Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

How do we give a voice to those on the margins? We must, first, find their voice – for every human has a voice. We can wander into their world, into shops or up into high-rise flats, to listen out for conversation. Yet, what if we are talking of the furthest margins - those who are so isolated and harried as to barely have conversation?

Aime Cesaire, black poet and politician, died in Martinique’s capital Fort-de-France on April 17 2008, far from his ancestral lands, and as a long-serving mayor of his adopted city.  There were petitions for him to be shipped back to France and buried in the company of great French poets and literary figures there.

Seeing, Hearing and the Value of Caribbean Film Festivals

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This familiar question puts a spotlight on human perception; it underscores sensory and mental faculties. To hear is to perceive via the human ear. And, sound is defined as those vibrations that make impressions on the human ear and are perceived or interpreted in the mind. Does that tree, then, really make a sound?

When we think of the future, it is natural to contemplate our youth, whether past or present. One of my greatest accomplishments during my pre-adolescent years was my starring role in a dance performance at my elementary or primary school (as we say in Jamaica) when I was 8 years old. I remember now, 19 years later, the final rehearsal… pacing the steps, feeling the hot concrete on my bare feet, as I wore my big sister’s long, blue nightgown as my costume. The dance was choreographed in the spirit of a revivalist experience. It was an exciting time for me – head wrapped with a colourful scarf, anchored by two No.2 pencils on either temple. The tricky part about this last rehearsal was that I would not do the final, most electrifying segment of the Pocomania-flavoured piece on the burning, concrete, open-air platform.

This conversation took place in Bridgetown, Barbados, during the 2010 Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA), 25-31 may 2010. M. NourbeSe Philip was born in Tobago, but has lived most of her life in Canada. Her path towards writing has gone through both her Politics and Law degrees, followed by several years practicing the profession of lawyer. Perhaps it was the easiness of her rhetoric, facilitated by this first career, that led M. NourbeSe Philip to approach creative writing with a sense of the oral  ‘root’ of the written word.

A Word on the Work:
I wrote this piece one morning after taking a taxi from Spanish Town to Kingston en route to the University of the West Indies. I don’t normally take public transportation so the experience was very shocking and disturbing. Jamaicans have a saying, made popular by Louise Bennett-Coverley. The saying is “tek kin teet kibba haat bun” which literally means “use your smile to conceal your heartache”.

Recently, I was reading Jeremy Taylor’s review of Conversations with Caryl Phillips (ed. by Renée Shatteman), a compendium of nineteen interviews with the Kittitian-born, British writer, where, according to Taylor, we learn all kinds of details about the author. Among them, the revelation that Phillips “doesn’t see himself as part of a Caribbean literary tradition; in fact, he hardly thinks there is one.”

Sea, the beach, Bob Marley, sun, chillout, hash, Fidel Castro, Rastafari, Haiti, hot, cool… This is just a short list of the answers people gave me when I asked them what was the first thing that came to their minds when I said the word “Caribbean”. One even came up with “ackee and saltfish”. But no one, not a single one, said literature. Not even “Derek Walcott”, or “Aimé Césaire”. Nothing.

The celebrations of the Day of the Dead in Mexico, Carnival in Rio, Oruro and Trinidad, San Juan in Venezuela, Christmas anywhere – each with their own style and identity – are some of the major festivities in the Americas.
The Fiesta in Latin America is an institution.  For Xavier Albó, a Bolivian culture researcher, the fiesta is a fundamental time in the lives of individuals and communities due to their diversity, the richness in its symbols, the amounts of people they attract and the power of their climax.

Can literature travel? And if so, does literature’s travelling transform its significance, function and indeed the pleasure of reading?

This is an important question that contains further questions, fascinating to me and to a great extent still unanswered.

So, I will break it into three smaller and more manageable themes: the act of writing literature, the politics that informs the division of literature and Humanities in general, and finally the material aspect of literature, by which I mean the actual material existence of ‘books’ as objects in space.