet thrust him off his chair. His instinctive reaction was to lay himself flat on the ground, grab onto the floor like a crouching cat. He would have thought ‘earthquake’, had it not been for the deafening explosion –the loudest, most threatening noise he had ever heard– that followed a few thousandths of a second after the first wobble; that seemed to destroy at once all the windows of the world from within the building. If Zachary Mitkowsky had been thinking right, he might have thought ‘bomb’. But Zachary Mitkowsky was not thinking anything at all. After long, dreadful seconds of motionless shock, Zach found his way back to his feet, stumbled out of his office, met the huge crowd of workers from his floor. Tears and blood were the common currency in a scene stricken by confusion rather than panic. There was no outside communication, the elevators weren’t working, the stairs soon got clogged with smoke. Suddenly, the rumour spread. A what? An airplane?

10.00 am: The satellite watch on Zach’s left wrist silently vibrates. Zach sees despair reflected on the glass of his watch. By 9.00 am the prospect of reaching the ground floor through the stairs had been discarded as a mere dream. By 9.30 am, twenty-seven minutes after the echo –that petrifying reiteration– of the first deafening explosion, the state of affairs was close to helpless. Typically, Zach had given himself a schedule, an operational deadline. He would have to resist until 10.00 am; then, he could reconsider the situation. With tears in his eyes, a burning, acrid knot in the mouth of his stomach, he faces the truth. I can’t take this. He won’t be the first one to jump; dry, grave thuds have invaded –ever more frequently– the ravished space of his office for the past half hour. To hell if I’ll ever pay you, Hawkins. To hell if I’ll ever see you again, Mary Anne. Zach would be grieved to know there is already no way in heaven or hell he will ever again see Mary Anne, but, as it is, he just lumps her together with the rest of the problems he will leave behind (unsolved) once he departs his office. Zach is still wearing his yellow silk tie, his dark grey suit. He walks over the crushed glass, towards the shattered window. He takes off his jacket, folds it, places it next to him. He undoes his tie, unbuttons his shirt. Suddenly, he becomes aware of an unfamiliar sense of urgency, a final impulse to dissent. His task loses its parsimony. He takes his laced left shoe off his foot, throws it as hard as he can, into the smoke, out of his sight. The childish satisfaction he derives from it prompts him to do the same with his right shoe, but just as he is about to release it, it slips out of his hand, lands stridently on the opposite wall. Zach doesn’t care; he takes off his socks, drops them on the floor; he takes off his shirt, his undershirt, his trousers. Finally, he gets rid of the tight half-boxers, imprinted with the D’s and G’s or C’s or K’s that cling to his manhood.

He stands by the window, naked, blinded by the smoke, maddened with despair, sweating from the heat emanated by the building, shivering of fright. He stands by the window, instinctively looks at his watch: 10.04 am. To hell if I’ll know the exact time when I died. He loosens the strap around his forearm, lets the watch fall in his right hand, sends it flying through the sky. One big breath, and Zach steps into nothing. His shivering becomes incontrollable. Fright turns into terror. Reflexively –almost necessarily– Zach lets out a primal scream that flows from a deep inner source –well below his stomach, well beyond his guts– he has never before known. His inert body tumbles through the air, past the plume of smoke rising from the forty-eighth floor. His swollen, watery eyes, assaulted by the coarse air racing by, immediately sense the unsettling clarity of the New York sky elsewhere, other than in Upper West Manhattan. His throat grows tired, his shriek ceases, yet the liberating openness he felt while screaming still remains: though silent, it still is wide open. He feels a vacuum inside that is pleasant, not distressing: his organs, though shuffled, have adapted to the freefall. Sensing the floor rapidly approaching, Zach’s bowels release, open the final tract in his body.

Zach feels totally liberated, when he sees the reddened shadow of his beloved park. For once, the highlight of his day hadn’t been the wheezing pause on The Terrace. Then, just for a moment –a fraction of the smallest fraction of a second– his descent pauses, or at least slows down significantly, as a colossal weight from above compresses the air underneath him, forces it sideways. On this precise instant, at 10.05 am on Tuesday the eleventh of September 2001, one thousandth of a second before Zach’s death, a bird crosses his flying path and –with a low, soft, delicate cry– says to him, Poo-tee-weet? Had he had time, Zach would have replied how wonderful it felt to fly, but before he had the chance to rationalise his feeling into thought, to turn thought into a chirp, he became an indistinguishable splodge, razed without any ado by the first of two collapsing cascades of steel and concrete that formed the greatest cataclysm in American history.

So it goes.

Saint-Barthélemy: Radical Chic… with a Twist

2011-09-25T09:33:00.000-04:00

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 mostexclusive, elitist destination in the Caribbean, was deemed to be worth solittle, it was sold for a pittance. Indeed, more than once: in the very earlydays of colonization, back in 1653, Phillippe deLongvilliers de Poincy, LieutenantGovernor of the French West Indies and Bailiff Grand Cross of the Knights ofMalta, purchased Saint-Barthélemy, the French half of Saint-Martin, the Frenchportion of Saint-Christophe (modern-day St. Kitts) and the uninhabited islandof Saint-Croix on behalf of the chivalric order for 120,000 livres. The venturewas unsuccessful to the point where the Knights sold it back to thenewly-formed French West India Company in 1664, but by this timeSaint-Barthélemy was uninhabited, following a murderous raid by Amerindians in1656, which exterminated the colonists’ settlement. Then, in 1784 the FrenchKing, Louis XVI traded the island to the King of Sweden, Gustaf III, inexchange for trading rights in Göteborg, into the Baltic Sea.

PORTRAIT OF GUSTAV III BY A. ROSLIN

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

It might be hard to believe, but a similar trend ran straight throughthe history of St. Barths until well into the 20^th century. Whileproperty in the island today commands some of the highest prices in the region,round about 60 years ago two to three hundred US dollars would have bought youa plot of land right near St. Jean. That is precisely what Rémy de Haenen, theinventor of modern-day St. Barths and the island’s leading political figurefrom 1953 to 1977, paid in the late forties for a rock. There he built thefirst luxury hotel in the northeast Caribbean, the Eden Rock (named after thefamous Eden Roc in Cap d’Antibes), which opened its doors in 1951 andentertained first class celebrities and movie stars who sought privacy awayfrom the madding crowd. Greta Garbo – disguised and incognito, despite deHaenen’s assurances that nobody would even recognize her – Robert Mitchum,Howard Hughes, Jacques Cousteau, all basked in the sun in St. Barths during thefirst Golden Age of the island.

THE EDEN ROCK, BUILT IN 1951

Things went quiet again for a while until the next boom loomed large,sometime in the 1980s – and nothing has been able to stop St. Barths since. Theisland was already famous when Patrick Demarchelier shot his renownedbeach-session with Claudia Schiffer in 1991, which officially incorporated theworld of fashion and photography to the jet-setting elite assiduous to Gustaviaand its shores. To this date, St. Barths remains extremely popular among thiscrowd, both commercially, with, for instance, H&M setting its worldwideadvertising campaign for its 2010 Summer collection in the island’s beaches,and socially, where being seen is probably almost as important as not beingbothered in an island that once made its reputation for its seclusion. Ah, theirony of it all!

SCHIFFER IN ST BARTH

But there is a lot more to St. Barths than its café-society visitors.There is, for instance, a charm that will scarcely be found elsewhere in theCaribbean: a charm that is made palpable as you walk through the fashionable andhighly profitable shops of Gustavia, anything from franchises of global brands,such as Bvlgari, Cartier, Armani or Max Mara, to local boutiques like Donna DelSol and Lolita Jaca; a charm that exudes from the yachts that face thepromenade in town, à la Saint-Tropez, as you sip a cocktail at the LeYacht Club or enjoy a meal at the Wall House; a charm that extends to theboutique-hotel tradition in the island – whether it be the elegant Isle deFrance, the mythical Eden Rock or the wonderful Le Toiny, all hotels in St.Barths have less than fifty rooms, giving them a cozy, personalized atmosphere.

DEMARCHELIER, ALWAYS INSPIRED BY ST BARTH

For the brave, who wish to venture beyond the beauty and the comfort ofthe beach at St. Jean, a trip to the Atlantic side of the island will make yourvisit unforgettable. Roads in trendy St. Barths have not improved much over theyears, even if the hard Mini Moke has been replaced with much friendlier MiniCoopers, but taking a convertible up Morne du Vitet, the highest point of theisland, peaking at a massive 938 feet (286 meters), strolling through the townof Vitet, rolling down the hill to the attractive Anse de Toiny and making itall the way to the beach at Petit-Cul-de-Sac, a lovable lagoon more known tolocals and experts than to the average passer-by, will provide an authentictaste of the Caribbean aspect of the island and will give you much to boastabout at the Nikki Beach later on in the night.

From the rich and famous to the shop-a-holic to the simply curious,everyone should go to St. Barths at least once in their lifetime – and once youhave, who could blame you for going back?

Dragon’s Secret

2011-09-17T19:30:00.000-04:00

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 Ihave come to tell you a secret.

My real name belongs tomy father, Nathaniel Jones. We both bear the exact same name, the exact samecurse. There isn’t even a distinguishing Jr between us. One night, manygenerations 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 qualifyingannex behind his proper name. Fifty years later, the second son of the youngestof the Joneses present in that family reunion filled out the forms thatacknowledged the legitimacy of a baby born from a German girl with sparkly blueeyes, dubbing him Nathaniel Jones. Not Nathaniel Jones V. Not Nathaniel Jones,Jr – partly because he, the father, was himself not called Nathaniel, butHorace. Simply Nathaniel Jones.

As soon as I heard thatstupid tale, at the age of eight, I, Dragon Jones, first and only son of suchNathaniel, refused to follow the unimaginative tradition of the family thatabandoned my father long before the blueprints of my being could be sketched inthe ducts of his testes. It was then that I acquired the identity of a man whowould forever be taken for a Welsh peasant. I, Dragon Jones, am notWelsh. In fact, I’m half-German – twice: my father, half-American, reallyGerman, met my mother, half-German, really Australian, in the place where I wasborn: the Federal Republic of West Germany. When my family discovered the factthat a country with soaring economic growth doesn’t necessarily provide theentirety of its inhabitants with economic wellbeing, they decided to move to aplace where they could put to use their Teutonic American and thick Australianaccents. The closest one was England. I don’t feel identified with any of thesecountries; none of those nationalities seem to apply to me. However, given thatvery few people in England know either my real name or the bizarre dimension ofmy true story, very few people in England believe me when I say that I amunequivocally not Welsh (after all, is thereanything 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 ratherWelsh than German (if only marginally) andstopped asserting what it was that I wasn’t.

Though I have tried mybest to disentangle myself from Nathaniel’s name, I still share his curse. Fateand Nathaniel have brought me to this flat islet with the shape of a snake onthe northern edge of the Caribbean. Anguilla is a recondite destination:sixteen miles long, three wide, little vegetation and no history. But Anguillais also surrounded by an enormous coral reef. Take that fact and combine itwith the effect of tides and a large, large dose of time, and you will be leftwith the most beautiful beaches in the world. In the world.It was seeking beauty, comfort and seclusion during Easter over one year ago,that Nathe stumbled upon the unattractive name of Anguilla. He was consideringreturning to the Seychelles until the moment when he opened the webpage of HotelAnguilla. From then on, there was no turning back.Had he not randomly landed on that webpage, he might have gone to theSeychelles. Had he not come to Anguilla, he would have never met SheilaRawlingson. Had he not met Sheila Rawlingson, he never would have marriedagain.

Sheila Rawlingson is myfather’s wife. Sheila Rawlingson is half Nathaniel’s age. Sheila Rawlingsonmight well be the reason why I’m here. Nathaniel met Sheila on the second weekof his two-week vacation during Easter, over one year ago. After a short periodof courting and a large amount of controversy, Nathaniel and Sheila married.Their long honeymoon was followed by a decision to return to the homeland oftheir love, perhaps to appease the clamour raised by their private wedding. Itwas at some point after their return that Nathaniel came up with theextravagant idea to set up a commercial airline based in Anguilla, to feed therest of the Leeward Islands, to connect with European destinations and to linkwith the most important of the Windward Islands. Sheila told him he was crazy;I had to read the email he sent me twice, to make sure he was not joking. ButNathaniel is tenacious to the point of stubbornness and his persistence hasmade me travel to an island of which I barely had heard before to form apartnership with a woman I had never met. Sheila Rawlingson is a gorgeous girl:she is exuberant, beautiful, elegant.

I, the Dragon, have asecret to tell you: I’m in love with Sheila Rawlingson, my father’s wife, ourbusiness partner.

St. Maarteners Blogging with Wild Abandon!

2011-09-09T13:29:00.000-04:00

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.

WEEKender tracked down one of the island’s most prolific bloggers recently to find out more about the motivations behind the drive to blog. Jessica’s blog is entitled “An American in St. Maarten.” She began her blog in the ’90s just after moving here from her home in Massachusetts. Jessica told me that blogging was a great method for socializing, learning about the community, and forcing herself to take part in things that she might otherwise sit out. For instance, she attended and then blogged about the “I love my ram” contest, and the Arrowroot jollification – both events not something she would normally seek out. Through her eyes, folks all over the world are introduced to some of our unique cultural nuances. Many follow Jessica’s entries, curious, living vicariously through her observations, likely considering the blog as more authentic than an ad or a magazine article. She admitted that she doesn’t know exactly where her blog will lead her, but it does seem to be leading her somewhere and it does take quite some time. Hobby turned lifestyle?

The WEEKender’s own Montague Kobbe is another prolific blogger. His topics are primarily concerned with Caribbean literature and related issues. With regard to his blog, he shared his thoughts: “The blog is going strong, although it’s always tricky on the Internet. Presently, I have about 1,000 hits monthly. That is about 10 times more than at the beginning, although some sites have about 50,000 hits daily – so it is still far from widely read. Nevertheless, I try to update it regularly (on a weekly basis), and to work on its format and so on, to make it more attractive or easier to use... after all, the subject is hardly the most popular in the region, so at least the presentation should be alluring!"

When asked about his motivations, he said: “I keep it for several different reasons, all of them pretty much equal in importance: I enjoy doing the articles for The Daily Herald because they give me an incentive to stay on my toes regarding Caribbean writers, and they also force me to sit down and write from time to time. It’s different to read a book for yourself or to read it with a view of reviewing it for other people to read and, in that respect, the readers of my articles are already there, present in the article, even before they read it, or even if they never do.

CARIBBEAN LITERARY SALON LOGO

“Other than that, the blog helps me to keep track of what I’ve done, what I’ve been doing, and it serves almost like an online portfolio. I often just tell people to have a look at the blog and there they have everything (pretty much) I have published in the last couple of years.” Here is an example of a recent posting on http://caribbeanliterarysalon.ning.com/ regarding the Summer Reading we have featured in WEEKender across the summer of 2011: “I actually prefer stories that are short; 1,000 words is perfect for me. It’s a bite-sized length that allows for pleasant tasting, giving instant satisfaction. Like many folks, I’m usually quite pressed for time. I would like to read more (books, stories) but getting around to doing so is a challenge; which is why I like mine short. 1,000 words is something you can read ‘on the go’ - at the breakfast table, during a lunch break, at a coffee house, etc.” We are quite glad to hear that!

Kobbe continued to comment about his blog: “But I also believe ideas should be free, so I love the fact that anyone can access the content of the blog for free. I always wait until after the publication of the material to post it online, but once it’s out there, I feel it’s nice that people can get the information if they want it, or if they need it.”

We certainly hope to hear from any St. Maarteners that are blogging out there. Send feedback to lisa@thedailyherald.com and perhaps we can feature your blog in a future article. Thanks!

The Spell

2011-08-29T18:22:00.002-04:00

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.

But then, one night, just before his creation was finished – once the keel was ready to go, before it got the first coat of white paint – one night, I tell you, right after midnight, Sharp’s neighbours heard a desperate clamor, a beastly disorder, ensue from his backyard. It was the sleepy plead of the three egg-bearing hens he had snatched from his corral with one quick motion of his huge right arm. Sharp walked that night – distilling a trail of rum, sulphur and hatred that could be sensed for days – towards his place of work, at the end of a private dust road, somewhere in South Hill. When he reached the naked skeleton of his craft, Sharp loosed the suffocating grip his right hand had over the joined necks of the three hens and dropped them half-dead on the floor. Panic-stricken, wounded and almost asphyxiated, the desperate animals barely made an attempt – certainly not an audible one – to save themselves. With a savage, ruthless, motion, Sharp beheaded each of the hens with his own hands, while his poisonous breath uttered a curse of failure to be sealed upon the skull of Bumblebee by the warm sprinkle of innocent blood, by the evil stare of his devilish eyes and by his final sacrifice: eating the raw sculls of his victims.

The fact that the bodies of the three killed hens were only found after the fifth consecutive second place by Bumblebee this year seems to have raised no suspicion. The additional fact that after three months the bodies in question were nowhere near the state of putrefaction you would expect them to be, seems to have confirmed rather than questioned the theory of a black magic ritual.

As things stand, the Bumblebee is in the running for the title this year. Ahead of the Champion of Champions race, the final competition of the season, it sits third in the table, meaning it needs to win, and hope the top two boats fail to finish “in the points,” to complete the triple miracle of turning a donkey boat into a winner, clinching the “Boat of the Year” award with only one win over the season, and, most importantly, chasing the haunting spirits of a hoax spell, a certain obeah, that, so far, has dominated our performance. The stakes are considerable, but no matter what anyone says, no one, not even the crew of the Bumblebee, thinks my boat is a rightful contender to the title today, because Bumblebee kyaan’ win no race, because Bumblebee is forever doomed – destined – to second place.

The Rendezvous

2011-08-22T04:39:00.002-04:00

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.

A drink on the house is a drink you cannot refuse but by dinner-time Nathaniel’s second beer of the day still lingered high up the neck of the bottle. What would you have if you were me? Nathaniel did not touch a thing, not even the cutlery. Take it home. Feed it to your children, your husband, your dog. He had not meant to be patronising, but he did not really care. Three quarters of a beer later, the restaurant was barren, ready to shut. Only one table, by the edge of the deck, remained to be put away. The tall, dark figure of the manager approached Nathaniel, whose eyes, though still wide open, no longer registered anything. Yah wan’ stay dere alnight? Nathaniel might or might not have nodded. See yah in de mahning.

Another day went by and this time Nathaniel was simply regarded as one more piece of furniture. He barely moved; he did not talk at all. No one even offered him a beer. He did not care to ask. The sun, risen from the east, hugged the kerb of the sky until it emerged from behind the structure of the restaurant, began its slow descent into its shelter of water. Nathaniel’s lips harboured two visible wounds, botched up with the clumsy protection of dried up blood and saliva. The maze of bloodshot capillaries that surrounded his pale blue eyes attested to three sleepless nights. The dark rings around his sockets were highlighted by the clashing contrast of the indigo blue with the carmine red of his sunburnt skin.

The sun shone for four and a half hours every day on the particular corner of the deck where Nathaniel Jones had built his nest to wait for Sheila’s love, or rage, or sense, or curiosity to hatch. The sun shone for four hours too long on the particular corner of the deck where Nathaniel Jones’ tender white skin got scorched beyond pain. Only the coat of half grown (over three days) white facial hair disguised the alarmingly bright hue of a complexion that – no matter how long it roasted – would never tan, with innumerable reflections of the sun, mirroring the effect of twinkling ripples in Nathaniel’s Red Sea.

Nathaniel’s throat was dry as a desert; his every breath ached. Every instinctive motion of his larynx to lubricate his windpipe carved a trail of agony in his consciousness. His eyes, even though wide open, could hardly see. His weakened body had resorted to its fat to produce the energy that was not coming from external ailment. Blisters crowded his arms and legs, where the relentless sun had punished him most. His muscles stung; his stomach burned. The sun was setting one more time.

Reds, yellows, blues meant nothing, when the silhouette of his dreams irrupted into an otherwise empty scene. Nathaniel’s delirious mind found no strength to gather. His knees shook, his skin burned, his head whirled. Still waiting? Did she speak? Was it her? Whose, the words I don’t want to transcribe? Whose the face?

We need to talk.

No. Of all the things they might have needed to do, talk was certainly not one of them. Just take me to your place.

The Matriarch

2011-08-17T05:53:00.004-04:00

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.

Under the guidance of Gwendolyn, the Stewarts had expanded their range of influence from their homely quarters in Island Harbour to a wider, more national network around the island: the Stewarts were partners in the Indigenous Bank of Anguilla; the Stewarts were involved in the seriously important business that was the golf course; the Stewarts had sold some land to Government for little money and much favor; the Stewarts had established a link with the people in charge of developing a system of public transport on the island. Throughout this process of expansion, Gwendolyn’s general attitude had remained the same, if accordingly broadened by the process itself. Thus, Gwendolyn’s goodwill – now extended not only to the members of her family but to the friends of her clan – had earned her the nickname of Auntie Gwen. Everybody called Gwendolyn Stewart Auntie Gwen, even people who had not the faintest kinship to her or any other of the Stewarts.

But since the days when Gwendolyn Stewart had first earned the name of Auntie Gwen, her hair had turned grey, her eyes had grown smaller, her cheeks had given way to the load of time; her haughty back had hunched, her perky breasts had sagged, her wide stomach had grown wider. These days, Auntie Gwen’s overloaded knees struggled to hold the weight of her weathered body; these days, Auntie Gwen’s tired ankles clicked and cracked with every step she took, as if giving out a warning of their imminent expiry; these days, Auntie Gwen’s hips refused to turn, complained with every motion of her legs; which meant these days, Auntie Gwen seldom abandoned the reclining chair on the backyard of her house just north-west of Island Harbour, overlooking the sea.

Nevertheless, on this specific day Auntie Gwen had received the surprising and, in plain terms, desperate visit of the youngest daughter of her sister’s son, Tanika Percy. Tiny, little Tanika had spent many a wasteful night mourning in solitude or evading in bad company the wretchedness of her star for not allowing her to get the man of her dreams. However, the ill luck that for so long had pestered her had suddenly disappeared, allowing her to find in the attention of Antwan Richards, fourth son of former Chief Minister Oswald Richards, the tranquillity it so anxiously sought.

On this specific day, Tanika Percy had come to pay tribute to Auntie Gwen, her eternal benefactor, and to ask for her intervention in the minor matter of the deportation of a seemingly indistinct tourist, who in fact was performing an enviable task at ensuring the happiness and stability of her idyllic relationship with Antwan Richards. Because, if Antwan had decanted his attention onto Tanika Percy, it was only because the real prize of the island, Sheila Rawlingson, was too busy spending her time with a certain Nathaniel Jones, a white man who could still be seen in the bars and restaurants of the island, long after his tourist visa had expired. But if Nathaniel Jones were to be kicked out of the island, who was to say what Antwan Richards might decide to do – “a man will be a man always, Auntie Gwen, I ain’ have to tell you dat. But I love me man, and if he go leave me for Sheila, I goin’ go crazy for good, you know.” Gwendolyn Stewart listened attentively to the story, reassured her niece, sent her away with a smile.

A matter as delicate as this could only be resolved with a dose of cunning, so she grabbed the phone, made a few calls, asked a few questions. But Gwendolyn Stewart never spoke to Akira Andrews, before she let the full weight of her colossal body storm into her niece’s office. Auntie Gwen had barely said Afternoon, by the time Akira Andrews dropped the rejection stamp she held in her right hand. “You ain’ even goin’ offer me a seat?” Akira fretted. Her hands flying from side to side, her eyes bulging with nerves, her body moving gracelessly this way and that. “You seen you cousin Tanika lately? She doin’ jus’ fine.” Tanika Percy and Akira Andrews were unrelated, but Auntie Gwen always said ‘If I goin’ be everyone’s aunt, den dey better be all cousins, becausin’ if not the whole world goin’ be upside down.” This time, however, she didn’t say it. In fact, she didn’t even say the name of the white man who was doing a great favor to Tanika Percy. She didn’t have to.

Cold War

2011-08-02T15:22:00.002-04:00

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.

The words that had just been spoken cut through the fumes of the rum, crawled beneath the table, furled between four pairs of legs, rolled along the dust road and ran into the night as a thick cloud of fear and sand. One by one, they spiralled up the trees – the cedar trees, the neem trees, the flamboyant trees – of Stoney Ground road, pleaching their way to the tamarind tree that made corner with Albert Lake’s store. From there they spread to the farthest reaches of the island: eastward, through the narrow aisles at Proctor’s shop, onto the Long Path, overflowing both sides of the road, flooding the fields, waking the goats on their way to Sandy Hill; westwards, through the dense forest of Rey Hill, to the perfect flatness of Wallblake and over the subtle rise of George Hill, enveloping the low houses, filtering through the floorboards, seeping through the roofs, filling the spaces left opened by uneven planks of wood; northwards onto The Valley, seizing the old stone tower of St Mary’s Anglican church, climbing the branches of the centennial oak trees, lighting the gas lamps of the factory, the bakery, the Warden’s house.

Before the end of the night, the swarming presence of words ill-spoken ambushed the thin strip of land that is Sandy Ground: a dense, impenetrable mist approaching over the salt pond from the south; the same cloud closing in from the north, over a sea that was neither deep nor blue. Through window panes and thresholds, railings, nooks and hinges came the words that hidden eyes and ears had witnessed that night.

The break of dawn lingered.

The sun stood still, the sky remained dark and not a single soul in Anguilla stirred. Except for an ill-mouthed man bound by a twist of fate to open his shop slightly earlier than usual. On the parking lot before his storefront he found an old truck and a man more determined, more purposeful, than any rodent he had ever seen. We need to talk – but the shop-owner walked past him without setting eyes on his early visitor.

After I open my shop.

Dat can wait, and this time the intent in his interlocutor’s voice forced him to look: he held a shotgun by the receiver on his right hand and two rounds of shots on his left. One ah these have no name on it, yet – dat one for de man who dare bring fire anywhere near my house. The oder have your initials carved on it already. Eyes locked, lips quivered, drops of sweat ran down temples. Both men saw the dead of night reflected in each other’s pupils.

A dismissive wave of his left arm broke the stale-mate, while the shop-owner opened wide the doors of his business and sent his foe back to you wife and children. An’ don ever show you face ’roun’ here again.

I’ll do dat. But you better pray no fire find my house by accident, you know. For I never yet miss a target wit’ dis shotgun, yet.

Outside, the sun had risen as the men and women of the island got ready to face another day.

Before Candace Bushnell, There Was Jean Rhys

2011-07-28T18:38:00.001-04:00

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.

Born and raised in Roseau, Dominica, Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams was sent to England in 1907, at the age of seventeen. Her father was a Welsh farmer and her mother a Creole lady from the ruling white minority. Consequently, her accent, her lineage, and eventually her own identity were considered exotic – alien, even – both in England and Dominica. This ambivalence certainly shaped her personality, and might have dictated the path taken by her intense, though troubled life. At the same time, it sent her literature on a unique course that resists ready-made categorizations: much in the same way as Rhys’ ethnicity was discussed and questioned in Paris in the years between World Wars, her place in the Western canon has swung periodically from complete oblivion to great recognition, from being labelled British to being considered West Indian.

The problem, of course, is that Jean Rhys the writer, just as much as Jean Rhys the woman, crossed boundaries and legitimately manipulated – absorbed – elements from a wide variety of sources. Thus, her writing is both modern in style and overtly conscious of tradition; and while she is as British as Kafka is Austrian, there remains an inexorable Caribbean vein in her that seeps onto her work, to the point where it not only enhances it, but even defines it. Similar connections could

be made down the line about anything from her personality to her racial background, which was a major issue at the time, and which she described as white, to the extent where you can be certain about it in the New World. Or anywhere else, she might have added.

FORD MADOX FORD

Rhys lived a comfortable life, until the death of her father in 1910 forced her to put an end to her Dramatic Art studies in order to make a living for herself. This she did through a series of jobs – chorus girl, model – not fully approved by the conservative standards of respectability in England. After the Great War she married Jean Lenglet, a Dutch writer with whom she travelled extensively throughout Europe, prior to settling in Paris. Her first literary breakthrough came through her acquaintance of Ford Madox Ford, a poor man’s Ezra Pound, whose Transatlantic Review carried Rhys’s first published piece, the short story “Vienne”, in issue, in 1924. Ford, her friend and literary mentor, would also become her protector, when Lenglet faced a spell in prison. This led to Rhys publishing her first collection in 1927, The Left Bank and Other Stories, which was prefaced by Ford himself and which received positive reviews. Predictably, it also led to a tumultuous affair between Rhys, Ford and his passive wife, which was subsequently chronicled in her first novel, Postures (later re-titled Quartet) and in his novel When the Wicked Men.

Although Quartet eventually made it to the big screen in a solid 1981 production that included Alan Bates and Isabelle Adjani, it remains Rhys’ less accomplished novel. The plot loosely follows her experiences in Paris, where Mado Zelli, the protagonist, finds herself lonely and lost once her husband is jailed for one year. The ensuing drama becomes predictable even to those who know nothing about Rhys’ life, as the story moves forward with some pace but little sophistication. What is worse, the characters corresponding to the figures of Ford and his wife oscillate from the trite to the spiteful, while young, innocent Mado tends to slip into a malleable frame of mind that verges on the pathetic. Consequently, the nuances that so suggestively become evident in the behaviour of Rhys’ later female characters and the expectations that are cast upon them remain largely undisclosed in her treatment of the protagonist of Quartet.

Rhys would never fully detach her fiction from her real-life experiences, and perhaps it is precisely this tight control of a simple plot which allows her to delve into the inner worlds of her protagonists with both insight and finesse. Following Quartet, she published After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1938), the best of her early novels. Subtly shaped with a modernist aesthetic, Rhys adopted a sober kind of stream-of-consciousness style to unify a narrative that shifts between past and present with ease and frequency. Sasha Jansen, a middle aged woman in a crisis, comes to Paris for a two-week break from her dreary life. But in Good Morning, Midnight, Paris is not just a city. Rather, it is a subjective place shaped by the emotions it evokes on Sasha Jansen, who has spent the best and worst of times there. Hence, she thinks, she needs to be careful in her “avoidance of certain cafés, of certain streets, of certain spots” that might trigger negative memories or where she might be remembered for the wrong reasons. [1]

In Good Morning, Midnight Rhys embraces literary modernism emphatically by using an array of contemporary techniques both expertly and maturely. While Paris becomes a central figure in the novel – the co-protagonist, together with Sasha Jansen, one might say – the city is not described in any palpable terms, emerging instead as the foundation of Sasha’s experiences, past and new. Even aesthetic judgements, or statements relating to the weather, depend directly on Sasha’s perspective or location. “I believe it’s a fine day, but the light in this room is so bad you can’t be sure” (pp. 13-4). Consequently, the notions of time and space evinced in the novel gain a measure of relativisation, typical of the Bergsonian spirit of the times. The narrative structure of the novel is disrupted constantly by the thoughts of Sasha Jansen, which regularly lead to phases of her past. While there are specific episodes when these phases work as traditional flashbacks (most notably, although not exclusively, Part Three), the great majority of them are no more than instantaneous transportations to a past moment which dissipate within a sentence. In this sense, past and present interact continuously in a reciprocal relation that not only infuses the present with a certain emotion (happiness, nostalgia), but also affects Sasha’s actions and judgement. Thus, her self-consciousness and her determination to avoid unpleasant situations make her aware of everything and everyone around her, to the point where she sits in a café and feels aggrieved when her eavesdropping lands her on a conversation where someone describes someone else as “la vielle”. Days later, sitting in a different bar and again feeling unwelcome (this is Paris, after all), the connection is made to the prior episode as she wonders whether the girl behind the bar will “say something about me in a voice loud enough for me to hear it?” The girl “says nothing… But she says it all”, in the face of which Sasha remains defiant and gets drunk (p.104).

Yet, in this interaction of past and present it is not only the chronological passage of time which is challenged: at its most extreme, this relation transgresses the boundaries of traditional space. Still sitting at the same café as above, Sasha, three Pernods down the line, sees the road outside walking in through the door to greet her – “Nobody else knows me, but the street knows me.” And when she, in her drunken stupor, affirms that she “won’t walk along that street again”, we cannot assume that she means exclusively the street in her memories (pp. 107-8). After another few drinks, Sasha finally arrives in her hotel room, which is “saturated with the past… It’s all the hotel rooms I’ve ever slept in. All the streets I’ve ever walked in.” (p.109). For Rhys time and space are subjective phenomena perceived by her characters through their senses, not objective realities imposed on the characters above their perception. Consequently, time and space become dependant on the mood and temperament of her characters, to the point where for Sasha “The musty smell, the bugs, the loneliness, this room, which is part of the street outside – this is all I want from life.” (p. 131). The unorthodox integration of indoors and outdoors in a single space in this sentence combines with an emotion (loneliness), a sensation (the musty smell) and an autonomous entity (presumably the bugs exist beyond Sasha’s perception of them) to create one ideal reality, which we can certainly understand, but which remains nonetheless distant from the more traditional sense of the word.

World War II broke out shortly after the publication of Good Morning, Midnight, and Rhys, now in London, disappeared from the public arena. Altogether, critical reception of her books had been positive, but commercially they had not been a great success. She failed to re-emerge after the war, and while protracted silence was not uncommon among intellectuals following the traumatic conflict (Hemingway, for instance, published nothing between 1940 and 1950), it is likely that hers would have been final had it not been for an initiative by the BBC to produce a radio adaptation of Good Morning, Midnight. Secluded in Devon, Rhys must have had to read twice when she saw the newspaper ad looking for her.

And so began the second period of her literary career. Rhys’ most successful novel, and still today her claim to fame, Wide Sargasso Sea, was published in 1966. Widely known as a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, this is a finely balanced work that consciously makes use of Bronte’s text to enhance its appeal, but that is quite capable of standing on its own. Structurally, it is Rhys’ most complex piece and the one that ventures farthest away from the format of the short story. The plot follows the life of Antoinette Cosway, the eldest daughter of a white widow and landowner in Jamaica, shortly after the abolition of slavery. Antoinette’s childhood is marked by the resentment felt by the black population towards her and her family. Her mother is saved from complete despondency when she marries Richard Mason, but things still get worse when their estate is burned down by the locals. Sent to boarding school, things regularise somewhat with the passage of time, until she is of age to marry. Her considerable dowry attracts Edward Rochester, but their relationship collapses even before they leave the West Indies.

While the exact knowledge of Jane Eyre and the manipulation of this tradition adds a fascinating level to Wide Sargasso Sea, the more interesting aspect of the novel corresponds to its exploration of the perspective of the other. In this sense, Rhys’ final novel fittingly closes a circle that started with the flat characterisation of the helpless Mado Zelli in Quartet, forty years earlier. However, in Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys is able to paint a more detailed and more trustworthy portrait of the male companion to her protagonist by adopting a first person narrator that shifts back and forward between Antoinette and Edward, giving the reader an insight into the personality of both characters. This results in a bi-polar situation where the worldviews of Edward and Antoinette stand in direct contraposition to each other. Nevertheless, by carefully describing a setting in which Antoinette has never been accepted, or even comfortable, Rhys sets up a reasonably balanced scenario that favours neither of the players. Extracted from the exigencies of the patriarchal environment where he belongs, Edward finds himself in a context where he can be free. “Here I can do as I like”, they tell each other in one of the rare episodes of mirth they enjoy in the book.[2] But freedom comes at a cost for Edward, who is left without the reasserting background of an approving society: indeed, here he can do as he likes, but only because here he is on his own.

As the narrative continues, the patently differing worlds of Edward and Antoinette become more and more distant, to the point where they become irreconcilable. When Antoinette asks Edward if it is true that England is like a dream, instead of being amused he seems insulted by the question. It transpires that to him what seems like a dream is the West Indies, to which Antoinette asks “But how can rivers and mountains and the sea be unreal” (p. 90). His answer uses the same verbal formula but the content of his thoughts perfectly displays the size of the impasse reached by their contrasting worldviews: “How can millions of people, their houses and their streets be unreal?” Ultimately, their failure to communicate reaches as far as language, as their idiosyncrasies become visible in the names they use to refer to simple things such as a thatched shelter, which he calls a “summer house” (there are no summers in Dominica) and she ajoupa (a patois word)(p. 88). Thus, in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys matches the destinies of two outcasts, of two others, who nonetheless fail to find any common ground to build a shared existence. In the relatively neutral middle ground of Dominica, Antoinette finds tools to fight against Edward, but as soon as the decision is made to return to England Edward assumes the dominant position, to the point where he refers to Antoinette by the name of Bertha, simply because “it’s a name I’m particularly fond of” (p. 135). By then, Antoinette is already doomed to the miserable existence given to Bertha Mason by Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre.

Between 1966 and her death in 1979, Rhys would publish three more collections of short stories and would leave an unfinished manuscript of her memoirs. However, her contribution to world literature was quite complete. In her work, Rhys stated the case not so much of the underdog, as Ford suggested in his preface to The Left Bank, but of the disenfranchised. Naturally, it is no coincidence that the protagonists of her five novels are all female. However, what really brings them together is neither their genitalia nor their sexual inclinations, but rather the hopeless situation in which they find themselves, precisely due to the restrictions set in place by an imposing society. This is a condition that cannot be escaped by the gigolo who picks up Sasha Jansen in Good Morning, Midnight, who “will be up against racial, not sexual characteristics” (p. 157); it is a condition that cannot be escaped by the poor, be that Mado Zelli, or the white girl washing-up the glasses in a coffin of a room in a café in Paris (Good Morning, Midnight, p. 105); it is a condition that cannot be escaped by the West Indian in London – this she knows from experience. Rhys’ critique of society is comprehensive, even if it is not always as effusive about capitalism or racism as it is about patriarchy. And yet, the characters she creates are simultaneously wretched and funny, sad and witty, hurt and harmless. In the construction of these characters, Rhys makes use of Caribbean as well as European elements, combining the crass directness of West Indian speech with the subtle irony of British humour, her knowledge of calypso with her acquaintance with Edwardian etiquette. The result is a remarkably complex world where transgression is the rule – because with every cross-over there is defiance and there is a trade-off. This permeability is precisely what makes Rhys’ work resist labelling and stand out as unique. Ironically, it also makes her seem more current in the fluid world of Post-Modernity than she was in the mid thirties.

[1] Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight: Perennial Library, New York, 1982 (first edition 1938) (p. 15). All further quotes taken from this edition.

[2] Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea: W W Norton & Company, New York – London, 1966 (p. 92). All further quotes will be taken from this edition.

Una Marson: Woman, Fighter, Lover, Writer

2011-07-25T06:51:00.004-04:00

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.

HENRY SWANZY

The rest, as they say, is history: under the guidance of Swanzy, Caribbean Voices discovered, encouraged and promoted an extraordinary generation of West Indian literati who, to this day, dominate the literary scene in the region. Among them were V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, George Lamming, Andrew Salkey, Jan Carew, and I could go on, but this piece is not about them: it is about their predecessor – a rare sample of Jamaican intellect, activism and courage that achieved a reasonable amount of recognition (that is the rare part) within the eminently racist environment of London during the Interwar period.

Born in 1905 in the remote countryside of St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, Marson was a middle-class daughter of a Baptist parson who moved to the big city (Kingston) to look for work. She acted as assistant editor of the Jamaica Critic from 1926-28 and then produced her own magazine, Cosmopolitan from 1928-31. From 1932 to 1945 she spent most of her time in London, with a two-year spell from 1936-38 when the social injustices in London, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and her work, in direct contact with HIM Haile Selassie, plunged her in a profound depression that sent her straight back to Jamaica.

HAILE SELASSIE

Marson was an outspoken activist both in Jamaica and in England, a supporter of Pan-Africanism, a leading member of the Women’s International League, she was the first black woman invited to attend the League of Nations, worked with the British Commonwealth League, was part of the poetry League in Jamaica and helped with the establishment of a Jamaican arm to Save the Children (Jamsave). And yet, her poetry is highly sensitive, often excessively traditionalist and almost always marked by a profound respect for the canon (the British canon, of course), which makes it seem less avant-garde, less audacious than her critical mind might merit.

Perhaps for this very reason she has been a largely forgotten as a literary figure in her own right, and is generally recognized merely for her role in the early development of the BBC’s Caribbean Voices. Until now, that is, because the British publishing house Peepal Tree Press, ever the white knight of Caribbean literature, has just published a new compilation of Una Marson’s poetry through their Caribbean Modern Classics series.

The edition, in the hands of Alison Donnell, comprises works from all four of Marson’s poetry collections, Tropic Reveries (1930), Heights and Depths (1931), The Moth and the Star (1937) and Towards the Stars (1945) as well as previously unpublished material and contributions to the 1933 and 1935 editions of The Keys, the journal of The League of Coloured People. Additionally, it is prefaced by a thorough and erudite introduction by the editor, which gives a detailed account of the writer’s work within the context of her life and times, as well as providing useful information regarding the critical reception of her poetry. The volume is nicely appointed and, bar the obnoxious exception, it is carefully edited. Most importantly, however, it purposely sets out to provide a faithful idea of Marson’s writing, leaving aside the received perception of her work being old-fashioned, sentimentalist or even archaic and confronting the reader with a manageable collection (200-odd pages) of vastly diverse texts, both in terms of tone and subject.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle for the reader to get into this selection is the fact that it is organized chronologically, a pattern that I would generally favor. But not on this occasion, for the simple reason that Marson’s first two collections of poems are far less mature, less accomplished, than The Moth and the Star. Consequently, the opening sections of the book become an effort.

The great majority of poems from Tropic Reveries and Heights and Depths are mainly useful in the context of Marson’s later production: they display an unquestionable devotion towards the lover, often using the trope of the slave and the master or the king (“Renunciation”, p. 44; “Resignation, p. 75); they explore a Wordsworthian setting, leaning on the image of the poet “sitting by the wayside” (The Singing Pilgrim”, p. 58) or laying “in idle mind” (“The Meeting of the Clouds”, p.71); and they seek to fall squarely within the lyrical tradition by using established forms (sonnets, for instance) and purposely unnatural, archaic language.

These two collections of poems were produced by Marson when she was still in Jamaica, before her first emigration, and are powerful evidence to the frame of mind – the intellectual benchmark, as it were – instilled in middle-class Caribbean children by an educational system that was blatantly focused on the administrative center of the Empire (i.e., London) and not on the peripheries where such education was imparted. However, in terms of the pure joy of reading, the Selected Poems becomes much more interesting once we reach the third section of the book, where Marson’s voice gains tremendously.

It is only from The Moth and the Star onwards that Marson-the-activist finds a proper outlet through her own poetry, and this makes her work immensely richer. While “Another Mould,” (from Heights and Depths) makes a gesture in the direction of social activism, demanding, almost 20 years before Andrés Eloy Blanco’s “Angelitos Negros,” to “give me my brown skin cherub” (p. 77), it is only with poems such as “He Called Us Brethren” that the outrage, the full extent of the indignation caused by racial discrimination, actually becomes palpable on the paper.

ANDRÉS ELOY BLANCO

Similarly, “Cinema Eyes” explores the role of mass media in the creation of social criteria which are later unchallenged, and further elaborates on the original notion, rudimentarily expressed in “Another Mould,” of black identity being forged on a different ideal to that of, say, white British identity. Furthermore, Marson becomes sufficiently comfortable with the dialect of her island – perhaps, even, with her own dialect – to introduce it in The Moth and the Star on various occasions, most notably in the “blues” series – a group of four highly musical poems built around various topics, where the archaic forms of her early poetry are replaced by the naturalism of the spoken word.Nevertheless, the reason why Marson’s poetry becomes increasingly more interesting with time is not necessarily because she makes the transition from broad issues, such as love and nature, to specific matters where commitment is required, such as racial politics. On the contrary, I would argue that the most fascinating progression evident in the Selected Poems corresponds precisely to the poet’s appreciation of love: whereas in Tropic Reveries and in Heights and Depths Marson creates a sense of inevitability through the total devotion she professes towards her inconstant lover, the proposition becomes much more ambiguous in The Moth and the Star, to the point where it seems apparent that her love is willfully unrequited, “For love reciprocated dies away” (“Reasoning” p. 120). Thus, the poet’s need is not to be loved “Lest naught be left / In life worth my desire” (“My Need” p. 118).

The subtlety of Marson’s shift, together with a running thread of deep belief, of honest faith that, through God’s will, everything will be fine in the end, makes the reading of her Selected Poems more than worth the while. And, indeed, in order to perceive this shift it is necessary to look at her earlier poetic stance, to retrace the journey of her life alongside her and to take the good with the bad. If you do, however, I assure you in the end the balance will be well on your favor!

Desorden Publico Cast Their Spell on Madrid

2011-07-11T14:11:00.007-04:00

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.

The reason for this uncharacteristic reticence to mingle with the crowd and loiter on the streets, on the sidewalks, on the squares, lies on the fact that I have belatedly learned that one of the most iconic Venezuelan bands of the ’90s, Desorden Público (Public Disorder, in English) has arranged a one-night-only show in Madrid this summer. Today! So, much to my dismay, I have to bypass the potential of an unpredictable evening of spontaneous revelry and spend, instead, a good hour trying to get a ticket online.

Now, at this stage I feel a clarification needs to be made, because Desorden Público is not just any band, nor will this gig be an affair like any other. Or at least so I hope. Hence, a word of context: back in the mid-eighties a new kind of music emerged in the scene. It was a fusion of Latin rhythms – old, forgotten, passé rhythms: cha cha chá, mambo, guaracha, murga – combined with the terse, lean, violent beat of British punk and the exquisite timing of reggae and Jamaican dub, themselves huge influences in the development of British punk in the first place. The result was called Latin ska, and it was an absolute sensation in Latin America.

Latin ska’s most emblematic band was (and still is) called Los Pericos, a septet from Argentina, founded in 1986 and declared Ambassadors of Reggae by Jamaica some years later. As a matter of fact, Argentina was pretty big on Latin ska, with another band, Los Cafres, coming into the scene shortly after Los Pericos, even if they never attained the status of their predecessors. Brasil’s Os Paralamas do Sucesso were probably the first band to experiment with Latin, rock and Caribbean beats, reaching something similar to Latin ska in the early eighties. Paralamas, however, was always more oriented towards the Latin rock tendency.

Meanwhile, Desorden Público, founded in Caracas in 1985, put their money on the fusion wagon, pushing all they way their belief in the Caribbean roots of Venezuelan society. Over the years, the seven-member band has experimented with every conceivable musical modality, from calypso to hard core. Their songs are predominantly in Spanish, although they have a respectable number of English songs in their repertoire, both original and covers – because if there is one thing they are not, it is shy. Their version of “Rudy, A Message to You,” for instance, is, perhaps not a classic, but it certainly is inspiring, and some of their trademark tunes are singular precisely because of their bold – and highly unlikely – mixture of traditional cha cha chá with hard core, for instance, in “Cha cha ska.”

KING CHANGÓ

Indeed, Desorden Público became so popular in Venezuela, and the whole phenomenon was so well received in South America, that by the mid-nineties a new, second generation of Latin ska bands had emerged and made their mark. Among them counted King Changó, an 11-man band with parallel roots in Caracas and New York that combined Afro-Cuban sounds with reggae and ska to reach a similar, but eminently distinctive, beat of their own.

The movement lasted roughly another ten years, but by the mid-naughties most of the bands had slowed down or disappeared altogether. Only Los Pericos managed to keep a respectable level both musically and in terms of their popularity. Meanwhile, after six successful albums, Desorden Público found it hard to cope with failure in the early days of the new millennium, and, like Los Cafres, King Changó and the rest, their production dwindled.

But times, and tastes, are constantly changing, and with the new decade a new-found liking for this funky rhythm has returned to the scene. After five years of silence, Desoren Publico went back to the recording studio this year, launching their tenth production, Los contrarios. To celebrate it, they have organized an ambitious European tour with more than 20 dates over the course of the summer. Madrid is their third stop, following performances in Switzerland and Germany.

More mature than the last time I saw them, Horacio Blanco, the lead singer, has lost some of his unmistakable voice. But what he lacks on that front he certainly makes up on enthusiasm and energy. Indeed, the band’s joy at performing before a responsive audience who can understand what they are told is evident from the first moment. From the first moment, too, the rapport between the crowd – a respectable few hundred that fills the joint without making it too crammed – and the musicians, all of them, is exceptional. And as the night wears on and the effects of the music, of the drinks, of the reunion grab hold of the place, everyone, the band, the crowd, even the organizers, lets go. It is then, when, for an instant, magic can be sensed.

Horacio Blanco, scraping the bottom of his vocal cords, appeals to the shared heritage of his band and the predominantly Venezuelan audience. He asks everyone to lay low on the floor and, in the most autochthonous gesture I have witnessed in my life, he pulls his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans, flips it open, produces a stamp of Dr. José Gregorio Hernández, a revered figure in Venezuelan lore, and, almost voiceless, he utters a familiar blessing. The crowd goes mad, the band plays louder, and no one even notices, any more, that Blanco’s voice can’t be heard. No one even cares. We have all been served, and Desorden Público have certainly remembered why they are back on the stages.

DESORDEN PÚBLICO

By the time I hit the streets of Madrid again I am as voiceless – and breathless – as Horacio Blanco. The Gay Pride parade, as it turns out, is only just beginning. But my night has reached its climax already, and there is no point in trying to better it. I go back home, as usual, before the city’s nightlife is over, but I’m satisfied, I’ve had plenty… and some more.

Andrea Levy: Jamaica in My Mind

2011-06-28T15:57:00.003-04:00

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.

That much is obvious from her third novel, The Fruit of the Lemon (1999), which depicts the conflict of a hard-working, young professional who is suddenly faced with deeply-rooted racist attitudes in London, both within her working environment in the BBC and in the political tension that arises in the neighborhood where she lives. Faith, Levy’s protagonist, falls into a severe bout of depression that sees her travel to Jamaica, the land of her parents, for the first time. As she faces a whole array of new experiences, she comes to learn a great deal about her family story, but she also undergoes a transformation that is, perhaps, more evident to the reader than to herself.

While Levy was long listed for the Orange Prize in 1996 for her second novel, Never Far from Nowhere, her big success would only arrive in 2004, with Small Island. Set in the midst of World War II both in Britain and Jamaica, this novel maps the lives of four people, two couples, who have been paired by chance more than anything else. Ambitious, expansive and, on the whole, engaging, Small Island proved to be immensely popular among readers and critics alike, meriting Levy the Orange, Whitbread and Commonwealth prizes in one year.

Set in London in 1948, the novel depicts in rich detail the circumstances that lead many West Indians, particularly Jamaicans, to leave their islands behind in favor of a new life in England, and provides an insightful look into the conflicts that awaited these emigrants in the less-than-idyllic pastures of post-war Britain. Through the expert manipulation of narrative structure and voices, Levy manages to render a picture that is far more complex, and far more convincing, than the standard victimization commonly found in texts dealing with the question of immigration. Therein, precisely, lies the novel’s greatest achievement, as Levy reproduces the attitudes, but also the motives behind them, of a time that was not only extremely hard, but also utterly different to ours. Because, if bigotry cannot be condoned or even justified, it can, and should, be understood as a rational reaction found in people at large.

Levy’s reproduction of the times is far from flawless, most notably in her characterization of Hortense, a Jamaican teacher whose pride and propriety leads her to a headlong collision against the coarse realities of working-class England, and Bernard, a timid bank clerk whose preconceptions about the social ladder will find him at odds with the changes undergone by society following the end of World War II. Right at the other end of the novel’s spectrum stand Gilbert, an uneducated but hard-working Jamaican for whom his island has become too small, and Queenie, a beautiful peasant whose life is turned upside down by her aunt’s determination to bring her to the city and give her the chance to “improve herself.” And yet, even though at times Hortense’s character feels more like a caricature, and even if it seems implausible that Bertrand’s profound racism could be overturned merely by the smile of his wife’s newborn baby, a mixed-race child who is clearly not his, Small Island still opens avenues of reinterpretation and understanding about some of the most important issues in the forging of modern British society –and it does so in an entertaining and dynamic fashion.

In 2010, after a six-year break, Andrea Levy published her latest novel, The Long Song, in which she takes the question of her Jamaican heritage all the way back to the days of plantations and slavery. Set in 1898, the novel is purportedly an account by an octogenarian woman about the things she saw when she was a young woman at the Amity plantation, during the years immediately prior to and after manumission. Framed, and often interrupted, by a narrative device that conveys to the reader the struggles of the narrator –July, the old woman– with her editor and publisher, who is also her son, The Long Song is far more assertive and more self-confident in its voice than Levy’s previous novels. Indeed, at various points the narrator challenges the reader to close the book and stop reading, as she refuses to delve into, for instance, the gory details of the Baptist War. While this experiment is perhaps the least successful aspect of Levy’s novel, it proves a useful and cunning strategy when we learn that the narrator and the protagonist of the novel are one and the same person. The problem, however, is that at times the reader might have difficulties to find much interest in July’s story –particularly in the opening section of the novel.

Much like in Small Island, Levy firmly grabs hold of the reader when the intricacies of a general conflict (WWII in the former, the Baptist War in The Long Song) affect directly and specifically the lives of individuals. Thus, as the reverie of the rebellion overtakes the servants at Amity plantation and the ruthless aftermath drives even the master of the estate to despair, that is when the reader becomes engrossed in a tale that no longer will allow to be put down. Yet, if it is true that Levy’s last two novels share their strength, they also come short in similar aspects, as a number of central figures in The Long Song come too close to the caricatural. It is the case, most notably, with the overseer of the plantation, Robert Goodwin, the son of a Baptist Minister who comes with lofty ideals about liberty and equality to the Caribbean, only to see circumstances change his mind in dramatic fashion.

Long listed for the Booker Prize in 2010 and winner of the 2011 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, The Long Song is more compact than Small Island, even if it spans 80 years of history. But the history with which it is concerned is more remote, and perhaps Levy felt less obliged to look at the situation from every angle at once, and therefore the novel reads more smoothly, more naturally, than her previous work. Which is not to say that every angle will not be covered in the future, because the ending to The Long Song invites us to speculate that a second volume will follow, to provide us with a British perspective on the same subject. Let’s just hope it does not take her another six years to write it!

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

2011-05-30T14:51:00.004-04:00

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.

Written in lyrical prose and segmented into short, self-contained episodes, Platero and I (1914), became an instant success and cemented Juan Ramón Jiménez’s reputation in his country. The collection is usually regarded as a children’s book, or a storybook for children, primarily because it was first published by La Lectura as part of its “Youth Library”, and because, at the time, Jiménez wrote a short prologue that hinted in that direction. The fact, however, is that he wrote this highly sensitive text between 1911 and 1913, just before departing Moguer (again) for the cosmopolitan surroundings of Madrid, during a period of pseudo-reclusion and nostalgia in which he sought the Moguer of his childhood in his peaceful interaction with nature and his donkey (Platero). For the modern reader, Platero and I might seem excessively laden with conceit and somewhat naive in its idealization of nature. Nevertheless, as recently as 1956, the Swedish Academy, which normally awards the Nobel Prize for the complete oeuvre of a writer, singled out the collection as Jiménez’s outstanding achievement. And even before receiving the Academy’s recognition, Platero and I had been translated into a variety of languages and had sold close to a million copies.

In 1915 Jiménez met Zenobia Camprubí, who would become his wife the following year. A blend of Puerto Rican with Catalan, Zenobia linked Juan Ramón for the first time with America, taking him to New York for their wedding and their honeymoon. Between 1916 and 1936 the Jiménezes lived in Madrid, among a close-knit circle of disciples of his (many of them part of the Genaración del 27), who continued to produce new material and conceived the idea of compiling his entire works into a series of several volumes. The project changed shapes repeatedly and he was in the middle of restructuring it when the War broke in Spain, in 1936. Having pledged his allegiance to the Republican cause, he requested a diplomatic passport to travel to Puerto Rico, in order to fulfill previously arranged contractual obligations. Juan Ramón Jiménez left Spain on August 22, 1936, never to go back. At 55 years of age, he was forced by circumstances to rebuild his life.

ZENOBIA AND JUAN RAMÓN

That is where the Caribbean plays its central role in his life. He arrived in Puerto Rico in 1936, gave out several lectures and planned to publish anthologies of his work. But he could not find the necessary presses to carry out the work, so he soon moved to Cuba. There, he was the cornerstone of the literary establishment for three years, and he likely would have stayed in the island a lot longer, had the War not favored the fascist faction. Afraid that his diplomatic passport might be revoked and he forced to go back to Franco’s Spain, Zenobia and Juan Ramón fled again, this time to the United States, where Zenobia had relations.

There followed four fruitful years in Coral Gables, where Juan Ramón wrote his famous Romances de Coral Gables (written in 1943, published in 1948) before heading north, to Washington, first, then Riverdale, Maryland, where both he and Zenobia taught at the university. But his health had been deteriorating all through his life in exile, and while he became more and more recognized across South America, serious bouts of depression often landed him at the hospital in Miami, in Maryland, in Washington. His poetry became more transcendental and much of his time was devoted to the completion of his collected works.

In November 1950, the couple moved to Puerto Rico permanently. Zenobia began teaching at the university and Juan Ramón saw his health improve slowly. But Zenobia was diagnosed with cancer a year later and had to undergo surgery. The last five years of her life she spent battling the illness, while Juan Ramón, now permanently interned in a sanatorium, came in and out of a chronic depression, working only at times. He imparted several seminars at the university of San Juan and continued to produce new material until 1954, when the couple donated all their books to the library of the University of San Juan. The Nobel Prize came in 1956, just a few days before his beloved wife passed away. He did not attend the ceremony.

Today the Sala Zenobia y Juan Ramón Jiménez at the University of San Juan remains one of the most impressive research centers in the region. A kind tribute to the life and gift of the troubled couple who, unable to stay at home, chose the islands as the place to live the rest of their lives.

The Nine Lives of Ernesto Sábato

2011-05-14T07:15:00.008-04:00

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).

JUAN DOMINGO PERÓN

Meanwhile, the political environment in the traditionally unstable Argentina made things harder, with the coup of 1943, the ostensible neutrality of the country during WWII, and Perón’s final ascension to power in 1946. Seen in the context of a cataclysmic World War, of the havoc that reigned in Argentina, of the internal conflict that ultimately pointed Sábato, in his thirties, in the direction of literature, it is hardly surprising that his first novel, The Tunnel (1948), is not an uplifting or lighthearted affair. Rather it is a psychological novel structured in the fashion of classic crime fiction, where the protagonist allows the reader to look into the transformation of his inner self, while the desire to commit a murder grows inside him until it becomes irrepressible.

He would not publish his second novel, Of Heroes and Tombs (1961), for another 14 years – and they were 14 turbulent years at that: Peron’s “revolution” had gained widespread popularity among Argentina’s poorer quarters, until his second term as president was cut short by yet another coup, in 1955. Always an antagonist of Peron’s, Sabato was appointed by the leaders of the Revolución Libertadora as editor of the magazine Mundo Argentino.

SÁBATO IN MUNDO ARGENTINO, 1955

In an eerie prelude to what would befall decades later, Sábato remained anti-Peron but also turned against the military government when he discovered the details of the atrocities committed during the overthrow of Peron’s government. Fittingly, On Heroes and Tombs depicts a grim and decadent picture of Argentinean society at large, and it includes the famous “Report on the Blind,” quite possibly the most disturbing episode in Latin American fiction.

The fact that Sábato includes himself among the blind in his third and final novel, Angel of Darkness (1974) is a testament to the extent of his conflict. More autobiographical and less traditional in its structure, Angel of Darkness fails to reach the heights of his previous two novels. Nevertheless, the pessimistic vein that runs through all his work gains relevance when it is seen through the prism of Sábato’s life, whose darkest episode still lay in the future. I refer to the position he was asked to assume following the overthrow of Argentina’s ruthless military dictatorship, which ruled the country from 1976-1983. Sábato was asked to lead the National Commission for Disappeared Persons, which investigated the crimes against human rights committed by the regime. He described it as his “descent into hell,” one degree deeper into despair with each of the 8960 victims identified in the final report, published in 1984 and commonly known as El informe Sábato.

NUNCA MÁS, OR EL INFORME SÁBATO

From that point forward, Sábato received one recognition after the next, beginning with the Premio Cervantes, the highest literary award in Spanish language, awarded to him in 1984. He was a candidate to the Nobel Prize on several occasions, most recently in 2009, and he was officially recognized by over a dozen countries in America and Europe, from Germany and France to Argentina. His report about the dictatorship, however, earned him much suspicion among his fellow Argentineans. Most importantly, I suspect, it marked the end of his life – he was nearly 75 years old when he published the report – with an intense sense of the tragedy and sadness that, uncannily, had already haunted him from his youth. The final years of his life were spent in the darkness he so much feared – he became totally blind in the early 2000s – unable to write or even to paint, due to his fragile health. What remains of his literary production is only that which was saved from his destructive instincts by his prudent wife, Matilde Richter. Now, years too late, he often complained, this all too troubled genius can finally rest in peace, and as I re-examine the extent of his legacy, the only words that come to my mind, time and time again, are “Thank you, Ernesto. Thank you.”

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

2011-04-28T07:17:00.003-04:00

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.

Like most Caribbean literature of the past half-century, or so, Brathwaite’s poetry deals with exile and the question of identity. It is the latter which becomes the central issue of his concern, and the cunning, challenging conclusions he reaches are what make his poetry both unique and indispensable. From his first poetry trilogy, The Arrivants (1973) (incorporating Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968) and Islands (1969)) to his latest collection of poems Born to Slow Horses (2005), Brathwaite consistently embarks on the exploration of familiar subjects from an idiosyncratic perspective to develop new concepts that can appropriately map the nature of Caribbean culture – of Caribbean-ness. In this sense, Brathwaite’s efforts share a common purpose with Glissant’s formulation of the notion of “creolité”, a word he uses to denote the set of characteristics that shape Caribbean societies where African and European traditions permeate a reality that is unlike either of the two. Brathwaite’s poetry alone gives us enough indications to believe that, loosely speaking, he would endorse such statement, and even in a gesture as symbolical as the adoption of an African name and the permanence of his Western surname, we could read a conciliatory attitude of the kind eked above.

Nevertheless, I would venture to assert that a dialectic interpretation of Brathwaite’s notion of Caribbeanness, whereby Caribbean culture might be understood as a hodge-podge of “original” traditions which combine to create a third, somewhat contaminated, culture would be completely off the mark. Brathwaite’s literature is highly experimental, and, as with all such kind of writing, the result is often less important than the process necessary to get there. In this respect, Brathwaite in concerned in all his oeuvre with questions that he views as fundamental to a shared Caribbean experience. Among those issues count the idea of a “nation language,” a language quite distinct from English, which follows different rules of enunciation (rules that are inflected, one would suppose, by African languages, rather than by English) and that forms the basic foundation of the different versions (dialects) spoken throughout the English-speaking (although this name is incompatible with Brathwaite’s argument) Caribbean. Examples of Brathwaite collapsing, integrating or phonetically spelling words abound in all his poetry, but what becomes striking is that this is not the exclusive form he chooses to give his work. Consequently, one is forced to believe that the distinction he makes between English and “nation language” when choosing how to write his poems bears a conceptual relevance that goes beyond the aesthetic, that entails more than just a tribute to the layman’s form of expression.

Because Brathwaite claims through his poetry that orality – speech – is king. Also this is a notion that emerges time and time again in his work – not only in his different poems, but in his continuous reproductions – iterations – of his older poems, each time slightly modified to convey different meanings, or perhaps to best convey their original meanings – if such thing exists. For instance, in 1992 Brathwaite published a selection of poems, mostly from his first two trilogies, The Arrivants (1972) and Other Exiles (1975), except at this stage he had discovered the advantages of working on a computer. This led to the development of his “Syncorax video style” texts, which is another way of describing the usage of various font styles and sizes throughout the book. The changes occur both within a poem and from poem to poem and the spectacular graphic effect lends itself to being discarded as an aesthetic caprice, or an ode to the wonders of technology. Upon second scrutiny, however, it becomes evident that the graphic innovations are, in fact, included to highlight, to reproduce, the natural emphasis and modulation that pertain to Caribbean speech.

MARINETTI'S FUTURIST POETRY JOURNAL, ZANG TUMB TUMB (1912)

A quick flick through Middle Passages leaves you with the impression that Kamau Brathwaite discovered in the early nineties the art of early European modernists, the Futurist treatises of Marinetti or the Vorticist manifestos of Wyndham Lewis. But soon it becomes obvious that Brathwaite attempts to elevate the status of intonation, from an accident dependent on the person who speaks, to an essential quality that belongs to a “nation language” that no longer is viewed as inferior (“pigeon”) to English. It turns out that the “Syncorax video style” simultaneously exposes the deficiencies of traditional Western typescript to fully express Caribbean speech, and the essential differences between English and such “nation language.”

Finally, Brathwaite’s poetry is deeply concerned with the development of rhythm in his verses. In this sense he shares a fascination for blues with the influential American poet, Amiri Baraka. But blues is just one of the influences that shape his work, with African and Caribbean sounds clearly dominant in his cadences. And yet, while musicality is sometimes almost forced into the reader through pauses and repetitions that do not bear to be read in any other way, sometimes the same pauses and repetitions create a stuttering sensation that burdens the reader with anxiety until the moment when the content is finally released. There are numberless examples of both instances, but just to illustrate I submit the final three verses of the poem “Bread”, included in the collection Words Need Love Too (House of Nehesi Publishers, Sint Maarten, 2000):

rolled into night into night w/out morning

rolled into dead into dead w/out vision

rolled into life into life w/out dream

Despite the fact that there is no punctuation in these verses, and a very subtle version of the “nation language” is used in the construction of “dead”, the musicality of the whole is such that it would be difficult not to read this with an even, neutral tone. Compare these lines from the poem “Stone”, included in Middle Passages (Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1992):

like she up. side down up a tree like she was scream.

like she was scream. like she was scream. ing no & no.

body i could hear could hear a word i say. ing. . even though

there were so many poems left & the tape was switched on &

The poem is highly emotional, and the sentiment transpires through (I am tempted to say even “despite”) the pauses; however, I would be interested to know how many people got a clear picture of the situation after one silent reading of the stanza. Not many, would be my guess.

GLISSANT'S CARIBBEAN DISCOURSE (1981)

I will not venture to provide an appraisal of the reasons why Brathwaite might be inclined to make the reading of some (sections of some of) his poems so difficult. Nevertheless, in the light of what I have discussed so far I will suggest that part of his motivation might be related to the notion of the (Caribbean) poem as an oral form of expression, which ought to be spoken, not written. If, for Brathwaite, “nation language” is a defining and common characteristic of Caribbean people, and the intonation of such language is part of its essence, then it would be natural for him to expect his readers to read out loud – to perform – the poems he writes. Nevertheless, the experience of a reader who is first confronted with the pauses and repetitions that build the cadence of Brathwaite’s poems must, perforce, include a sequence of readings and re-readings until the right rhythm is found. Consequently, in the rehearsal of the performance of Brathwaite’s poems, the reader is forced to go through the same lines several times, thus enacting the stammering, the inability to read out loud what he is meant to speak, that shapes the form of the actual poems. Pause and repetition become, then, active elements in the communication – in the stressing – of the final message.

Brathwaite is all but an easy poet to read. After all, he is an intellectual mind of the highest caliber who has been celebrated repeatedly in the region for his achievements both in terms of his poetry and his non-fictional work. That he has not achieved the praise or reputation of other members of his generation in the Western world is nothing short of an indictment on the criteria of the academies. This, remains so quite independently of the final valuation of his critical ideas. Whether there really is one “nation language” underlying the speech of the myriad peoples of the Caribbean, and whether the performance of this language really is an essential characteristic that binds in concrete terms cultures that at times seem so distant from each other are questions that can only be answered (if at all) once the sizeable material put forward by Brathwaite is carefully studied. By the end of it, you might not agree – but, I guarantee you, you will respect the mind that came up with the idea.

Eugenio Montejo: Chronicler of Time, Admirer of the Moment

2011-04-28T07:17:00.002-04:00

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.

[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.

Saint George and the Legend of the Great Martyr

2011-04-28T07:07:00.006-04:00

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

St. George might not be as popular as, say, St. Patrick or St. Nicholas, but on April 23 plenty of people will be drinking to his health in the bars and pubs of England and, well, I guess Georgia. Meanwhile, in Catalonia people will exchange precious books with their loved ones – because these days the feast of St. Jordi (George in Catalan) is synonymous with an invasion of book sellers who take over every corner of the city and organize a spontaneous book fair. Not that St. George and books are that closely related by anything other than chance, given that UNESCO decided to make April 23 the World Book Day, commemorating the date of the death of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare.

Now, it might seem like two of the greatest writers known to the Western world passing away on the same day (April 23, 1616) is as tragic as it can possibly get, but the fact is that things will get a whole lot worse once we look into the story of St. George. Because he might not have been a particularly talented man of letters – after all, he was a soldier – but he certainly was a literary figure, whose legend, kept for the ages in medieval manuscripts, will provide us with the link between the Great Martyr and the International Day of the Book.

The most popular tradition, fostered for centuries and still very much alive in our common consciousness, has George featuring as a chosen figure who faces superlative danger and who, through the grace of God, overcomes it. Like David, George encounters in the dragon a creature of superior strength that terrorizes the inhabitants of a nearby township. Unlike David, George needs not recur to craftiness to surmount the evil he faces in the shape of the dragon but, rather, to his own courage which, aided by the delicacy of the princess he is set to save and, of course, by the favour of the Lord, allows him to defeat the devilish powers he confronts.

Nevertheless, there is an older, more deeply rooted legend relating to St. George, which, in all its complexity and unlikelihood, hides a richer legacy than the somewhat exhausted myth of the sequestered lady and the abducting dragon. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, George features as a Cappadocian soldier whose devotion to Christianity leads him to the most gruesome of punishments: persecuted for his faith by Dacian, king of the Persians (or, depending on the version, Diocletian, Emperor of the Romans), George is imprisoned for seven years. In their efforts to force George to admit to the falsehood of the Christian religion he is submitted to the cruellest forms of torture, which include stretching him on a rack; flogging him with hooks that, quite literally, shred him to pieces; inserting him in a coffin fixed with strategically positioned nails; impaling him; and, finally, boiling him.

Inexplicably, George survives this ordeal and is comforted by Christ who reassures him with the news that he will die three times before he is admitted to Heaven. Subsequently George outlives poisoning, withstands lacerations under a wheel of swords, suffers dismemberment and is thrown into a well. God proceeds to resurrect George, who is then tied to a bed while lead is poured into his mouth, followed by the hammering of nails into his head before the hanging of his body, upside down and with a stone tied to his neck, over a live fire. Despite all this, George will not die, so he is cut in two halves from head to toe, boiled to his bones and buried at last. But five days later George defeats death one more time, triggering the amazement of Dacian/Diocletian, who invites him to sojourn in his palace as a guest and to engage in conversation.

Following an extended debate, George looks persuaded to acknowledge the pagan faith but this is just a trick to convert Dacian’s/Diocletian’s wife, who is therefore instantly executed. George is again sentenced to death, this time simply by decapitation, which he duly suffers, surrendering his life for good.

If this legend appears unnecessarily bloodthirsty and, indeed, implausible, it also renders us with a George whose character is as helpless as it is obstinate. Equipped with little more than the confidence provided by his faith, his obliviousness to common sense becomes akin to Abraham’s irrational obedience. Nevertheless, given the invincibility of such faith, George is as effective in his ultimate goal (to spread the word of God) as he would be were he empowered with, say, lethal weaponry. Indeed, at every turn (miracle) of this tale, handfuls of heathens convert to Christianity thanks to the example of George; and if the outcome of such conversion is fatal (each group of self-proclaimed believers in Christ is faced with summary execution), the hope for eternal salvation is accompanied by the comfort that in this early depiction of the Christian martyr cruelty is reserved to the pagans.

However, what remains the most extraordinary aspect of this myth is the wealth of narrative elements it displays – elements that, if you can forgive the nature of its cyclical structure (repeated thrice) and you can ignore the naivety of its factual disregard, allow the audience to dive into an ocean of meanings and contexts that make the reading experience infinitely more exciting. As it turns out, there might be more to George and books than a mere coincidence!