(or 7 days in the life of a creative whose well of dreams is deeper than her pocket)
SHORTLY AFTER Minister John King’s open invitation to the artists' community of Barbados to bombard him with ideas, project proposals, wish lists, I volunteered to respond on ArtsEtc’s behalf. Of course, I’ve procrastinated. No idea where to begin. But last week after more than seven near-consecutive days of creative adventure, I am beginning to sense what the notes for the draft of that letter might look like….
Day One: The Great Escape
Frank meeting with ArtsEtc co-director and partner-in-crime Rob Sandiford about the things we do and how to better monetize them. What to cut and what to keep. In the fifteen years ArtsEtc has been alive, we’ve both had the support of partners whose “sensible, regular” jobs have helped us to keep doing what we love and loving what we do—even in those bleak periods where we’ve said, “Maybe it’s time to jack it all in and return to sensible, regular jobs of our own.” Only, each time that happens, we realize we’re in too deep, escaped too long over the fence—come too far with the adventure—to turn back now.
#Dear John, we need your help to restage our Green Readings; cement Read2Me!, our schools literacy program; publish anthologies; and continue mapping our rich Barbadian literature. We need your help to make great our good escape.
Day Two: Poetry in Windows
Find myself at Camp Moorings, a great little summer camp at the Seventh-Day Adventist School in Dalkeith. Theme? The environment—which makes the children ideal candidates for Poetry in Windows, a project that teaches them about climate change, encourages them to write poetry from their newfound knowledge and experience, and displays the best of that poetry at selected island venues. The partners include: The Canadian High Commission, the National Cultural Foundation, The Ministry of Youth & Culture, and the husband-and-wife team Caroline & James Gardiner, whose bright idea it was. Two other partners are The Future Centre Trust and CORALL (a new agency involved in the protection and restoration of our coral reefs). Their reps go into camps and make presentations on oceans, beaches, coral and climate. As one of the project’s creative writing instructors, I go in with a broom afterward and sweep up the sparkling poems that result. After my day at Camp Moorings, where I engage with twenty amazing young people and their counsellors, I say to myself: “Self, you love this kind of thing so much you would do it for the rest of your life—for free!”
#But, Dear John, you know what? That very last bit is a lie.
Day Three: Chattel House by Wayne Archer
Sitting on the beach with good friend, fellow writer & visual artist Sarah Venable. We watch the procession of vendors with their lively, purposeful banter: the coconut salesman (I buy), the coconut=shell ornament salesman (I don’t buy). Out in the water, jet-ski and banana boat operators let their hijinks do their sales talk for them. “Here comes Wayne,” says Sarah, almost conspiratorially, as we relax on loungers with rum-spiked drinks. “He does the best paintings. Sells them on the beach to make money for the gallery he’s building at his home in Nelson Street.” We watch Wayne make the steady tour up and down the rows of beach umbrellas and lounge chairs that colonize our beaches now, engaging their various occupants. Eventually, he reaches us; and I see what Sarah means: he’s carrying a stack of twenty or so paintings, each one an original on sturdy card, roughly 9” x12”—fishing boats, fishermen, chattel houses, town and beach scenes, and landscapes in broad, suggestive strokes. Soon, Barbados in living, breathing acrylic is scattered around my sun-broasted limbs. I am surprised, as I divide the paintings into a Yes and a No pile, that most if not all the chattel houses end up in the Yes pile; that the Yes pile is chattel houses with maybe one delightful portrayal of young boys at play on a boat. To me, chattel houses (and fishing boats) are to local art what the mango is to poetry: a dreadful cliché to be actively avoided—unless you can write the perfect mango. There, leaning against my knee in free, fluid greens, blues and burgundies, is the perfect chattel house: two figures (a woman and child?) are in the foreground, trees in back; and all presented as if they might vanish at any minute, be swept away by sudden wind or hurricane. Wooden structure, trees, sky, humans, all seem caught up in the same swirling, evanescent moment. “This is strange,” I say to Sarah and to the artist himself. “In all my time collecting, this is the first chattel house to ever catch my eye.” “I know what you mean,” Sarah replies. “I have only one painting of a chattel house, and it’s by Wayne.” Prices are on the back of some of the canvases, but Wayne asks me to name mine. As our negotiations go on, it becomes clear he will take anything, and I do mean anything, for it. He has tiles to buy for his home/gallery conversion and warns that if I do not buy now, that particular chattel house will be gone forever. He will sell it, and there is no guarantee he will ever paint it again. I want the chattel house. It is the only one he has quite like it. My money has already gone on beach furniture, food, drink, coconut water. I want Wayne Archer to have tile money, but I don’t want to rob him of his energy, time, talent. We do a deal; exchange numbers so he can be paid in full later.
#Dear John, how we gon’ get Wayne and all the artists in Buhbayduss their tiles—in other words, whatever the building blocks they need—to work and live their dreams?
Day Four: Words and art…
A broken cartwheel resting on its side just inside the entrance to the Courtney Blackman Grande Salle leaps out at me. Wax sculptures of an old rotary phone and a smart phone, and of a game console chained to the hand of its user, similarly beckon the twelve-year-old who is with me. Tracy Greenidge’s depiction of a lion licking a wounded planet Earth and another painting—a commentary on ocean pollution—attract two others in our small but vocal and opinionated group. This is the NCF’s Writers in Schools and Education (WISE Jr.) Art Walk writing workshop, and we are using what strikes us at the Crop Over Fine Art exhibit to create poetry in less than three hours. We do it, too! But there is not enough time (there never is!) to finesse the drafts or, as was also the plan, to turn the poems themselves into pieces of visual art inspired by the tapestries and quilts in the sister exhibit at Queen's Park Gallery.
#Dear John, two things strike me: One, it was fascinating watching these young people absorb art this Crop Over, to engage with visual artists through their work and use it to comment on their own lives, on Barbados and the world. What if it was a given that every year, every child in Barbados had this hands-on words-as-art-as-words experience? To experience Crop Over beyond the bashment lyric and the wuk up? And Two: we can spend the money now, on after-school programs, on sports and art—or we can spend it later, on juvenile rehabilitation.
Day Five: The art of words
I get a chance to read my work surrounded by the same art. All thanks to a creative mash-up of the Crop Over Visual Arts Exhibition and the annual Crop Over Read-IN! pared down to a mini-festival. For the Read-IN!s, I share intimate stages in QPG and the Grande Salle with Esther Phillips, Barbados’ recently appointed and first ever poet laureate, and again later with Margaret Gill, who is ever soulful, ever stirring, and full of the unexpected. Winston Farrell, Dana Gilkes, Sharma Taylor, Ross Chase, Deanne Kennedy, Wilmot St Cyr, Edison T. Williams, and Anthony Kellman also feature during the month-long event. The audiences are small but engaged; warm, responsive. They seem masters of that increasingly rare art of listening. Deep listening. A respectful, almost spiritual state of listening. Australian Aborigines have a word for it: Dadirri. Kudos to Ayesha Gibson-Gill, the NCF’s cultural officer for literary arts, for getting creative with her budget and adapting what is usually a large, performance-based event to the smaller art space of QPG and the Grande Salle, and for throwing the spotlight back on writers. The challenge for coming years, if the experiment is revisited, is to grow audiences that are as keen to simply listen as the writer is to simply read.
#The Read-IN!s remind me of the Green Readings ArtsEtc did for eight years before tings got brown. Dear John, we looking for tings to catch-back green again.
Day Six: Flaws and all
I accompany my daughter Izora to Brownes Beach at 9:30 a.m. on a Sunday so she can stage a Body Positive photo shoot. She’s been talking to friends and friends of friends on social media about body image. The amount of tall, willowy, teenage beauty with bad self-body image out there is startling—and Iz has decided to do something about it. She has no problem finding four willing bodies. I watch her set up and direct her own shoot, apply body paint boldly, riskily even, to scars and stretch marks and supposed lack of cleavage; to long-long arms and short-short legs, and to dark-dark skin and pale-pale skin. She collaborates well with the photographer (who is also a young poet), and the results are stunning. (See for yourself on Instagram at zoras.world.) She also handles with flair for her years the creeps who occasionally, predictably, Sssssstt at her and her friends in their swimsuits, or who hover to get a better view of what’s going on. Basically, she pays them no mind. Just steupses, wonders to me later on what it will take for grown men to grow up and let children be, and gets on with the job of raising young girls’ self-esteem—“gassing up her friends,” as she puts it. Recognizing the flaws and moving beyond them.
#Dear John, you should have seen her. She’s planning a next one soon. She’s reminding me of why I must get on with doing what I do. And that if I need help to do it, I must ask for it.
Day Seven: To vlog or not to vlog
I suppress a powerful urge to start a vlog after reading Home Home by Trinidadian writer Lisa Allen-Agostini. It’s a young-adult novel about a Trini teenager who is sent to her aunty in Canada after a suicide attempt. The book is, surprisingly, a lively read, and quick—just 100 pages—super contemporary, with realistic, drily humorous teen dialogue. It’s truly YA, geared for its audience, and not just another book simply about young people written by and for adults fondly recalling their own childhoods. Man, I would have a lot to say about it in this vlog, about all the books I’ve been reading lately. And it would complement ArtsEtc’s IndyList, too, and our Mapping Our Literature project, and Read2Me!, and my work as a storyteller, and, and.... Then I realize—with all else on my plate, I just don’t have the time or resources to vlog.
Day Eight: Dear John, I begin writing you this letter in earnest….
