"The myth of the suffering artist is a myth. Suffering may inspire great art, but nutrition, sleep and security will take it from inspiration to actuality,"  says Karen Lord.  Photo by Ryan Durgasingh.  Copyright © 2016. 

The following was presented as the feature address at the 2016 Frank Collymore Literary Awards ceremony in Barbados January 7, 2017. 

Opening Thoughts

This State of the Art originally appeared in ArtsEtc Issue No. 3, July/August 2003.

I FIRST MET Edward Kamau Brathwaite in the flesh in Toronto in 2005. I was attending a conference on the Caribbean at Ryerson University. I arrived to see my good friend and mentor Austin Clarke standing and talking to a tall man with a whitish beard, wearing a multicoloured tam.

“Kamau, this is Foster,” Austin said in his imitable Bajan, a way of speaking that never permits Clarkie to ever call me by my first name.  This is a way of familiarity that perhaps only a Bajan high school can instill, where everyone answers only to a surname. “Foster, this is Brathwaite.”

In 1996, Kamau Brathwaite brought a group of students from New York to Barbados for a week to experience first-hand his Mother Poem. ArtsEtc editor Linda M. Deane was at that time an arts and features writer at the Nation newspaper, and was one of two journalists invited to accompany the poet and his students on an island tour. Below is a condensed version of her story that appeared in the Nation’s Sunday Sun of April 28, 1996.