A Review by CAROLE BOYCE DAVIES

Letters to Ailan 
by Wendy Fitzwilliam. 
Trinidad and Tobago: Lexicon Books, 2009
 
This is a cleverly written book because it employs a series of signifying practices in order to communicate the story of a young Trinidadian woman who has touched international celebrity status, dealt with it elegantly, and returned home to life and work in her home country. 
Letters to Ailan uses the classic epistolary form, of writing letters to or on a subject which, in the end, is read cumulatively and becomes a complete narrative.  The epistolary form as used here also navigates the art of journal-writing as the writer indicates that she had kept a journal of her experience consistently.  These journal entries become the documented content that serve as the source of what becomes a connected, though episodic narrative. We learn that during his mother’s journal writing process Ailan is a gestating baby and then a beautiful healthy little boy.  So, the letters are written to him retrospectively about his birth and becoming. 
By the time of publication he is on his way to his third birthday.  One assumes then that while he is the subject of the address, he will read this book at some distant time in his adult future as a way of interpreting his life and his formative experiences. But in reality, since the book is published in the present time and not kept in a private vault for him, the subjects of address are multiple and varied: they include his mother’s immediate family,  the Trinidad and Tobago national public,  his recalcitrant Jamaican father,  the Catholic church,  and even the larger international community of women and men who feel pride at this young black woman’s success or concern about her choices. Each of these categories comes in for some direct challenge on issues ranging from sexuality and un/faithfulness to hypocrisy and love and caring, but through it all,  the importance of dignity and elegance.
Still, as one reads Letters to Ailan, one laments at how one of Trinidad’s beautiful gems, its international beauty queen as charming as the iconic humming bird, could be entrapped so easily.  This is perhaps what has driven some of the critiques that the author describes from the local media and public.  As a mother myself and witnessing Wendy’s beauty and success, I imagined for her a famous athlete or actor or a classy Obama-level politician as the type that someone like this, our Miss Universe, would attract.  Having met his sister Beth professionally, and learning that her brother was having a baby with our Miss Universe, I expected a man of much more elegance.  The picture painted in this book and the photographs reveal the opposite.  For he comes across instead as someone who gets joy, it seems, in snagging beauty queens,  knowing how to charm and get to them but also  how to misuse and discard them.  Having previously been married to a Miss World he is automatically suspect.  And further having fought her tooth and nail for custody of his son, he knows exactly which buttons to push to get at the vulnerabilities of beautiful young women. 
In the end, even our forgiving writer recognizes this as in disgust she says finally as she catches his ambivalent relationship to her in a beautiful  lines of summation:  “He seems to want to break my spirit, my joy.  Sometimes he loves and admires me, sometimes he is spiteful and seems determined to purposely hurt me.” (240)  Thus her response is understandable:  “I walk away, seething with rage due to his total lack of understanding as to why his actions are intolerable.  Unsure of how I will react next, I walk away.” But it doesn’t end there as he annoyingly follows her and we are happy to see our Wendy fight back:  “I hit him repeatedly, I kick him. I stop just short of spitting on him. This man who worked so assiduously to gain my trust and respect has now degenerated into the base, spiteful human being in my eyes.” (248). 
One wonders what emotions would be raised in a son who reads these lines.  How would a son read this which, one imagines, is clearly written for us in the present as a bit of a cautionary tale to other young women, i.e. not so much for the son.  But I imagine that even the son as an adult may not find this a pleasant detailing of his father.
This is lifestory writing at its finest:  a revelation of the self even its most vulnerable with all its  privately personal dimensions,  linked with the political.  The personal details are sensibly selected, reflective, deeply private - down to identifying the denial of sexual intimacy which becomes part of his dysfunction.  So as one reads, one can see ahead of the writer how this is going to end.  The writer sympathizes with Panton for too long, it seems, as he struggles with his wife for custody of his first son.  It becomes ironic for it seems he is capable of doing the same thing to her and it almost happens at one point.  In the end then, one gets a sense that it may be better if the two women  (Miss World and Miss Universe) were to become friends and exorcise this manipulative man from their lives.
The political details have to do with the nature of personal choices and sexuality for the contemporary young woman:  the choice to have an enjoyable sex life, the choice to be a mother when one is ready -with or without full male support- and particularly if one has the professional means to do so; the choices of a public figure to live a personal life.  While the personal is political has been a mantra of the women’s movement,  Wendy’s choices  in many ways benefitted from an already existing and certain black feminist understanding of  women’s need for independence but also the fact that often they have no choice but to be independent.  The narrative we get indicates that this was a position that some women of  every generation (including her own grandmother)  also engaged successfully.  Being a woman who raised a child without a present male partner, though with love and support of the extended family, is not an unusual phenomenon historically in the Caribbean; it is also now one accepted family form in the rest of the world.  The important and contemporary advancement of the narrative is that Wendy had already qualified as a lawyer and had become a professional woman before all of these so-called transgressions. 
The more difficult challenges have to do with family responses, all based on their care and love for her.  Worst in my estimation is the more public dressing down from the Catholic hierarchy.  One wonders then how people are able to stay in a church context like that which publicly humiliates without any care for the feelings of the individual…a seemingly very unchristian approach to this situation.  Did not the Virgin Mary, experience something similar?  Wendy clarifies this situation for herself and in her way as not having human frailties interfere with her own faith and belief in God and love and care for her child. She sings and communicates love for her baby consistently.  She continues to enjoy the things she loves like Carnival and a good fete and high fashion and above all her body.  She is also clear that many offer a hypocritical stance, condoning behaviors which can be read as always problematic when dissected, all the while maintaining public self-presentations that convey the opposite.
What is finally significant is that the author has taken back her power by writing her own self into history.  All of the theoretical studies on women’s lifestories indicate that women who do not write their story are consigned to the fictions of others.  By writing then, Wendy claims her authority over the subject matter, over the public discourse and indeed her life.  She absolutely luxuriates in her pregnancy and shows us beautiful and sensual photographs of herself and family along the way.  One leaves with the breathtaking photograph at the book’s close of a mother with child, Madonna style.  We see also a woman who has been tested come out on the side of elegance and maturity as the beautiful young girl seemingly becomes a woman before our eyes as we read and engage the meaning of this narrative.  Letters to Ailan is destined to be a Caribbean classic of a young woman’s coming of age,  a must read for those interested in contemporary questions of Caribbean sexuality, a very Caribbean story told from the point of view of one who is confident in the telling as in her beautiful self.

*Carole Boyce Davies is Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University in the USA

BREAKING THROUGH THE STASIS

A Review By RAWLE GIBBONS

The following review was presented at the book launch at the Normandie Hotel on  August 20, 2010

Policing the Transnational:
Cultural Policy Development in the Anglophone Caribbean (1962 – 2008)
Suzanne Burke
Lambert Academic Publishing, Berlin, 2010
“You think they could go the States and say we got oil? You mad, oh me laad,
Texas have more oil more than Trinidad, oh laad,
So why neglect your culture? You making me feel sad, oh me laad
Calypso and steelband are the culture of Trinidad.
I cyah understand/Every week they sending away delegation
To talk bout what i ain’t know/Tell why they getting on so
They wouldn’t say they promoting steelband/or even send two or three calypsonians
But gone to other country/ And anything we say, they have twice time more than we.
You think they could go into Cuba and say we got sugar? You mad, oh me laad
Cuba have more sugar than Trinidad, oh laad
So why neglect your culture? You making me feel sad, oh me laad
Calypso and steelband are the culture of Trinidad.”
  (Sonny Francois:
‘Culture of Trinidad’, 1965)

This was Mighty Power’s critique of the economic development model pursued by Trinidad and Tobago in the early years of nationhood. Almost half a century later, with, arguably, fewer natural resources and increasingly globalized market forces, the nation may be disposed now to listen to Power’s exhortation. ‘Culture’ may yet prove the golden egg in the region’s survival basket in this 21st century.
Dr. Suzanne Burke certainly thinks so. Her newly published book, ‘Policing the Transnational: Cultural Policy Development in the Anglophone Caribbean (1962 – 2008)’ confronts the questions: What is culture policy? What does it mean for the Caribbean? What is the Caribbean? How can a policy be shaped for the benefit of all stake-holders? In so doing she fills a chasm in the literature/information available to the region’s practitioners, policy-makers and others involved in the practice, transmission and development of arts and the creative industries.
The fundamental argument Dr. Burke advances is that culture policy development in the Caribbean is in a situation of ‘stasis’. This is so because traditionally, a) governments have been lackadaisical about culture policy; b) action in the culture sector tends to be ‘catalysed by factors external to the region’ (p.19); c) there has been little/only slow recognition of the economic value of culture; d) Caribbean policy concerns are ‘nationcentric’ and so fail to come to terms with the transnational nature of Caribbean existence. These factors are complicated by contemporary global challenges: ‘The forces of globalization, trade liberalization, rapid technological change and the convergence of telecommunication media…’ in addition to ‘the expanded role of international trade regimes’. These imperatives have brought focus to the ‘cultural policy domain’ as ‘a vehicle for fostering diversity, building cultural confidence and creating wealth in developing countries.’ (p.20)
Other sources lend support to the viability of this view. The late Rex Nettleford often stated that we have more artists per capita in the region than any other part of the world. He put it as ‘having more artists than is probably good for us.’ Another factor which Dr. Burke herself presents, is that the Caribbean is ‘the most tourist dependent region in the world where gross tourism receipts are 1/3 of exports and where close to one million people are employed in the sector.’(p.21) In addition, she quotes a World Bank study which affirms that with 5.3% of the region’s population living abroad and accounting for 29% of all voluntary immigration, the Caribbean has the highest immigration rate in the world. (p.19) The ‘Caribbean’ historically, has always been a ‘transnation’. These are the realities on which the researcher bases her arguments.
The book is divided into three sections.
Section 1 deals with “Theoretical and Practical Approaches to Cultural Policy Development”. The first chapter reviews current trends/theories in the field of cultural policy, while the second presents US, British and Senegalese policy models. This section provides the important theoretical underpinnings of the book. Dr. Burke does this in a way that is both academic (in the best sense of the word) and at the same time, urgent. She leads us immediately into the midst of current debates in the field. We therefore see the multiple definitions and applications of the issues and terms and the various theoretical positions contributing to what becomes a dynamic field of study, one still very much in the process of defining itself. Also important to her discussion at this point are the role and significance of UNESCO conventions. The picture that we see only in bits – WTO and GATS agreements in some north European country, information-sharing workshops on cultural industries, government ministers signing international conventions and our own output in one area or another of the arts or creative enterprise – all begin to fit together. This approach is reflective of the challenge faced in fashioning an appropriate cultural policy model that must be holistic and consensual:
“This methodology also necessitates a multi-disciplinary concentration that involves practitioners, activists, intellectuals and politicians from a broad spectrum of commercial, public sector and community-based organizations. It is clear that the coalescing of these various actors will not be easy, but it appears that only through such an approach that a more robust, respected and useful cultural policy model will emerge.’ p.58.
This section also affirms that ‘the most recent contributions….have put creativity at the core of the ‘new economy’, a point well worth noting to which we shall return later. The theoretical approach adopted for the study is one based on ‘cultural diversity’ recognizing the history and realities of the region.
This is a strong beginning – immediate, informative, authoritative and, most of all, clear.
Section 2 deals with the Caribbean Context. Here Dr. Burke presents an historical encapsulation of the region and the theories of the evolution of Caribbean society – the Plural model, Creole model and Plantation Economy model – establishing the transnational or ‘borderless’ nature of Caribbean identity. In the next chapter she structures three phases for the evolution of Caribbean cultural policies. Phase 1: The Creolization Policy Model with its ‘all ah we is one’ imperative that accompanied the nationalist/Independence movement; Phase 2: the Plural Society Model that followed the ‘winds of change’ in early to mid 1970s in recognising the cultural diversity within the region and being more ‘people-centered’. Phase 3: Cultural Industry Model with the growth of the cultural industry sector in 1990s, in spite of economic downturn in the region.
In this current phase, the author identifies two streams of policy activity: a) addressing issues of cultural development (low levels of cultural confidence); b) economics of culture framework addressing the economic dilemmas of the region. Even in this phase of need and awareness, however, policy is found to be still lacking or at best, inadequate.
Privileging the view of Derek Walcott in ‘The Schooner Flight’ to anchor her account of Caribbean history lends tone to this section and re-inforces the aesthetic underpinnings of the subject. However, while the three policy phases seem clear, there is little reflection/appreciation of the role of people in the movement and change from one phase to the next. Any change in cultural policy/practice in the mid-70s would have come out of the pressures of the Black Power Movement. While this historic event is mentioned, it is merely as a footnote (p120) with no meaningful explication of the link between people’s action and state policy. Similarly, there is a people’s factor in the change to ‘creative industries’ in the 1990s that was given recognition by the policy gatekeepers, but had been growing for decades. It is a truism that under pressure people tend to be more creative. Much of our own creativity in the region resulted from our resistance to historically structured impoverishment. The 1990s may have brought this people’s activity to political/academic attention. I also don’t see these shifts as neatly sequenced as the analysis here suggests. Best Village, for instance, was started in 1963, and as such, should belong to the first and not second phase where it is placed. So, too, the Jamaica Festival Commission which was also instituted for Jamaica’s Independence. If these ‘people-centred’ mechanisms were there in Phase 1, it may be necessary to ask again how was the post-1970 Phase different from the preceding period?
Section Three devotes each of its four chapters to case studies of different arts industries in the Caribbean: the Carnival complex, the Performing Arts, Literary Arts and Book Publishing, the Jamaican Popular Music Industry. These analyses are really the meat of the book. In each study, Dr. Burke gives us an overview of the global performance of the industry, before looking at the specific characteristics of the Caribbean phenomenon. Finally, she discusses Caribbean policy relationships with/within the industry.
In the Carnival chapter the author examines each of the three art forms comprising the whole, the linkages and operational strategies employed that made them trans-national in character, decades before any policy intervention - interference really - by the State. Her research allows her to conclude: ‘Therefore the Trinidad Carnival is at once a celebration of the people, the state and the transnation…..the carnivals pose the same policy problems that confront many other sectors in the Caribbean cultural industries that have been globalized – they generally resist subjugation to national imperatives.’ P.172.
The case of the Performing Arts is particularly depressing. The book focuses on three specific types of policy/operational structures represented by CARIFESTA, Jamaica’s National Dance Theatre Company, and Lordstreet Theatre Company, a micro-sized theatre organization based in Trinidad and Tobago, but with international connections. None of these models proves up to the challenge of surviving at a global level. While recognizing the resilience of Caribbean peoples in creating art in spite of a generally incompliant policy environment, she notes that even these minor gains may be lost in ‘the increasing encroachment of global cultures coupled with a hostile operating environment at home’, p.210 ‘…In this regard a more relevant and dynamic policy regime can only be achieved if the key stakeholders give full cognizance to the intrinsic value of art to society……framing of a truly Caribbean aesthetique.’ We remain hopeful.
The Literary Arts and Book Publishing study shows greater government support for the former, given its longer history in the region, than the latter. The case for publishers and the need to see linkages within the industry as well as with other sectors is strongly made. The conditions pertaining to this aspect of the sector are almost as challenging as those in Performing Arts. This sector suffers from the same misperceptions:
‘Generally, large segments of Caribbean people, including the policy makers still view culture and its ancillary products as commodities that are owned and shared by the community – as a public good . As such, the need to subject art and creativity to industrial imperatives to generate wealth and well-being is a concept that is still difficult to envisage or activate.’ p.244.
These are the entrenched realities of the work of which all involved need to be conscious, if any change is to be made. In the author’s discourse though, one missed the voice of the writer as a principal stakeholder in this industry. That inclusion may have brought other complexities to the interpretation of the industry as presented, as well as a further interrogation of some perceptions.
The analysis of the Jamaica Popular Music Industry reveals, above all, the degree to which this industry is the playing field of big transnational integrated-media labels. It also shows how high the stakes are in terms of class and economic elite structures in the Jamaican context. As advanced as the perception of Jamaican policy in this industry may seem to the rest of us in the region, it comes up woefully short in meeting the challenges of making the ‘cultural supernation’ tagline a reality. The conclusion this section offers should serve as the guideline for policy development in all the industries described:
‘Given these facts, it appears that the real challenge of Caribbean cultural policy is to identify, analyse and eventually give better support to the alterity that makes its music industry so distinctive.’ p.290.
If by ‘alterity’ we understand how we distinguish ourselves in relation to the other, with our own specifics of being, such a state falls between two other unworkable policy positions in the region: what is described as ‘nation-centric’ and (perhaps the same group) looking outside for solutions:
‘…the policy stasis in the Anglophone Caribbean is a direct result of the dominance of certain power elites in the policy making process. Throughout the period following Independence this group has consistently exhibited the tendency to look outside of the Caribbean for policy solutions.’ p.292.
The solutions proposed in this study are then of a different order.
Dr.Burke advocates a transnational approach that must recognise and incorporate the diaspora within the policy map of the Caribbean. In this respect, she advises we can all learn from Haiti’s recognition of its diasporic citizens in the establishment of a ‘10th Department’ by the State. The recommendations for change in the regime, developing cultural resources and gaining competitive advantage are all based on this proposition. One may add to this that the inherent richness and complexity within the region itself remains unexplored by Anglophone policy makers, if not practitioners. Annexed as we are to Latin America, in particular, Brazil in the south and, even closer to us, Cuba and Haiti, as well as the French Caribbean Departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and New Orleans to the north, there may exist possibilities for mutual learning, training, trading, policy initiatives and innovative models born out of the synergies of historical heritage that should not be taken for granted. Clearly, it was such a possibility that Rex Nettleford recognised when he responded to the New Orleans disaster with what would become his final major choreography ‘Katrina’. I am not regarding the absence of such an exploration in this book as an omission, but the subject of another study built on the base so proficiently provided by Dr. Burke. That other study, or yet another, may also bring the visual arts, as long established sites for trade and profit, as well as film, into its industrial survey.
The substantive argument however, is that ‘the direction of cultural policy in the Caribbean has been heavily influenced by external agendas and agencies.’ p.292. While this may be so, one is also aware of internal and popular factors that give people agency in their own destiny. This would have been evidenced in reference to a) the social and popular movements (see above) and b) the Trinidad calypso. It is surprising that no use is made of calypso, an art form which has consistently offered a critique of every aspect of Caribbean life – including culture policy. Two brief examples here support the author’s arguments.
Mighty Power’s ‘Culture of Trinidad’, quoted above, clearly undercuts the policy formula for socio-economic development in the nationalist phase which Dr. Burke herself has criticised as ‘making the right mistakes’. In Power’s analysis, the root of the problem is the suppression of the indigenous arts in their very birthplace by an uncreative, oppressive social elite - euphemistically referred to in the literature as ‘lack of cultural confidence’. This very ‘lack of cultural confidence’ is at the root of the ‘stasis’ in cultural policy development that Dr. Burke identifies. Also, back in 1973, Black Stalin (Dr. Leroy Calliste) wrote his own view on this stasis into the public imagination. He offered one simple, perhaps ‘nation centric’, imperative to all:
Love Your Own
One of these days when you wake up
Hear wha’ you go find
Canada is the land of calypso
Britain in the home of the limbo
Sweden is the land of the steelband
There is nothing for Trinbagonians
Then you go hold your head and you go bawl if I did know, if I did know, if I did know
I woulda hold on to me steelband and calypso.

Bally, in the upbeat soca mood of today is joyfully optimistic of the future:

Whenever the oil run out on we
Culture will drive the economy
Whenever the gas evaporate
Culture will fuel the ship of state 
(‘Culture Energy’, 2010)

Apart from giving birth to Calypso, Trinidad and Tobago is probably singular in respect of the number of aborted attempts to bring into being a national cultural policy. Perhaps this failure can now be put to good account by creating the kind of cultural policy that copes with both historical realities and current trends in the contemporary world. This thesis argues strongly and sensibly for the arts and culture sector as the fulcrum for a shift in the economic re-positioning of the global Caribbean:
‘In fact, the forms of transnationalism that are a constitutive part of being Caribbean in the world are to be celebrated…..it is only by understanding and embracing these histories, identities, ways of life and creative capacities that the region can come to a more sophisticated understanding of itself by turning dispossession into possession.” p.302. This complex identity is at the crux, in my view, of Sparrow’s paradoxical mask in ‘Labour Day’ (1968):
Even though I feeling home sick, even though I tired roam
Just give me meh calypso music, Brooklyn is meh home.
This book establishes its importance by its appeal and value to different stakeholders in the cultural sector – which, in the final analysis, includes everybody. It provides practitioners with a sense of global trajectory and ammunition for advocacy. Entrepreneurs gain from it some sense of market intelligence, economic potential and the challenges therein. It provides policy makers with knowledge of what parts must be connected to make up the whole. For the arts educator, it becomes a source of information; for the academic it offers a framework for research and interpretation in the field of study. For all of us, it articulates the need to come to terms with who we are, before we can even hope to become what we can be.

A Review By KEVIN BALDEOSINGH

The Cult of the Will

Gerard A. Besson

Paria Company Publishing Ltd, 2010

ISBN 978-976-8054-82-1; 283 pages.

This is really two books masquerading as one. In the first part, writer and publisher Gerard Besson gives a skilful demonstration of the historian’s art in microcosm, tracing through official records and personal family history the story of the Bessons’ settling in Trinidad. The second part, which is more polemic than history, examines the background and rise of Dr Eric Williams to become the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago.

The putative link between the two books is the custom of “placage” (concubinage) which created the mixed class in early Trinidad, since both Besson and Williams are products of this particular history. So the “will” in the title is a pun: the fortunes of the progeny of concubinage often depended on whether they were included in the wills of their white fathers or not. Williams’ family was mixed, but they had been left out of their ancestors’ inheritance. Thus, writes Besson, “I will suggest that Dr Williams’ political personality was constructed around 18th and 19th century events and that his perception of these events would eventually produce a political culture in which the role of the victim and the perpetuation of guilt were as readily embraced as they were easily politicised.”

One of the interesting sub-texts in Besson’s study, which unfortunately remains undeveloped, is the portrait of Trinidad’s white and black elites. “Some of the French patois-speaking Free Blacks and People of Colour had been wealthy land and slave-owners. By the early 19th century, Trinidad’s Afro-French/English Creole society had produced a small black and coloured educated middle class, which boasted a few university-trained professionals. Compared to other black and mixed people in the neighbouring islands, they had already gained a head start. Among these were the well-known Philippe, Romain, Beaubrun, Saturnin, Cadet, Boissière, Regis, Bicais, Rambert, and Langton families.” Similarly, the names of formerly prominent French-Creole and other whites - Collens, Bowen, de la Bastide, Wight, etc - give a rough idea of social mobility in the island.

Besson ends Part One of the book with an account of his father who, he writes, “was brought up by his mother’s brother, Simon Josse de l’Isle, and his family in Arima in unfortunate circumstances.” Joe Besson, also known as Boysie, was largely excluded from the family, wearing hand-me-downs from his older cousins, ill-treated by his uncle, and given only a rudimentary education. According to Besson, he was “left to fend for himself and make his way in the world, which he did with considerable charm.” Besson offers no speculation on how his father was able to overcome this disadvantaged childhood —a reticence that is perhaps understandable, but which stands in marked contrast to the extensive speculations about Williams that run through Part Two of the book.

Besson blames Williams and the PNM for many of the ills plaguing Trinidad and Tobago now. In his introduction to the second part, he writes, “I am attempting to alter the criteria of identity formation of Caribbean people along the lines of what I call the ‘cult of the will’. This cult or obsession, and the politics it has produced, apportions a false sense of inherited victimhood and entitlement to some, and to others inherited guilt and social embarrassment. It locks us in a perpetual state of irresponsibility and powerlessness, and makes us prisoners of the past.”

Besson adopts the “great man” theory of history, which assumes that individuals shape events rather than events facilitating individuals of particular skills and outlooks. He also has an explicit agenda in respect to the proper approach to history: “…the condemnation of what, in my view, amounts to the corruption of the scientific methodology of history for the popularisation of nationalistic politics in the mid-20th century.” But Besson himself is not entirely rigorous in his historical analysis since he has didactic ends in writing his study.

He devotes some pages, for example, to rejecting Williams’ thesis that the abolition of slavery was driven by economic rather than humanitarian motives, yet cites none of the scholars, not even Seymour Drescher, who have provided hard data undermining the argument. Besson also claims that in the 20 to 30 years after 1970, there was a “coarsening” of the society which he attributes to “Williams’ idea (which was accepted and carried forward by his successors) that the people of Trinidad and Tobago were still victims, and therefore could not be held individually accountable for their actions and that they were entitled to unearned benefits. This led to the collapse of civic and moral responsibility and expressed itself in the breakdown of civil society and the institutions that serve it.”

But Besson does not define what “coarsening” means, nor does he cite statistics or any other data to prove his argument that there was once an era of “civic and moral responsibility” in T&T which has now vanished. He could have referred to the rise in murders over the past decade, but how does the drop in infant mortality over the past 50 years, the reduction in race barriers, or the increase in literacy rates fit into his thesis? And does this coarsening, whatever it is, apply to Trinidad and Tobago as a whole or just to the Afro-Trinidadian segment? Besson also criticises what he terms the “moral relativism” of leftists, claiming that the PNM political culture is founded on this philosophy, without seeming aware that the logical obverse of “moral absolutism” has been responsible for greater historical evils and ignoring the fact that the core of PNM supporters are Christians. He is equally oblivious to the philosophical paradox of asserting that ideas in history and politics determine people’s attitudes, but that people should take individual responsibility for their actions.

So the first part of Besson’s book is a valuable, albeit limited, contribution to Trinidad’s history, delineating as it does the background of the island’s foundational elites. The second part may be interesting as polemic, but Besson fails to ground his argument in a manner which will persuade anyone who doesn’t want to be persuaded.

Cecil Gray

Possession: Poems

Toronto, Lilibel Publications, 2009, 71pp.

ISBN 978-0-9681745-5-5.

In Possession, his sixth volume of poems, Trinidadian Cecil Gray continues his long and seemingly compulsive meditation on the fate of Caribbean island nations that flaunt a rainbow of mixed cultures, within an historic context of colonial victimisation through slavery-and-indenture. One poem “At the Sea’s Edge” considers the fate of victims of empire worldwide: “Today Iraq, yesterday all of Africa, and before that / the land and people of what’s called America.” (p.65) It is bitingly ironic to stomach the fact that  European imperialists conquered and dispossessed dwellers of an entire continent, then named it “America” after themselves. Such is the contempt of imperialists, we are told, that their victims are: “stepped on like roaches by imperial boots.” (p.65) But in spite of the sharp and unsparing nature of these particular comments, Gray’s tone manages generally to shun shrillness over the brutality and injustice of imperialism. Restraint and control come t the fore more often than not.

In “Coast Road,” the persona recalls abuses of empire specifically in Trinidad: “blindfolded years of slums and subjection / when smooth roads were closed to those with complexions / a bit too swarthy, and their sweat could not earn / enough to relieve them from hunger, nor from / compounds they lived in like horses in stables.” (p. 68) Such dehumanising conditions are bad enough. What is worse is fear that their sordid truth may be lost in the mists of history.  So far as mixed cultures go, “Bugles and Drums” acknowledges rhythms of Africa and Shango worship in Trinidad where: “beliefs had to come from Europe`s scripture … and to be African / was an offence.” (p.8)

But not all poems in Possession are weighed down by the heavy hand of history. Some poems focus on personal, everyday events and relationships. For instance, “Sceptre” celebrates the piety and patience of the poet’s grandmother, while “Jimmy King” recalls fond memories of a friend, and “Goodbye” gives thanks for forty years of friendship with Freya Watkinson, an English woman who dies before the poet’s final visit to her.  In “Epitaph,” meanwhile, Gray pays fulsome homage to P.E. Ferdinand who was his teacher seventy years earlier, but now: “has sunk like a stone into oblivion.” (p.11) The poet’s unsolicited expression of gratitude, so long afterwards, when no one might have noticed had he remained silent, carries a hint of our capacity, alas rarely seen, for noble actions of pure goodness, independent selflessness and sheer integrity.

In an unusually satirical poem “Cutting Edge” Gray sneers at poets who indulge in avant garde literary gimmicks. This implies preference for his own more conventional style which mixes iambic pentameter and free verse with varied stanzaic forms and lines of  varying length. When it suits him, however, as in “Well,” Gray shows that he is versatile enough to display his own dalliance with avant gardism through idiosyncratic arrangement of lines on the page.

Although many poems in Possession consider commonplace scenes or events, often in foreign parts, for example, in Canada, England and India, there is no denying the pervasive, haunting presence of the poet’s native post-colonial Caribbean environment. The opening poem to the volume “Always the Sea” quotes two lines from the Barbadian poet Frank Collymore as an epigraph: “Like all who live in small islands/ I must always be remembering the sea.” (p. 1) And this idea about the crucial role of small islands in shaping Caribbean consciousness is driven home by the final lines of “Bounty” the second to last poem in Possession, which declare that mere sight itself of the Caribbean landscape evokes: “the love for an island that was not yours but / which claimed your faith and reshaped your ends.” (p.70)

What also haunts Possession is a sense of loss and transience when: “All things sink out of sight,” ( p.5) or: “Expectations have withered to straw;” (p.9) for as we all discover, sooner or later, youth, ambition, energy and enthusiasm all inevitably fade away in time. In “Fragrance” for instance, the poet recalls the bubbling eagerness and zest of his schooldays which brought: “the scent of burgeoning hope;” (p.9) but: “None of that happens today.” (p.9) “Take Five” also recollects the poet’s youthful excitement over particular musicians - Brubeck, Desmond, Billy Eckstine - and particular tunes - “Tenderly,” “Moonglow,” “Over the rainbow” -  which produced such irrepressible delight that it led the poet and his young friends, during one of their music listening sessions, to burst out in song for their neighbours to hear. But the poem ends with two sad questions: “What heavy roller through the years crushes such zest? / How is celebration so ruthlessly suppressed?” (p.15)

It would be a mistake all the same, to detect bitterness or worse - complaint - in these questions. The poet is probably prompted by no more than natural concern over his own process of ageing. As the persona of an early poem “Cool Now, Calm” bravely acknowledges: “I wish for nothing more, merely to endure / a pebble on memory’s soft powdery strand.” (p.5) If this sounds like pretentious or pouting bravado, consider other lines in the same poem: “despite comforting myths / like warm blankets” that is to say, systems of belief that promise spiritual transcendence, or some form of eternal life: “dissolution comes to end / every trivial parade.” (p.5)

We surely cannot expect a more confident or decisive acceptance of the finiteness and transience of all living things, especially when it is followed by: “Twilight has its own comforts like any age.” (p.5) This mature acceptance of loss enforced by human mortality, within a universe of unfathomable secrecy and ultimate mystery, gains even stronger conviction from the magisterial final two lines of “Cool Now, Calm”: “I am glad that I had days to do what I did / but I’m cool now, calm, as it fades away.” (p.5)  Here is both gratitude and contentment. Who can wish for more?

Reviews by FRANK BIRBALSINGH

Neil Bissoondath

The Soul of all Great Designs

Toronto, Cormorant Books, Inc., 2008, pp.223

ISBN 978-1-897151-32-7

It is fascinating to watch the progress of Neil Bissoondath’s skill as a writer of fiction. To start with, one is struck by the thoroughly unsettled, roving nature of his settings: his early stories and novels are set in his native Trinidad, in Canada where he has lived since his university days, and in foreign places, while his fifth novel The Undying Clamour of the Night takes us to a remote island that looks suspiciously like Sri Lanka, and is now followed by The Soul of all Great Designs whose action swings back to Toronto, Canada’s largest city which, although being far from remote like the island in the previous novel, is just as nameless. Evidently, place and a settled sense of belonging are problems in Bissoondath’s fiction, implying not only shifting, physical restlessness, but uncertainty, doubt- even turmoil within the inner lives of his characters themselves.

Soul is divided into three parts the first of which is narrated by a young man who paints a thoroughly convincing picture of his conventional, working class parents in the fully earned comfort of their suburban home.  He has issues, mind you, with his parents’ practical-minded conventionality. It is entirely to please them, for instance, that he takes a job in a painting company, but he does not abandon his secret yearning to become an interior decorator. As he asserts at the very beginning of his story “Everybody has secrets. I have a secret. Don’t you? Deep down, in your heart of hearts as they say?” (p.3)  One secret is that he works in the painting company while, unknown to his parents, doing interior decorating. Another secret is that he uses his good looks to pass himself off as the stereotype of a gay interior decorator. This double life inevitably creates inner strain. Our hero who prefers not to give his name - yet another secret - frets about leaving home and breaking free from parental control when, abruptly, his parents die in a traffic accident, and by the end of Part One, he is left enjoying complete independence and success with his own interior decorating company New World Designs.  In Part One at least, carefully observed detail combines with sharply analytical character studies to produce a taut, diverting and wholly compelling narrative - the work of a true master.

In a complete change that seems wholly disconnected from the serious or sober manner of Part One, Part Two revels in delightfully comic episodes about an Indian immigrant family and their frantic, if clumsy match-making efforts on behalf of their daughter Sumintra (Sue). When her parents contrive a meeting with an Indian bachelor, eligible because of his professional qualifications, money and family status, Sue’s cutting sarcasm is hilarious when she confesses to her suitor: “Sometimes my folks can be as subtle as an earthquake.” (p.92)  Yet the ironic portrait of Indian immigrants struggling to survive in North America, fighting for acceptance of their foreign qualifications, settling for second or third best, then greedily acquiring conspicuous wealth, is both wryly amusing and soberly realistic. The comment: “The idea of ‘going to the cottage’ was alien to people whose spare money was sent back home to relatives or hoarded for plane tickets to the land they had only left physically.” (p.101) confirms Bissoondath’s authoritative grasp of immigration and ethnic issues.

As if to redeem the disconnection between the first two parts of the novel,  the nameless hero of Part One meets Sue when he buys a bottle of water from her father’s food truck at the end of Part Two. Part Three opens with our hero’s confession that the name “Alec” which he has given Sue is a fabrication, yet another secret. Then follows a frenzied sexual relationship between Alec and Sue in which they often use the apartment of Kelly, Sue’s trusted friend. There is yet another ludicrous episode of failed match-making between Sue and an ageing Indian widower Professor Mukherjee. But by this time, Sue’s secret erotic encounters with Alec are beyond redemption.

The secrets in Soul are functional: they aid and abet the artificial and flexible quality of identity which is an essential part - the soul - of the novel’s design.  Alec quotes Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players “ [p.201] in justification of the roles he plays, and adds, “These selves of ours we’re supposed to be true to our constructions - the roles we play, roles that are either given to us or that we invent ourselves.”  [p.201] This is a frankly frightening confession. For Sue is ineluctably drawn to Alec: “She[Sue] wanted to know who I am . But who I am is what I have constructed - ungraspable and enigmatic, fluid even to myself.” [p.202] This enigmatic, artificial identity is what leads to the bizarre climax of the novel.

From his earliest fiction Bissoondath has been attracted by the perilous quicksilver nature of identity whether conditioned by race or ethnicity as in the Caribbean, or by immigration, language and class as in Canada. But secrecy is crucially linked to the formation of identity in Soul. Bissoondath takes his cue from  the novel’s epigraph: “Secrecy has been well termed the soul of all great designs. Perhaps more has been effected by concealing our own intentions, than by discovering those of our enemy.”

The quotation is from an English clergyman Caleb C. Coulton who is remembered chiefly for his aphorisms and sayings.

The author’s skill in Soul has already been acknowledged: his taut, intricately designed and potently succinct narrative, relieved by witty, comic sketches, is the work of a master technician. But the link between secrecy and identity produces too horrific a climax in the novel.  Nor is such horror justified by Colton’s epigraph which both eulogises secrecy and connects it to “great designs.”Alas, not even irony can portray the final horror in Soul as part of a great design.

By FRANK BIRBALSINGH

Shani  Mootoo
Valmiki’s Daughter
Toronto, House of Anansi Press Inc.,2008
pp.398. ISBN 978- 0-88784-220-7.
Shani Mootoo’s third novel Valmiki’s Daughter confirms both her growing confidence as a novelist and  her projection of a distinct voice that we recognise in writing by other Indo-Trinidadian women such as Lakshmi Persaud, Ramabai Espinet, Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming,  Rajandaye Ramkissoon-Chen and Madeline Coopsammy. The writing of these women incorporates fresh attitudes and actions, new preferences and preoccupations, never before so candidly or forcefully expressed in West Indian literature. Preoccupation with sexual ambiguity, for example, especially among women, runs through much of Mootoo’s work, mainly in the form of suggestive or sinister hints which appear with greater frequency, although still suppressed, in several characters in Valmiki’s Daughter.
The principal character in the novel Valmiki Krishnu is an Indo-Trinidadian medical doctor who lives in San Fernando, South Trinidad, with his wife Devika, daughter Vashti and Vashti’s older sister Viveka who is a student at the local university. Valmiki who is bisexual  had a torrid affair with a man in his own university student days, but submitted to the prevailing convention of heterosexual marriage and started a family.
Now, many years later, he neglects sexual relations with his wife in favour of an affair with an Afro-Trinidadian man Saul Joseph who also serves as his partner on hunting expeditions.  As if all this is not scandalous enough, Valmiki seems to revel in his added reputation of sleeping with (white) female patients in his surgery.  Not surprisingly, though, much of this hectic hedonism is concealed behind a false and fragile front either of ignorance from Valmiki’s daughters, cooperative silence from his wife and partners, or blatant connivance by his receptionist.
In contrast to her father’s flagrant indulgence, Viveka’s equally transgressive sexuality emerges more naturally as the surprising self-discovery of an adolescent girl. Hers is an altogether more sensitive and subtle portrait made all the more plausible by Viveka’s anxious awareness of signs of physical manliness in herself, for instance, her “well known affinity for sports and things mannish”(p.95), growing hesitation and doubt over her relationships with young men, her special feeling of being somehow inhabited by the spirit of her dead brother Anand,  and her strange attraction to women, in particular to Anick the French wife of Nayan Prakash, a family friend who has just returned from studies in Canada.  Viveka’s ensuing affair with Anick is the centre piece of the action which, after explicit sexual encounters between them, comes to a somewhat gloomy end when Anick’s pregnancy by her husband drives Viveka, like her father before her, to succumb to convention and get married - to Trevor, a male Trinidadian acquaintance. 
If they appear excessive or indulgent the effect of these sexual high jinks, of both father and daughter, is neutralised by their tragic outcome: not only does Valmiki resolve to end his affair with Saul, but Viveka and Trevor are scarcely married before they admit that their union stands little chance of lasting for long. Also, almost from start to finish, the novel’s action is haunted by the baleful, brooding presence of Merle Bedi, Viveka’s erstwhile school friend, who drops out of high school for a life of vagrancy, begging and social ostracisation partly because of “the same craziness that had her loving within her own sex.” (p.94)  But the sexual shenanigans in Valmiki’s Daughter should not be read simply as a sensational display of spoilt sophistication, liberation or modernity in contemporary Indo-Trinidadian society: they reveal troubling insight into the historic role of race and class in contemporary Trinidad and Tobago.
In one of the most moving scenes in the novel, Devika meets Saul Joseph’s wife by chance in Mucurapo Street market, and is mortified by the sheer effrontery of Mrs. Joseph’s speaking to someone of her wealthy, high class Hindu background.  Guilelessly adding insult to injury, Mrs. Joseph even dares to mention Valmiki’s affair with Saul: “Just look at our crosses, na. You and me, we in this thing together. You know what I’m talking about, eh?” (p.124) Mrs. Joseph’s disarmingly innocent question exposes an historic confrontation on grounds both of race and class.
No wonder: “Devika’s skin burned with embarrassment. How dare she [Mrs. Joseph] ask how I am managing? Devika had thought. She was livid.” (p.125) Thus, for all their illusory sexual delights, the well heeled Indo-Trinidadian professionals and business entrepreneurs of Valmiki’s Daughter are still as trapped by their history as the poverty-stricken Indo-Trinidadian peasants who eked out a bare existence fifty years earlier in Samuel Selvon’s ground- breaking novel  A Brighter Sun (1952).
For it seems that sexual high jinks are a symptom  of social or spiritual unease. In a discussion with Viveka, Nayan dismisses not only Indo-Trinidadians, but all overseas Indians: “ the sugar-cane and cacao Indians, those of us from Trinidad, Guyana, Fiji—we don’t exist…We are not properly Indian, and we don’t know how to be Trinidadian. We are nothing.” (P.307)  This confirms that Nayan’s thoughts could have come from the 1950s when most  West Indian authors were concerned about issues of identity. That Mootoo who was born in 1958 writes about similar issues in contemporary Trinidad should concentrate our minds. 
Yet all is not gloom and doom in Valmiki’s Daughter which contains paragraph upon paragraph of gloriously lyrical evocation of Trinidad’s natural beauty, rich passages of salty local speech, and raw details of everyday life that cannot have been written by someone who does not “know how to be Trinidadian”. This means that Nayan’s view of Indo-Trinidadian nationality is not the author’s. When Mootoo writes, for instance, of “swollen carcasses of animals” (p.109) drowned in a flood, or of a “bent, bodi-thin woman sweeping the step of her one-room shack”(p. 188,) or again of ‘the roti-flat, silvery Gulf of Paria,” (p.108) we hear an unmistakable Trinidadian voice, one like Ramabai Espinet’s in her novel The Swinging Bridge, that encloses the issue of Indo-Trinidadian alienation firmly within unswerving commitment to a single, broadly-based, multicultural Trinbagonian nationality. Valmiki’s Daughter triumphantly reinforces that commitment.

JEAN ANTOINE-DUNNE Reviews Gabrielle Hezekiah’s  latest work on the Films of Yao Ramesar
Phenomenology’s Material Presence
Video, Vision, Experience
Gabrielle Hezekiah
ISBN 978-1-84150-310-3
Bristol:  Intellect, 2010.

Gabrielle Hezekiah’s work Phenomenology’s Material Presence is situated within a relatively new sub field of both Philosophy and Film-a field that examines film’s capacity to construct knowledge or to engender new insights into the nature of what it is to be human. Can film, as Noel Carroll posits, on occasion ask radical questions about the nature of human reality? Does it have the capacity to provide the kind of sustained argument or nuanced thought that one usually associates with philosophical discourse? Indeed where does film as philosophy fit into the institutionalized divisions of academia?
We can say, of course, that Film as a form of philosophical enquiry is as old as film itself. The first film philosopher is thought to be Hugo Münsterburg (1916), whose attempt to understand the nature of film as a unique art led to his understanding that film’s use of flash backs, cuts and close-ups showed its difference from the other arts. But the person who is most often acknowledged as the first aesthetician of film is Sergei Eisenstein whose questioning of film’s relation to reality, and life long belief that film could and does create concepts and whose engagement with montage as capable of shaping an intellectual discourse is at the back of a writer such as David Bordwell who is the initiator of the relatively new cognitivist film theory.
But even before the Russians sought to dissect film’s capacity to raise consciousness or to shape thought or to understand how cinema shapes ways of thinking, film had already self consciously, by its very genesis, opened itself to questions about the representation of the real. The great debates about cinema’s true destiny have evolved from its original link to magic (Melies) on the one hand and its reality effect on the other (Lumière).
However we look at it, film is a re-construction of the world and most thinkers of film seek to understand or reflect on the particular ways in which film’s capacity to hold onto concrete reality yet enables a mapping of psychological and perceptual states. The great debates about the filmic are shaped in the arena of the perceptual.
Gabrielle Hezekiah proposes that Yao Ramesar’s films perform a philosophical mode of enquiry and that enquiry is located within the specificity of Caribbean ritual, memory and acts of becoming.
This is by way of introducing Hezekiah’s importance to the as yet underdeveloped, under explored thing that is Caribbean Film Studies. There is no other work on Caribbean cinema that makes such connections between philosophical enquiry and film. Yet Caribbean critics have no doubt about the nature of literary enquiries into questions of humanity, being or spirit.  We find discussions of the philosophical discourses of Wilson Harris, Brathwaite, Nourbese Phillips, Erna Brodber, to name but a few and our critics have long recognized Harris’s debt to Heidegger or Brathwaite’s referencing of Bergson through T. S. Eliot. However, despite the growing number of texts devoted to Philosophy and Cinema since Deleuze published Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time Image in France in the eighties, there has been no sustained analysis of the kind of thought emerging from our film and filmmakers here in the Caribbean.  What is more, while Caribbean literary discourse has positioned its writers and their work within the perspective of African and Indian thought and rituals as well as Modernist paradigms, there has been no equivalent sustained critical process devoted to Caribbean film or video. Mbye Cham’s 1992 work X/Isles. Essays on Caribbean Cinema remains the single authoritative text on Caribbean filmmaking.
I note this now because despite the fact that Hezekiah’s work entails a conversation between three Phenomenologists of the European tradition, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, what she is actually doing, as she states very clearly, is paying attention to the films themselves and their own material and spiritual presence. While she does not mention Caribbean thinkers and artists such as Wilson Harris or Senior her discourse evokes their presence in very seductive ways.  The most immediate question that her book raises is the relation between these writers and thinkers and the work and practice of a filmmaker such as Ramesar.
Hezekiah situates Ramesar ’s work initially within the context of the American avant garde, for example Maya Deyen, because Ramesar “offers dreamlike sequences in which a collective unconscious might be made accessible through rhythmic manipulation of vision”, but this is also a description of the work of a Caribbean writer like Wilson Harris whose manipulation of the visual achieves a spatialization of experience that allows past and present to co-exist and that enables access to a collective unconscious.  It is also not unlike the visual processes of a work such as Zong by Nourbese Phillips.

For Harris, the visual opens portals into layers of experience and these act as openings through which the New World individual can arrive at consciousness.  This consciousness infuses and emerges from land and river and sea and is very similar to Heidegger’s mystical conception of the consciousness that undergirds the materiality of the world. But what both Aubrey Williams and Harris access is a mystical understanding of the world that we might call a New World philosophy of being, sourced from Amerindian belief systems and attached to Amerindian conceptions of dream time. For Harris, moreover, the spatializaton of time and memory that is made immanent in the materiality of dance, for example limbo, allows an understanding of the ways in which Caribbean cultures interpenetrate and become fecund.
 Hezekiah’s approach enables us to situate Ramesar within a well-established field from which Caribbean film has been too long orphaned by the paucity of rigorous critical attention. Ramesar is seen to be working in the tradition of Harris, Glissant and Brathwaite (the self in maroonage), Walcott and Kincaid. In other words ,within an aesthetic tradition that absorbs European forms but that also engages in specific and unique Caribbean discourses and modes of enquiry into the origins of knowledge: how do we come to know ourselves, what has shaped our ideas of self, what does it mean to be human in the face of dehumanizing narratives of history.
Hezekiah foregrounds  the importance of sense perception as a means to an encounter with the essence of Caribbeaness. I use the word “essence” here in the sense applied by Hezekiah as Being or by Harris, as spirit. It does not imply an essentialised self that suggests blandness nor fixity of Caribbean identity, What Hezekiah, Harris and Ramesar engage in is an act of encounter with what Ramesar has called “Caribbeing” which I interpret as spirit /being in the Caribbean. For all, the Caribbean is a place of constant transformation, in the true sense of the transformative, as an act that is metaphysical, but which is mediated through the material.
Phenomenology as a method of enquiry would seem to be particularly apt in the context of the Caribbean. Phenomenology enacts a process whereby the accretions and silt of time as historically imposed on our perception of the world, our knowledge systems, can be evacuated. Phenomenology enables a conscious encounter with the present that is unhindered by those internalized assumptions and imposed presumptions about who we are, what our relation is to the other and our position within a global order.
Hezekiah’s meditation on film’s relation to the real centres on the encounter between seer and the thing seen through the act of the shaping of the concrete by the filmmaker.  For her Ramesar’s documentaries, in particular Heritage: A Wedding in Moriah, Mami Wata and Journey to Ganga Mai are phenomenological enquiries that use filmic techniques to enable the camera to see beyond the historic shrouding of perception that has disabled the Caribbean psyche.  The techniques employed by Ramesar, such as slow motion, pixilation, the close-up, movement in and of itself, the use of light and dark reveal the true essence of Caribbean being but do so as process, not as fixed substance or embalmed subject. These videos are revelations of processes. 

What is being meditated on is the act of the unveiling, but it is also a meditation on something that exists and is beyond the embodied shapes that are available to sense.  The evolution of consciousness is two fold, the consciousness that is inherent in the participants and the ritual performance and the consciousness of the viewer who is situated in quite distinct ways to the world that is opened up to revelation.
The first encounter on which Hezekiah meditates involves an act of recognition or memory as something that is in the present, but to which the viewer has access only through the gaps that open up and within which she situates herself; the second is through a situating of the viewer as a witness to the experience of possession or the act of Ex Stasis; and the third is a coming together, other than at particular moments of individual awareness, in an accord with the flow of consciousness which is an ascension into the fullness of being, an absorption into the rhythm and flow that takes in the human as an essential part of the fullness of Being in the world.
What is at stake in this essay is the transformation of our attitude to the world, through film’s capacity to make us see for ourselves what is truly there, through our own subjective re-constitution of the world before us. The perceiving subject, through the acts of the camera and the consciousness that enables these acts, is allowed to see in new ways through a bracketing off in instances of tired perceptions, and the focalization of the thing, so that its essence is revealed.
This is perhaps the most important function that Caribbean art and philosophy can facilitate-Film, as Hezekiah recognizes in Ramesar’s work, enables a Caribbean consciousness to take precedence over other ways of seeing.
Interestingly the three videos that Hezekiah addresses speak to the syncretic nature of Caribbean experience, and privilege memory as an act of creative appropriation of the past through the presences that exist in the present. Memory is both inside and beyond us, we re-cognize the self in maroonage, emerging from the deep recesses of the repressed psyche that video simulates and one might say, engenders.  By video’s framing of fragments of reality we are made to enter into the space between memory and forgetting-to see the past as objective viewers newly reconstituted.
“Caribbeing makes the familiar strange” says the author on page 8. The videos are themselves acts of philosophical encounters, that search beyond habit (that great deadener) and move toward a new consciousness of the Caribbean.
In Hezekiah’s reading these videos allow an entry into the region of the unconscious or the layers of spirit that constitute the Caribbean  (as Harris sees it) as a region distinct by virtue of its history and its intercultural, cross cultural, interracial mixing and merging and genesis.
Through acts of suspension we are allowed to meet, and ultimately briefly, enter into the “generative ground of Being”. Something I must emphasize that is deeply engrained in the work of Lamming, and the later Walcott. Like Ramesar and Hezekiah these writers seek to make the reader viewer and auditor, open to the experience of spirit and matter, spirit residing in matter, through acts of memory and memory as ritual, that become passages for the flow of past and present in the movement into the future.
Hezekiah’s underlying idea that video is an instrument of meditation that “serves as an interface between the bodies of artist and viewer, making a material connection which brings towards us a specific, embodied perception of the world” is crucial to our understanding of her project.
Film acts on our bodies through the dynamic interplay of sound and visual. It does this through the play of sense on the body of the filmmaker who transmits this play and thus intensifies our perception of the seen world. Christian, African and Indian rituals constitute the transmitted field of memory through sense.
The viewer is made to see from varying perspectives. These aberrant points of view in which she is made to see outside of everyday perception, enable several levels of visual experience (through shots from below, from above, eye level, through the close up, and in slow motion). They lead to looking at the world in “another way”. We are given the freedom to contemplate in “the aftermath of the perception of the object” often through film’s capacity to expand time (18). Hezekiah emphasizes the fragility of these moments of consciousness and contemplation “we slip all too easily into the natural attitude”, she says  (11).
For the viewer the characters in the video Heritage appear to exist in a liminal space, between past and present, a place of memory and death. Bu this is also memory that remains a trace in the unconscious present.
In making this space of memory something that we appropriate, Ramesar is elaborating on and making concrete what has been central to Caribbean philosophizing. This is achieved by the use of micro rhythms, slow motion and sound that together shape the dream like quality of the work.  The vibrations (trembling temporality) enable a sensation that the thing is broken up into its component particles, so that as viewers we become part of the process of the becoming. Heritage, by altering our experience of duration, draws the viewer simultaneously into an experience of pure perception and an experience of consciousness. We take up each interrogation and exploration of the camera as a “subsequent perception (or memory) by virtue of the fact that we have inserted ourselves in the gaps of the image and taken on the experience of memory.  The gaps opened up are also closed by sound that jolts us into an awareness that we are looking at the screen (returns us to ourselves as viewers) but with something added-we see differently.)
More importantly, these images become the vehicles for enabling us to see the constitution of that perception of the present. I acknowledge that I am reading into Hezekiah’s work, but it seems to me that while she is speaking of the ways in which the creation of structures of memory enable the viewer to be absorbed into the act of remembering as if it is her own memory, she is also describing a simulation that one finds in works such as Walcott’s Omeros or even Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, where memory that is not ours enables acts of recall that open us up to the spectre or trace of the past of submerged consciousness.
What Hezekiah calls a paradoxical “experience of immersion” in a past that we do not remember, but which becomes an evocation of false remembering is one of the properties of film that literary writers find so seductive. It is, in my interpretation, an attempt to recoup memory from that void that is The Middle Passage, through the very fact of film’s capacity to mimic the process of remembering.  Through the strategies of the camera, the use of particular looks and point of view, we participate in what Harris calls a collective unconscious. This occurs through acts of bodily identification (Hezekiah 35), through invitations that call out to us from within the frame,  “and invite us to vision and we move forward to meet them” (38).
While Heritage enables a mapping of the processes of memory itself and engages the viewer in a mimetic appropriation of the act of remembering, Mami Wata is about ecstasy or being outside oneself and is a call to witness rather than to participate. The film moves towards the woman’s “transformative experience” which “alters “our own relationship to the space of the event” (43). This is, according to Hezekiah, a dwelling in the phenomenological reduction (43).  This indwelling enables a “momentary crystallization” (a form of differentiation between ” the visible and the invisible”) through which the invisible becomes visible. The “Concretion of Visibility,” is a meditation on the call to witness an act of movement out of self. The consciousness that becomes visible, she says, is the very ground of the participants. There is no reciprocal gaze, because invisibility exceeds the limits of the body. In effect consciousness as excess meets the limits of our body and exceeds the limits of the body it inhabits.
The meditation on Being, Consciousness and Time brings the essay to full circle. It expands the conception of consciousness as something that cannot be measured in terms of linear time, but that exists as something stretching to infinity. Time is essence in Journey to Ganga Mai. It flows with the river, in the movement of the work; everything exists in the flow of time as duration.   As viewers we are caught up in the flow until and other than in those decisive moments when we are framed by the look, and see ourselves as separate.

Ganga Mai does not induce contemplation but uses filmic techniques to engage the viewer in the flow of time in its passage to completion.  It is a “leading back to oneself”. The video entails and shapes immersion, other than in occasional moments of an awareness of being seen. The world is drawn into the video, not kept outside it. The Dasein as openness to encounter becomes the project of the work and here Ramesar’s work and Hezekiah’s attains a mystical aura that seems to overlap most fully with the work of a writer like Harris, whose systems of belief have led to the creation of dream works.
It is through this last section that one arrives at the full impact of Hezekiah’s writing. It is a call to consciousness and it envisions the camera, the video and the filmmaker as capable of enabling new forms of vision.
This is not an easy work to read. It is born of meditation on the thought of perhaps four philosophers, and the work of a filmmaker whose experiments in seeing are conceived as acts of philosophical enquiry. One needs to meditate on what this work offers to arrive at new insights into the very nature of our encounter with time, and our perception of the reality of the Caribbean. This is a pioneering study and one that I welcome wholeheartedly.

By FRANK BIRBALSINGH

Golconda: Our Voices Our Lives
Lawrence Scott, Ed.,
UTT Press, 2009,
pp.146. ISBN 978-976-651-000-8

As its title implies, Golconda: Our Voices Our Lives is a work of oral history, a collection of comments, stories or memories from villagers in Golconda, Trinidad, in their own words (Voices) and about their own experience (Lives.) Their village began as a sugar estate in the first half of the nineteenth century when, it seems, the English proprietor George Monkhouse named his property after “Golconda” a former fortress near Hyderabad, in India, which he remembered from his days in the East India Regiment. The estate later became a settlement for indentured Indian labourers, and later a mainly Indo-Trinidadian village. 
As Lawrence Scott, the editor of Golconda explains, the aim of the volume is to catch the actual experience of villagers, conveyed in their own direct speech rather than through academic or second hand commentary. Hence the recording and transcription of comments from more than a dozen Golconda villagers some of whom provide three or more contributions, the collaboration of three assistant editors – Naila Arjoon, David D.A. Maharaj and Marilyn Temull, and two local Consultant Historians - Angelo Bissessarsingh and John Ramsaran, all of whom doubled as contributors. 
With so many contributors chiefly of short (usually one-page) prose narratives and even shorter poems, the editor exhibits the patience of Job combined with the judgment of Solomon to contrive order out of disorder, so that Golconda appears as a nicely ordered text arranged in six main sections labelled: Sugar; Estate Life; Religion, Traditions & Festivals; Childhood & Schooldays; Marriage; Life Stories. And even if some repetition creeps in it simply enhances the credibility of the oral medium. It would be natural, for instance, indeed unavoidable, especially for a speaker providing two or more contributions, to slip into repetition.
At the same time, for all its concern with naturalness, credibility or truth, Golconda boldly advertises itself as a volume with thick pages of sumptuously glossy white paper and lavish coloured photographs, a physical format suggesting that even if the volume began as a simple community project collecting  raw material in the interest of cultural retrieval, it soon transformed itself into a genuine labour of love destined for display on coffee tables rather than mouldering as arcane research filling an empty space on some obscure library shelf. 
Historically, after all, sugar was the lifeblood of Caribbean plantations never mind lesser crops like coffee or cotton, cocoa or citrus. More importantly, according to Angelo Bissessarsingh in his “Prologue”, indentured Indian labourers who first arrived in Golconda, Trinidad, around 1850, became “ the dominant fibre in the fabric of life in Golconda for more than a century thereafter.” (p.XIII) This makes it clear how much the service of Africans to the Caribbean sugar industry, before the end of slavery, has in common with the labour of indentured Indians for the same industry after Emancipation, for example, with Caroni Limited in Trinidad or Bookers Brothers in Guyana. No wonder, as Moonan Amichan asserts, more than once: “They [indentured Indians] worked as slaves but they were never slaves.” (p.74)   
There are no two ways about it: life for indentured Indians in the “poverty stricken barracks” (p.59) of Golconda was bare, basic and brutish. Accommodation consisted of one room divided into a kitchen and a “gallery” which served as living room, bedroom and everything else. (Bath or toilet facilities are not mentioned.) What this could mean for Jhaimany Seeta Seebaran’s family of fourteen or Radha Benjamin’s of sixteen we can only imagine! In Jhaimany’s case: “Sometimes I use to go to school without anything to eat and I drink water until I come home.” (p.75) Meanwhile, from Jaitoon Mahabir we hear: “Sometimes we going to school, we eh even have a underwear to wear. Had to wash [same] clothes to wear next day.” (p.19) It would take more research than a thousand academic treatises could muster to match the eloquence and sheer pathos of “a underwear to wear.”
Working conditions in Golconda were no different as Sookier Amichan proves when forced to work despite illness, or when she reveals: “We putting sugar shit on we head in basket (that was cane manure, we used to say sugar shit) … And all that thing used to come down in we face. Rain could come, sun could come, you have to go and do that work, and that’s it.” (p.34) Sookier’s comments support the notion of Golconda as a gigantic prison where workers lived in constant fear of resisting authority or violating rules and regulations. It was enforced browbeating that compounded further abuse from drivers, foremen and overseers when, according to Moonan Amichan, for example, “drivers used to take advantage of the ladies working with them, [and] the ladies who gave in to the drivers got the easier jobs to do.” (p.14) 

For all this tribulation, however, or their prison-like conditions, with the rum shop and cinema as their only outlet of dubious social relief, the resilience of Golconda residents is nothing short of miraculous  through such survival techniques as maintaining kitchen gardens and farm animals, and their resourceful improvisation of commonplace objects for household purposes. Most miraculous of all was their effort to build fresh community out of ethnic and cultural fragments left over from the colonial era, not only of different castes, but Hindus and Muslims, Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians, not to mention Africans and Indians.
Here is Bernardine Sandiford: “I get on good with the Indian. Bhagwat  (religious ceremony) I there. They never look at me bad. As a negro they always have me as their own. “(p.114) If there is lingering doubt about the usefulness of these comments and memories, consider that the Golconda barracks were demolished in the 1960s, the cane railway discontinued in 1998, and Caroni Limited closed for good in 2006. All this surely justifies Lawrence Scott‘s claim that:  “one of the main values  [of the Golconda Project is] to record a swiftly disappearing way of life.”(p.135).

By DAVID CAVE

Last month, the University of the West Indies concluded its celebrations of Caribbean Nobel Laureates with a celebratory four-day academic conference at the St Augustine campus in honour of Derek Walcott, Nobel Laureate for Literature, 1992. Amidst the fervour of the conference entitled “Interlocking Basins of a Globe” (Jan 12-15), a small exhibition of Walcott’s art was held at the Office of the Principal.
Encountering the painter’s side of this literary giant inside the principal’s office was evoked all the joy of a surprising and rare delight.
While many are familiar with Walcott as an renowned essayist, dramatist and poet, his pursuits in the field of visual arts remain relatively unknown and unacknowledged by the mass media and general public.  The eighteen paintings on display were trademark Walcott in the technical skill and attention to detail for which Walcott’s poetry. Which just goes to show the fundamental nature of Walcott’s approach to expression. 
Perhaps the lack of public attention to Walcott’s paintings is deliberate on the painter’s part. These works seem to capture Walcott’s moments of calm and quiet throughout the years.  The subject matter of the paintings is primarily nature scenes. Most seemed to have been created directly from observation, capturing the light and mood of a private time in a well-balanced style that is sufficiently detailed to convey the verisimilitude of a specific time although the artist’s delicate treatment of paint does not allow the viewer to get lost in the details.  There is also an adequate degree of gesture which Walcott uses to extend the mood of tranquillity and solitude to the observer.
Walcott’s daughter, Anna Walcott-Hardy, who was on hand to discuss the art, emphasised the personal nature of the work, pointing to such pieces as “At the Gate, Petit Valley, Trinidad” (circa 1981) as a factual depiction of her in school uniform to the right side of the image.  The two largest pieces of the exhibition, “Horses at Sunrise” (c. 2001) and “Country Fete” (c. 2001) were, however,  imaginative compositions- which, until disclosed by Hardy-Walcott, the viewer would not have deduced given the detail that seemed to have come from observation.
Walcott’s visual art, like his poetry, demands a keen and observant eye that looks beyond the obvious.  One notable detail of the works on display is Walcott’s attention to shadows.  Equally important is the shade of unseen elements beyond the painting which can be so vivid that the viewer might walk away believing they were in the painting. 
The Walcott exhibition also contained a few odd paintings that do not fit into the mould of the nature scene.  In addition to the two largest imaginary pieces, “Horses at Sunrise” and “Country Fete” there are also two story boards created in water colour and ink of Walcott’s famous play “Ti Jean and Brothers”.  One of the most discreet yet notable painting of the exhibition is the “Coconut Trees” scene by Walcott’s father, Warwick Walcott.  This last piece suggests that Derek Walcott’s affinity to art goes back a long way, and has always been integral to his life.
Despite its small size and low-keyed nature, this short exhibition (Jan 13-15) offered a valuable glimpse into the complex and multi-faceted artist that is Derek Walcott.  The exquisite execution of the work also makes a point that this Nobel Laureate still has a lot to offer the Caribbean. 
For having given us this glimpse in Walcott’s world, the UWI and the general public owes a great debt to his family Margaret Walcott, Anna Walcott Hardy and Elizabeth Walcott Hackshaw.

By LLOYD KING

I have no science background but I find that there are scientists who manage to convey to the ignorant but educated reader a reasonable sense of the remarkable developments in scientific research, particularly in regard to evolution and cosmology, of particular interest because they impinge, to put it mildly, on our view of religious belief. Oddly the same cannot be said for literary discourse. The Walcott Conference has come and gone and it was extremely successful in its academic way as a forum where insiders spoke to insiders and Mr Walcott was duly celebrated but I am not sure that outsiders were drawn in, that anyone rushed off to purchase a copy of Walcott’s latest book of poems. This partly has to do with academia which has largely lost what I will call the Orwell talent, that capacity to communicate to the simply educated. It does not bring promotion in the academy. But, in respect of Trinidad and I suppose Tobago, there has been another development. There has been a profound shift in perspective. We now bow down not to the artist but to the artiste, the local entertainer. It is our form of nationalism. We rush not only to see our performers but to hear them speak of their creativity, as against, say attending a lecture by the eminent economist, Joseph Stiglitz, an American whose whole career has been dedicated to defending the interests of the Third World. How can one complain!
My own observation of a number of university Pro-Vice Chancellors is that they were as turned off poetry as any man in the street. The problem is large, if you believe, that is, that poetry is important as against asserting that writers who win international prizes are important. To be anecdotal for a moment I remember one day maybe 40 years ago when a specialist medical doctor came to the department of French to seek out a colleague in order to clear up a point about Moliere which was bothering him. A distinguished surgeon has told me that his pleasure is to read French novels in French. Needless to say they go back to the much deplored colonial days.
What was the prevailing ideology of that era which persuaded the educated to take an interest in what is called the Arts?  It went/goes by the name of  liberal humanism which was  associated with writers such as Mathew Arnold and espoused a civilizational ideal, urging the embrace of the best that was thought and written, ideally if not practically in the world. In practice, it was assumed that the best of what was thought had been written and that you started with the ancient Greeks and the Jewish Bible as conscripted by Europeans. If you were widely educated you might know of the analects of Confucius or the Sanskrit Vedas, unlikely possibilities in the Caribbean. The Bible, it should be said, was regarded rather as a literary achievement than as the very fount of truth because already under the pressure of evolutionary theory and developing views of the cosmos, at least agnosticism was in, if not atheism. It was the point of a presenter at the Walcott Conference pinpointing him as, at least in his early incarnation, a liberal humanist. And it is easy to point to the way in which he associates the West Indian imagery to Greece and Dante and the great traditions of Western painting, and of course the magnificence of poetry in English. Something else needs to be stressed in a context of West Indian realities. What was involved was a commitment to the written word and this brought up the issue of voice, a voice that was true to experience. I underline this because it has been at the heart of negative criticisms of Mr Walcott’s poetic production, if not of his plays. I shall return to this matter below.
What I want to focus on briefly is the sense in which liberal humanism was an ideology. First of all it obscured the self judgment  that European intellectuals had pronounced on their civilization since the end of the First World War. After the barbaric horrors of that war, the word abroad was that the West was in decline. It was why Andre Breton and the Surrealists were so keen on African primitivism. African carvings had had an incredible impact on Picasso. This view of Europe  certainly reached Latin America and accounts for the popularity of Jazz in Europe. The British did not feel themselves included or chose not to see that the days of the end of the Empire were drawing nigh.
By the Second World War with the German concentration camps functioning, poets and particularly German language poets were questioning the capacity of language to render experience. In England you have TS Eliot’s Mr Prufrock’s exclamation: it is impossible to say just what I mean. West Indians were sheltered from the horrors of the War; those who took part showed no sign that they understood the bowels of the nightmare in which they had sojourned. Our faith in language was not and has not been shaken. Liberal humanism would not and did not allow it. Liberal humanism also- and this was part of the role of the British Council- was a shield against anti-colonial ideas, specifically Marxism. Even in the midst of a colonial situation, it taught the virtues of liberal democracy and the Rule of Law. At best it admitted Fabianism. Unlike what had taken place in Latin American countries, where French style Marxism had reached early, you had, like CLR James, to go to the mother country to be exposed. Moreover, you had to travel to meet a genuine African. It would take years before one discovered that Trinidad and Tobago is full of Africans speaking Trinidadian creole. 
It is in such a cultural environment in the past that the young Walcott wrote the poem that will never go away, A Far Cry From Africa, with its all too resonant lines : how to choose between This Africa and the English tongue I love?   The Africa being referred to was of course the Kenyan Africa of Mau Mau barbarism, their form of anti-colonial struggle. I was at the Mona Campus when In a Green Night came out and I can’t remember anyone drawing back at those lines.

The English lecturers in English were delighted. They said: Here at last is a poet who is expressing complexity of feelings. Complexity of feelings, being torn between two moral positions was a sign of the highest sophistication in a poet. It was part of what liberal humanism was about. However if you look at it the line is really pseudo complex. The volume of poems makes clear implicitly that the English language was part of who the speaker of the poem was. There was no choice. The real anguish was about Africa, this Africa of barbarism, a barbarism that obtains to the present day, and so often seems to lurk just below the surface. It was a feeling shared by many educated  West Indians, to a huge extent by Latin Americans who had their own barbarisms to contemplate and to the North Atlantic world which  felt that their own more sophisticated barbarisms were suitably counterbalanced by the fact that they had created modern civilization. Whatever its discontents.
VS Naipaul’s contribution to the Africa theme need not be gone into. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then with Walcott developing an unparalleled body of work whose relation to the diasporic African reaction will perhaps only be explored with the proper clarity when that diaspora’s nationalist orientation has been transcended. Have we gotten much beyond liberal humanism and do we (we here meaning my former colleagues in that area called the Humanities) not act on its assumptions without bringing them out in the open?  I pose this question because it is my sense that the African alternative or contestation has simply been accommodated into the status quo without any fundamental revaluation of its underlying assumptions.  The creativity of that admirable entertainer Black Stalin is now on a continuum with Walcott or WB Yeats. Is it? I happen not to think so, but to me what is important is that it has not seemed worth discussing, which is surely what universities are about.
What does the word creativity mean in the West Indies? Can a book of West Indian proverbs grip our minds like one of Plato’s dialogues? Not that one should exclude the other.  Where are we because the confusion has filtered down?
 Not too long ago, a columnist in a newspaper asserted with nationalist pride that he would rather hear the Shadow than an opera by  Donizetti . So, what I suppose would be called high culture is anathema to him. But does he object to a steelband playing a tune taken from Beethoven? Would he be put out by a performance of The Phantom of the Opera or Cats or Porgy and Bess?  We are into a phase of nationalist stupidity. Then there is the question of voice. I was rather pleased to come across a talk by the British mulatta novelist Zadie Smith. In this essay she identifies  Mr Obama as a man of many voices, but also as someone who chose a voice that is not specifically an African-American voice, but is not a betrayal. She was sensitive to the issue because she also chose an English voice at University which she feels was not a betrayal. She calls it interestingly a Pygmalion complex  as explored in Bernard Shaw’s play, My Fair Lady. I wonder who would dare to put on that play in a Trinidadian setting and accept the challenge of controlling audience reaction. 
No wonder that poem will not go away. It provokes our thought.