Taking on the world in leaps and bounds: The Translator, a COVID-19 hero of The Gathering. Artwork Copyright © 2020 by Tré Greaves. Comments courtesy of the 2021 graduating class of BFA graphics students at Barbados Community College.
INDEPENDENCE is the ability to not be reliant on another person's authority, while freedom—to me—is more a feeling and the power to act and think without restraint.
Destiny King Lavine
Saint Lucian children's author Dawn French and her good friend Peanut.
AMONG THE JEWELS that make up the Caribbean archipelago is Saint Lucia—the Helen of the West—so called because, like Helen of Troy, it is very beautiful. It is also home of the famous Pitons and two Nobel laureates. It further boasts an imaginative and accomplished children’s author by the name of Dawn French who is the creator of the Peanut series, a collection of stories about a fictitious little girl nicknamed Peanut, whose actual name is Sabine Clementine James.
MANY BARBADIANS consider me white. At CBC, the late Terry Mayers said no matter what I do or how I think and feel I’ll always be treated as white. This was in no way a bad thing, he was putting a name to a mindset I was already aware of! Like me, he knew I was anything but. I’m more mixed than Heinz 57: African-Danish-Italian-Carib-Portuguese-Scots, etc. I said to him my mother’s birth certificate says she is Coloured.
In plenty and in time of need
When this fair land was young
Our brave forefathers sowed the seed
From which our pride is sprung
A pride that makes no wanton boast
Of what it has withstood
That binds our hearts from coast to coast
The pride of nationhood
DEAR PRIME MINISTER,
BARBADOS' FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY celebrations come and gone and nobody ain’t say yuh cat, yuh dog, ’bout we. Sometimes yuh have to wonder if we is Bajan, too. Gabby had to tell Jack dat the beach belong to he, but it is time that we tell we story. These fields and skies ’bout here belong to we! We father get we here. We mother hatch we here. And here belongs to we.
The mighty Kendra. Illustration Copyright © 2020 by Dean Currency. Comments courtesy of the 2020 graduating class of BFA graphics students at Barbados Community College.
Freedom is the power to act based on my judgement, without any limitation. It is the capability to be myself, however that may be, without putting on a false front. Zuhair Jada, 20
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Free is what God calls you to be. Aaron Davis, 22
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WE HAD a close encounter in our house a couple months back. It was unplanned, unexpected and poetic in nature.
With that casual, don’t-carish air teenagers practice so well, my daughter picked up the review copy of Kamau Brathwaite’s Liviticus, published by House of Nehesi, that has occupied space in our front-house for a while now (along with overdue library books and other unfinished titles) and read the whole thing—thirty pages—out loud, including earthy, elegant foreword by Garrett Hongo and the author’s bio at the end.
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.
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