A Review of Ancestors

Brathwaite’s risky reinvention of his important trilogy—Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982) and X/Self (1987)—has much to offer old and new readers alike. The celebrated Barbadian poet has reworked the text in his own hieroglyphic “Sycorax video style” type. His dispossessed speakers habitually declare themselves in free verse dialect.

Sharma Taylor 2019 Frank Collymore Literary Award Winner

Central Bank of Barbados Governor Cleviston Haynes with top 2019 Frank Collymore Literary Award winner Sharma Taylor (second from left) beside sister awardees Claudia Clarke and Sarah Venable.  Photo Copyright © 2020 courtesy of the Central Bank of Barbados.

 

For the Days After COVID-19

What's more crushing than COVID-19?  Illustration Copyright © 2020 by Aeryn Sandiford.

 

“How does a culture withstand the onslaught of a pandemic? We survive first of all with the presence of culture within us. It is to our inner culture that we turn, the culture we carry in us through years of unconscious osmosis and conscious acquisition.” Ben Okri

MY 13-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER is afraid to die.  Some days, it’s an abstract fear: the thought of not being here, of being nothing, is an unfathomable void.   There are days—today—it is COVID-19.  

Poets@Work: Remembering Kamau Brathwaite

Kamau Brathwaite, widely acclaimed as Barbados’ greatest poet, and certainly one of the giants of Caribbean Literature, whose writings spanned literary criticism, drama, history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and more, died Tuesday, February 4, where his navel string was buried.  He was 89 and would have been 90 on May 11.  For decades, many considered Kamau Barbados’ unofficial poet laureate.  Then, in 2018, the nation finally appointed its first poet laureate, Esther Phillips.  In the following editorial, reprinted from the Spring 2018 issue of Kola, No. 30, Vol.

Frank Collymore Literary Award Winners In Print

Heather Barker, second-place winner of the 2017 Frank Collymore Literary Award for The Plundering, a collection of stories.  The title story appeared in the anthology So Many Islands, edited by Nicholas Laughlin with Nailah Folami Imoja.  Photo Copyright © 2018 by the Central Bank of Barbados.

Hazel Simmons-McDonald 2018 Frank Collymore Literary Award Winner

THE TOP SPOT at the Frank Collymore Literary Awards went to Hazel Simmons McDonald on January 5, 2019.

Simmons-McDonald, a retired University of the West Indies professor and poet, took second place in the 2018 competition.  She won for her manuscript A Collection of Short Stories.

For the third time in its twenty-one-year history, the committee decided not to award a first prize from the shortlist.

Performer and poet Sonia Williams, for the second year running, took third place with her poetry manuscript On Livity.

Combating the Cult of Doubt

Liam Neeson in a familiar scene from one of his movies: the Taken star’s real-life story of near revenge outraged many for its racist undertones early last month.  Photo Copyright © 2019.

 

“Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it.”  Goethe 

“I thought of Emmett Till and I just couldn’t go back.”  Rosa Parks 

Writing the Caribbean Superhero Novel

for Stan Lee, December 28, 1922-November 12, 2018.  Nuff respect.  Nuff said.

MY WIFE CALLS my novel And Sometimes They Fly “the Caribbean superhero book.” That’s how she referred to it the fifteen years I spent writing it, though its starting point became clear to me after the events of 9/11. Before you think she was mistaking magic realism or speculative fiction fantasy for something else, no, And Sometimes They Fly really does deal with heroes, legends and myth building in the context of Barbados and comics.

A Review of Frontiers of the Caribbean

Compelling and emphatic language toned down by academic speak.  A stitched-together structure that is both focused and diffuse.  The folk voices of Philip Nanton’s Frontiers of the Caribbean nevertheless come across, especially the accounts of his fellow Vincentians from interviews—or from personal profiling: “I cannot say that I knew my father well.  Perhaps he did not want to be known.  What I remember of his characteristics could fit on a postage stamp, but there were identifiable tendencies that were almost archetypal.”  The book could have done with more of such illustrative a

NGC Bocas Lit Fest 2018—Day by Day

Writers Shakirah Bourne & Brian Franklin along with AE Editor Robert Edison Sandiford: only part of the Bajan Posse @ Bocas 8 in Trinidad and Tobago. Photo Copyright © 2018 by Brian Franklin.  

 

"Imagination is our region's greatest resource."  Gregory Camejo, One Caribbean Media Group Executive—Corporate Services

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