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2001 • I leave the newspaper I was working at with a baby in my belly, a plan in my head and a rough blueprint in my hand. I call my co-conspirator, Robert Edison Sandiford (who had already left the newspaper), and a few weeks later we convene a session of like-minded souls to see how a newsletter called ArtsEtc might get off the ground. We meet at my home (chowing down on a mean chow mein and some fried flying fish to fuel the flood of ideas) and again, later, in a back room at Queen’s Park Gallery.

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.

Nick Whittle (r) in conversation with National Cultural Foundation CEO Carol Roberts-Reifer and Gustavo Pandiani, the Ambassador of the Argentine Republic to Barbados.  Photograph Copyright © 2019 by the NCF.

A Reaction to Nick Whittle’s Exhibition Other Lives

WITHOUT EXPENDING a huge amount of imagination, I find myself cast into the middle of a gigantic ocean. On a ship or, maybe, beneath it, at one with the churning waves.

Barbadian spoken-word artist Adrian Green: following in the tradition of pioneering Bajan writers A.N. Forde, W.S. Arthur and Karl Sealy.  Photo Copyright © 2013 by Fresh Milk Barbados.

Part of “Caribbean poetry’s new wave”: Ishion Hutchinson, Safiya Sinclair and Rajiv Mohabir.  Photo Copyright © 2017 by Bocas Lit Fest.

MAKE NO MISTAKE, the NGC Bocas Lit Fest out of Trinidad’s Port of Spain is big. It describes itself in this, its seventh year, as “the Caribbean’s biggest festival of words, stories and ideas.” Each year that the festival flexes its literary muscles, they are larger than they were in the previous one. 

Many of our writers were upset when Kamau Brathwaite, who has been called Barbados’ unofficial poet laureate, won first prize in the 2006 Frank Collymore Literary Endowment competition for his poetry manuscript Missa Solemnis.  The grumblings were much the same January 11, when Kamau did it again, this time with a collection called Lazarus Poems.