PAGE ONE: Inside: Caribbean Literary Series resumes in Brooklyn

PAGE TWO:

Writer credits: Mary Hanna, Basil Stewart, Tanya Leach-Haye, John Deamond

Bookshelf:

>>> HAPPENINGS

Caribbean Writers Celebrate Voice of Independence

o Caribbean literary series begins seventh season

[4 pics: earl, chris, david, samantha across top of story]

NEW YORK – A Caribbean tradition was expected to return to the downtown Brooklyn campus of St Francis College this past Friday, September 21, at 7:30 pm. Poets & Passion – A Caribbean Literary Lime, the monthly mix of literary salon with critically acclaimed and emerging writers, was scheduled to begin its seventh season with an impressive line-up of literary talent.

The programme featured an inter-generational panel of novelists, Earl Lovelace (Trinidad & Tobago, Is Just a Movie), and Christopher John Farley (Jamaica, Kingston Noir) and poets David Mills (USA/Jamaica, Jubilation), and Samantha Thornhill (Trinidad & Tobago, Seventeen Seasons), exploring the various influences of migration, gender, economics and language on their work, and Caribbean writing generally.

Headlining the programme was novelist, playwright and university lecturer Earl Lovelace. Born in the Trinidad and Tobago village of Toco, Lovelace has lived most of his life in Trinidad. He holds degrees from Howard and Johns Hopkins universities and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His books include While Gods Are Falling, winner of the BP Independence Award; The Dragon Can’t Dance; Salt, the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize winner; and most recently, Is Just a Movie, which has won the Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature (Guadeloupe), and the Bocas Prize for Literature (Trinidad & Tobago).

Christopher John Farley, who penned the biography Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley, which is featured in the soundtrack booklet to the documentary Marley, was born in Kingston, Jamaica and raised in Brockport, New York. The Harvard-educated Wall Street Journal journalist co-wrote and co-edited the book The Blues (Harper Collins), the companion volume to director Martin Scorsese’s PBS documentary series.

New York City-born poet David Mills, who has roots in both the American South and Jamaica, is a Queens Poet Laureate Finalist (2010). The Yale University alum has received numerous awards for his poetry including the PALF Award to travel Ghana, West Africa and the Soros Fellowship to write poems about the Holocaust in Poland. Samantha Thornhill, a rising voice in the world of words, crisscrosses the globe performing poetry, delivering lectures, and facilitating writing workshops. She is a poetry professor at the Juilliard School, and her young adult novel Seventeen Seasons is soon to be published by Penguin Books.

The September 21 programme is a Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event and is dedicated to the memory of Trinidadian novelist Rosa Guy and the centenary of Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay’s debut publication, Songs of Jamaica (1912). Guy, who would have had her 90th birthday on September 1, was an acclaimed writer of work for younger readers and the inspiration behind the Broadway musical, Once on the Island. McKay, an intrepid traveller and a seminal literary figure during the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century, was born September 15, 1890.

A project of the Brooklyn, NY-based Caribbean Cultural Theatre, Poets & Passion – A Caribbean Literary Lime with its mix of scheduled readings, open mic performances and ol’ talk, provides inviting opportunities for audiences to engage Caribbean and Caribbean-American fiction writers and poets, and positions the artists’ work as part of a larger conversation on issues of identity aspiration heritage and the immigrant experience. The series is presented with the support of Brooklyn Arts Council (Community Arts Fund), Caribbean Research Center – Medgar Evers College (CUNY), Mosaic Literary Magazine, Poets & Writers (New York State Council on the Arts), St Francis College – Office of Special Events.

Caribbean Cultural Theatre is a theatrical immersion experience presenting the work of Caribbean-based and/or Caribbean-influenced writers, performers and other practitioners that entertains, enlightens and honours a balanced rendering of Caribbean culture and the Caribbean-American experience.

>>> COMPETITIONS, CONTESTS, etc

Deadline for entries to the 2013 Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize September 30

The Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize is an annual award which allows an emerging Caribbean writer living and working in the Anglophone Caribbean to devote time to advancing or finishing a literary work, with support from an established writer as mentor. It is sponsored by the Hollick Family Charitable Trust and the literary charitable trust the Arvon Foundation, in association with the non-profit organisation the Bocas Lit Fest.

The Hollick Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize will be offered annually, initially for the next three years, and across three literary genres: fiction in 2013, non-fiction in 2014, and poetry in 2015.

The Prize

The Hollick Arvon Prize, with a total value of £10,000 (approx. US$16,000), consists of:

1. a cash award of £3,000 (approx. US$5,000)

2. a year’s mentoring by an established writer

3. travel to the United Kingdom to attend a one-week intensive Arvon creative writing course at one of Arvon’s internationally renowned writing houses

4. three days in London to network with editors and publishers, hosted by Arvon, in association with the Free Word Centre and the Rogers, Coleridge & White literary agency.

The winner of the 2013 Hollick Arvon Prize will be announced in March 2013. Presentation of the prize will take place in April 2013 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.

Eligibility

To be eligible for entry, a writer must:

1. be of Caribbean birth or citizenship, living and working in the Anglophone Caribbean and writing in English

2. be over the age of 18 by 30 September, 2012

3. have had at least one piece of creative writing of no less than 2,000 words published

4. not yet have published a full-length book in the genre category.

How to enter

Each entrant may make only one submission for the 2013 Hollick Arvon Prize. Each submission must include:

1. a maximum of 3,000 words from a work in progress which the Prize will allow the writer to advance or complete. This may be an excerpt from a novel or from a series of short stories

2. an outline of the entire work in progress and how the writer plans to develop it

3. a statement of no more than 500 words about why your work should be supported by this Prize

4. a copy of up to two pieces of previously published creative writing (not exceeding 2,000 words each). An extract from a longer work is acceptable. State the date and place of publication

5. a completed entry form

Note: all submissions should be typed with double spacing.

Submissions must be made electronically. Please send all submission materials attached to a single email addressed to info@bocaslitfest.com. The email subject line should read “Hollick Arvon Prize”.

Deadline

The 2013 Hollick Arvon Prize opens for entries on 30 June, 2012. The closing date is 30 September, 2012, at 6 pm TT time. No late entries will be accepted.

Judging

The Hollick Arvon Prize will be judged by a panel comprising representatives of the Hollick Family Charitable Trust and the Arvon Foundation, an agent from the Rogers, Coleridge & White literary agency, and up to three representatives of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest. The Prize will be administered by the Arvon Foundation and Bocas Lit Fest, in conjunction with the Hollick Family Charitable Trust.

For any queries about eligibility requirements or the submission process, please contact the prize administrators at: info@bocaslitfest.com

>>> NEWS

Wyclef Jean revisits Fugees, politics in new book

MIAMI (AP) – Anyone who needs to catch up with hip-hop star Wyclef Jean just has to refresh his Twitter feed.

“You know I’m direct about everything,” says Jean, 42.

Some things need more than a tweet to explain, though, so Jean has written an autobiography, Purpose (It Books), now in bookstores, that explores his political, financial and personal turmoil, including an extramarital affair with fellow Fugee Lauryn Hill.

The book opens with Jean hearing the news that a catastrophic earthquake has struck Haiti, the Caribbean country where he was born. The Grammy-winning multimillionaire returned home the next morning, trying to make sense of the chaos and overwhelming loss of life.

He kicked his Yele Haiti Foundation into overdrive to help survivors, and the urgency to get Haitians back to work drove Jean to announce his candidacy during Haiti’s 2010 presidential elections.

Both efforts, though, eventually left him reeling from criticism over his methods and motives. His presidential campaign was cut short, while Yele faced allegations of financial improprieties that benefited the singer.

In his book, Jean dismisses the problems at Yele as complications of a small charity’s sudden growth. After a restructuring, Jean writes, “We are a completely transparent organisation and I invite the world’s curiosity.”

In a conversation with The Associated Press, Jean compares those setbacks with the success he achieved with the Fugees, whose second album The Score remains one of the best-selling hip-hop records of all time.

___

AP: Do you think you’re going to run for president of Haiti again in a couple years?

Jean: (chuckling) … Keep in mind, right, that y’all always say “my run for the presidency” but there’s something you all must add – Wyclef never even got a chance to run for the presidency. It was sort of like, before I could even spit out who my technicians are, what are my policies, it was like, “Yo, this guy don’t have no technicians, this guy don’t have no policies, he’s not running, get him out!” Right now, it’s definitely, like, not in the focus.

AP: How was working on a book different from working on an album?

Jean: It takes you back to a place and to a time. I always tell people, the easiest thing for me in the book was talking about the Fugees. Because, you know, you’re young, you’re rock and roll. The hardest thing in the book was probably talking about my relationship with my dad. Growing up in a Christian household and then defying that and saying I’m going to be a rapper, and after they bring you from Haiti and the expectations, what they expect from you, and the fact that he never really came to my shows. …

AP: The book brings up some of your personal drama (extramarital affairs, including an on-again, off-again relationship with Hill) and your wife in the books comes off as being one of the most patient people in the world. What was her reaction to the book?

Jean: The main thing about me is, I’m just bluntly honest, you know what I mean? It’s like, I’m a man. Beyond my book, it’s in my music. If I’m going through something, you’ll hear it in my music. Like, if you’ve heard The Carnival – “To all the girls I’ve cheated on before, it’s a new year … I’m in love with two women, who is it going to be now?” This is not (something) I waited like 20 years later to be like, boom. I just basically stated the stuff that happened when it happened. … They say, what’s the secret? I say, first, the person I was trying to be with had to be a friend first, and clearly I would say that’s how we made it through.

AP: Was there any kind of bitterness when ex-Fugee Pras Michel came out and supported Haitian musician-turned-politician Michel Martelly instead of you early in your so-called run for the president?

Jean: No. … There’s a clear line, you know, between music and politics. And if you decide that you’re going to be a political candidate or run for that, then you have to have (what are called in Haitian Creole) “iron pants.” You basically have to be ready for everything to come at you, and whatever you expect, expect different. … As you can see, it was a lot of people coming at me, so that tells me a lot about myself, you know what I mean – my strengths, and what I possess. I always say, you come at me, I only weigh a buck-seventy-five, but you’re coming after what created me and you’re going to have a lot on your hands, because that’s God.

[ RUN AS ONE STORY: PLACE PIC OF BOOK HERE]

Purpose: an Immigrant’s Story (It Books), by Wyclef Jean with Anthony Bozza [pic]

Hip-hop star Wyclef Jean opens his autobiography in his New York music studio, working on a rap for the alter ego he created to tell the gritty stories about life on Haiti’s toughest streets. The music stops abruptly when he notices the headline crawling across the screen of a muted TV – a catastrophic earthquake had struck his Caribbean homeland.

In Purpose, co-written with music journalist Anthony Bozza, the Jan 12, 2010, earthquake that levelled Haiti’s capital is one of two phenomena with the power to focus the ex-Fugees frontman’s scattered energy.

The other is Lauryn Hill.

The Haiti-born, Brooklyn-raised Jean tells a familiar immigrant story about living in poverty and trying to fit into American culture. Rap was the language that gained him respect with the black Americans who mocked his Caribbean accent and parents’ strict ways.

Episodes of rebellion, petty crime and diverse musical commitments build to Jean’s introduction to Hill through Pras Michel and the birth of the Fugees. Their entanglements take up the bulk of the book, but neither the Fugees nor Jean and Hill’s tumultuous relationship survived the success of their 1996 masterpiece, The Score.

Jean skims over much of his post-Fugees recording career and work in Haiti, including an unsuccessful run for president there in 2010 and the financial scandals that plagued his Yele Haiti Foundation. The Grammy-winning multimillionaire’s story is strongest when he’s focused on his passions: music and serving as an inspiration for Haitians aspiring to follow his path from a hut to a mansion.

PAGE THREE:

Review:

Come Back to Jesus

Night Before Dawn by Roschelle McKenzie.

Nashville: True Vine Publishing Company, 2008. 293 pages.

Reviewed by: Mary Hanna

PULL QUOTE: The novel is a satisfying story of women’s cares and concerns, their wrestling with faith, their ultimate surrender. It is optimistic when dealing with male figures who do not come off quite so well as the women in the sense that they are often the cause of the women’s pain.

Roschelle McKenzie is a devout Christian author who uses her gifts to write Christian fiction novels. She is a member of Faith Evangelistic Ministries in New York City, but was born and raised in St Catherine, Jamaica. She migrated to the States in the late-1980s and has written many stories, though Night Before Dawn is her first novel. This text lays out clearly and simply a complex story of love, loss, and betrayal in which the protagonist, Sabrina Richards, is saved from tragedy and despair through the strength and restorative powers of the Christian God. It is a well-told tale of a young woman’s struggle to find peace, forgiveness, and a new life in the midst of tragedy. McKenzie tells the story with fluidity, calling on her familiarity with the born-again doctrines that pepper the text with messages of hope to readers who, I believe, are primarily women in need of encouragement and the kind of guidance that McKenzie liberally supplies in this thoughtful work.

There are many well drawn characters who offer examples of lives that have become untenable owing to lack of principled behaviour and faithful thinking. Sabrina’s mother Gina, for example, has become a crack addict who is involved with a violent, unstable man. He robs Gina’s mother’s house of its valuables to supply himself with drugs, and becomes brutal to Gina – a development that ultimately causes his death as well as the death of Sabrina’s twin, Mel. Sabrina is shown to have many reasons why she scoffs at the idea of the Christian God as a saviour. The success of the story depends heavily on the plot being believable and allowing the reader’s empathy to respond to difficult and desperate situations before Sabrina allows herself to be drawn in to the circle of believers who will help her overcome her own complicated challenges. McKenzie handles this necessary task with aplomb: she allows Sabrina to develop into the Christian way of thinking and being, and though she sometimes comes to sound like a bit of a prig, it is generally well done with a satisfying and not too miraculous ending.

In the course of the telling, there is much confession and asking for forgiveness by the various characters as well as pleas for Bri (Sabrina) to turn to God to resolve her difficulties. Courtney, her best friend, says to her:

“She [Gina] understands very well what was sacrificed for her, and is so grateful that she didn’t die in her sin and miss the opportunity for salvation through Jesus Christ. God knew the plans He had in this situation and, if He did it for Regina Richards, then certainly He’ll do it for you too. Sabrina, I really don’t know what you’re going through right now, but no matter how awful you think it is, I know that God can and will work it out for you. You just have to ask Him. Sometimes when the storms of life blow our way, it’s usually an indication that God is speaking and trying to get our attention. I really hope you listen to what He has to say.”

Sabrina is going through perhaps the very worst series of bitter blows that can be constructed around a young woman. McKenzie gives us a protagonist who not only finds out that the love of her life, her fiancé Eric, is having an affair with her best friend Monique, but also that Monique is pregnant – as, indeed, is Bri. With twins. It’s quite a development in what was an orderly life. Sabrina wrestles with the idea of aborting her babies, but makes a decision about what to do once she moves back to Atlanta and her grandmother’s home.

It is not long after this decision that she realises that the same God she continues to reject is the only one who can help her. She begins the hard spiritual work of forgiving Eric and Monique – and also Gina, her mother, and even Mel, her twin who died – in order to let go of her pain. In the night before dawn, she makes her decisions, which McKenzie shows in careful steps are the natural progression of the committed Christian. McKenzie writes:

Yes, he had cheated on me, and yes, with my best friend and got her pregnant. He even contemplated being with her instead of me. In the midst of all that, we pointlessly lost our child. It hurts like hell when I think about it, but the fact still remained. In spite of it all, I still loved Eric. But was it enough? How do we pick up all those broken pieces and move on from here?

At this point, only God could do it. There would be so much that would have to change in our lives. We could not go back to business-as-usual. If Eric was truly willing, as he himself admitted, to change his life and live for God, then maybe, just maybe, there was a chance.

McKenzie’s plot may sound a little too pat in the telling in synopsis, but McKenzie does a credible job of presenting the challenges in an orderly fashion and resolving them according to Christian thought. The novel is a satisfying story of women’s cares and concerns, their wrestling with faith, their ultimate surrender. It is optimistic when dealing with male figures who do not come off quite so well as the women in the sense that they are often the cause of the women’s pain.

Roschelle McKenzie has written a good, strong story that will bring pleasure to many a reader. She shares her Christian beliefs with conviction and clarity. It is a pleasure to read her contribution to the genre.

McKenzie currently resides in Westchester, New York, with her husband and young son. She is working on completing her second manuscript.

PAGE FOUR:

Memoir:

ONE BAD TURN DESERVES ANOTHER

By Orville Green [pic: bicycle]

PULL QUOTE: About midway into the turn, with the front wheel aimed toward the Jones Town Baptist churchyard – which was almost directly across the street from my house – I felt a sudden push from behind and, before I could determine what had happened, I was headed straight for the barbed wire fence.

My first bicycle was a present for Christmas the year I turned six. I had outgrown the pedal car that had replaced the tricycle of several years earlier. My father made time after work to hold me upright and run alongside while I learned to balance on two wheels and, in a relatively short time, I was doing well on my own. I was allowed to ride only on Myers Street, never beyond Price Street in one direction, or beyond Thompson Street in the other direction; I had to be visible from our gate at all times.

Before I could balance well enough to make a u-turn in the narrow street, I had to dismount and turn around on foot whenever I arrived at my prescribed boundary. I soon became tired of that and was determined to practise making complete turns. Late in the afternoon, when the groups of primary school children had gone home, was the ideal time for my self-instruction. On my first attempt, I mounted the bicycle and rode toward Price Street, then coaxed myself testily to undertake the turnaround. The bicycle traced a wobbly path as I tried to maintain my balance while moving at a snail’s pace. My effort was successful and, elated, I rode toward my gate and started another attempt at turning around in the street.

About midway into the turn, with the front wheel aimed toward the Jones Town Baptist churchyard – which was almost directly across the street from my house – I felt a sudden push from behind and, before I could determine what had happened, I was headed straight for the barbed-wire fence. I reflexively put my hand out in front of me for protection, as the front wheel hit the sidewalk and I was thrown at an angle toward the fence. I landed on the sidewalk with a nasty tear in my right palm, just below the thumb.

My first sensation was searing pain, then embarrassment; but anger quickly took over when I heard the raucous laughter of a girl who, I realised, had deliberately pushed me. As soon as she noticed the blood oozing from my hand, she dashed off in the direction of Thompson Street. Someone picked me up and rushed me inside my house, where the cut, which should probably have been stitched, was ‘dressed’ and bandaged.

Several weeks passed, during which I neither saw nor heard of the girl who I was convinced had intended to kill or maim me. My hand was healed, some bruises on my bony knees were barely visible and my confidence had been restored. I continued to practise making turns on the bicycle until I could do it in tighter and tighter circles. I mastered the manoeuvre. Then, on a peaceful afternoon, I was standing at the gate, ‘looking out,’ when I saw four girls approaching from Price Street. I recognised one of them as my assailant, and as soon as our eyes met, she burst into the same raucous laughter that had haunted me for the past few weeks. As they approached me, she was gleefully telling her companions of the incident that had brought us together, and I could feel the anger rising in me again. I felt I had to do something to pay her back for my injury – although she was much bigger than me – and to put a stop to her boastful recounting of the indignity I had suffered.

I made the decision in a flash, raced to the backyard, grabbed my bicycle and rushed into the street. The girls were already several houses past mine, but were walking slowly and chatting animatedly. They were still scoffing at my embarrassing encounter with their friend, when one of them looked back and saw me heading toward them at full speed. “‘Im a come!” was all she could say in warning and they set off at a gallop, with me hot on their heels. Their excited screams were mixed with laughter as they tried to outrun me on the bicycle. With head down over the handlebars, and butt suspended above the seat like a true racing cyclist, I cranked the pedals for all I was worth.

The fleeing quartet threw frequent, anxious glances over their shoulders to see if I was gaining on them, causing them to bump into one another as they ran. Although I was unsure of my intention, I threw caution to the wind, aimed the bicycle and charged into a tangle of unsteady legs. With screams and curses the girls fell in a single heap, with me and the bicycle on top. I quickly climbed down from the heap, pulling the bicycle after me. The girls scrambled to their feet and, crying as they went, ran as fast as they could toward Thompson Street. After straightening the twisted handlebars, I remounted the bicycle and triumphantly headed for home.

Orville Green grew up in Jones Town during the 1940s and ’50s.

PAGE FIVE:

Essay:

Who is my neighbour?

By Tanya Leach-Haye [pic: neighbour]

One day as I was reversing into my garage, I looked across at my neighbour’s kitchen window and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her there for a while. I used to call her my guardian angel because whenever I went to the gym at 5:30 am, she was always there at the window, which was diagonally across from my garage. Her presence there in those early morning hours was always comforting.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I couldn’t quite remember when I had last seen her. So, after I went inside our house, I asked my husband when last he had seen her. He, too, couldn’t remember. But she was probably one of those snowbirds, he speculated, enjoying life somewhere in Mexico until it got warmer here in Vancouver.

Still, I wasn’t convinced. The question haunted me all night. When was the last time I saw my neighbour?

The next evening, while reversing into my garage again, I saw her son. I quickly parked, got out of the car, and started walking towards him as he got out of his car in his driveway.

“Hi,” I started cheerfully. “Haven’t seen your mom in a while. How is she?”

“Ah!” he responded with a sigh and a twisted kind of smile. “Um … yeah, she passed!” He seemed apologetic.

“Passed?” I repeated.

‘Yeah,” he said.”She died.”

“Your mom died?” I was incredulous. “Your mom died?” I repeated. “When?” I continued unable to hold back the tears.

“July.”

“Your mom died in July and I didn’t know? Last summer? “

It was February as we were speaking.

I barely registered what he said after that. He gave me some explanation for not telling me before, despite the fact that we had seen each other many times since July. His dog had even chased into my garage one evening and we laughed about how the creature still, after almost three years, did not like me.

He spoke about his mother’s struggle with cancer, and I learned about the last weeks before she passed. Then it occurred to me that I had once seen someone, on their balcony during the spring, who I had then taken to be a relative undergoing chemotherapy since the person was bald and could hardly walk. It must have been her, I realised belatedly. He confirmed it had been her, and I asked how the family was doing. I shared my experience coping with my own mother’s death. I said all the right things. Then we said goodbye.

I walked away puzzled. How could my neighbour have been dead for six months? How could I have not missed her at the window? How could it have not dawned on me until now that it was her husband – not her – who had been walking the dog daily? But more importantly: How could no one have told us? Not the son, who had worked as an intern with my husband five years before. Not the nosy, neighbourhood watch spokesperson in the area. Perhaps she didn’t know, either. I’d say it to her the next time I saw her, which turned out to be the next day. She was apologetic when she asked me if she hadn’t mentioned it.

The next day, I shared the story with my students. Except for the South Asian students, they seemed puzzled about why I was upset. Death was a private affair, they said. They didn’t think they would have wanted to know if their neighbour had died. Others said they wouldn’t have told their neighbours if their parents had died. They asked how well I knew her. Not very well, I explained. We’d always chatted about insignificant things: the weather, the fence, the annoying resident skunk. The truth was: I didn’t even know her name! It’s true. She’d once told me, but I didn’t remember it. To me she was just my neighbour.

That made me think about what it would have been like at home in Jamaica. I couldn’t imagine the same scenario playing out there. Sure, everyone is busy these days; it’s easy for paths not to cross. But not seeing someone is different from them being gone permanently. If my neighbour in Jamaica had died, I would have known. Someone from the household would have told me. Or, around the time of the death, I would have seen people bringing food for the loved ones. Or the day of the funeral, I would have seen people dressed in black at the home of the deceased, or I would have seen it in the obituary. I would have known.

Fast forward to July 2012. It’s a gorgeous, sunny day in Vancouver. 78 degrees F. Everyone in the neighbourhood is outside sunbathing, etc, except me. And my other neighbour, the 94-year-old one on my left. Her son is outside in the backyard. So is her granddaughter, and her great-grandchild. And now I see three cars parked at their gate. We’d only, this past May, shared the cost of building a new partition fence. She had been gardening up until the week before. It couldn’t be, could it?

So I look in the obits in the neighbourhood newspaper. I burst into laughter as I it dawns on me that, once again, I don’t even know her name! But I look at the pictures and, thankfully, there’s nothing.

There has been a parked car at her gate since the day I missed her. I used to see her almost every day. Most evenings while I cooked dinner I’d see her at her gate. In the last few weeks, she started walking with a cane. Sometimes, she did leg lifts at her gate. That was always amusing, especially when the front lifts morphed into awkward hamstring lifts. At 94 she still had it going on. I’m not sure what has happened to her. Perhaps I’ll never know.

These two incidents lead me to ponder the age-old question the Bible story about the Good Samaritan raised: Who is my neighbour? The answer suggests that a neighbour is anyone. Everyone.

I often think about the neighbour who died. I had really liked her. I wish I had gotten a chance to say goodbye. It’s now a year since she passed. But hopefully it’s not too late to say rest in peace, lady who lived across the street.

PAGES SIX & SEVEN:

Art:

Jamaican Visual Artists Celebrate Jamaica 50 in Washington

Exhibit: Outward Reach: Seven Jamaican Photographers and New Media Artists

Reviewed by: John Deamond

PULL QUOTE (p6) Of course, this exhibition was not only designed to show how amazing Jamaican photography can look. Through the lens of a contested medium, Outward Reach investigates feelings of separation and duality from artists who are Jamaican by birth or identity, but who currently reside in the United States.

PULL QUOTE (p7) The work on exhibit wrestles with complex issues of personal and national identity that have no simple answers. It manages to do so, however, in a way that remains hopeful and intent on the future that the AMA seeks to represent. It’s as if Bishop intends in Outward Reach to rebuild the Folly Mansion that was so instrumental in her own past, as well as in the disintegration of positive relations between the US and Jamaica.

PICS: Outward Reach installation big at top of page

Chung

Chung2

Cosmo heirloom

Cosmo high tide

Bishop Folly

Bishop2

Jodie

Washington, DC – Walking into Outward Reach, the first thing I noticed was how wildly different the works in the exhibition are. True, they are all photography and video, but they bear about as much resemblance to one another as a da Vinci does to a Warhol. This exhibition does not play off of visual similarities; quite the opposite: Outward Reach intends to introduce the viewer to the range of Jamaican photography. Jacqueline Bishop, the exhibition’s curator, says, “Photography in the islands is a kind of ugly stepsister or brother in the visual arts, and that’s just not so, given all the potentials of the form.” It’s safe to say she has revealed that Jamaican photographers have harnessed this potential.

Of course, this exhibition was not only designed to show how amazing Jamaican photography can look. Through the lens of a contested medium, Outward Reach investigates feelings of separation and duality from artists who are Jamaican by birth or identity, but who currently reside in the United States. Bishop admits, “I often feel in exile myself, though I am not sure where I am in exile from… and I often wonder if I return ‘home’ to Jamaica, how well I would fit into and function in the society, even as Jamaica and Jamaican is the identity I am most sure of…” This literal change of the “exile’s” homeland, however, is only part of the story. Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, an artist in the exhibition, comments that an immigrant’s memory of her homeland changes over time, becoming more idyllic, “and perhaps comes to represent something else entirely”.

It is fitting that this exhibition is in Washington, DC, the land of the displaced, of the emigrant. In a culture, and, indeed, a world, where more people are leaving their childhood homes to find work or some other new hope, Outward Reach strikes a chord in us all. Like Cosmo Whyte, another artist in the exhibition, we all have some imposed identity that threatens to strangle our old lives. And, like Whyte, many of us feel bound by our new social status, wishing to be free of the responsibilities and expectations it entails.

Whyte’s life-sized photographs of a man being suffocated with neckties convey this message succinctly. He stands barefoot by the water in a natural area, wearing a business suit and dozens of ties. The ties have taken on a life of their own, wrapping his face and entangling his body. He is eventually shown on his back underwater, with only the ties sticking out. But as with most of the work in this exhibition, the battle between traditional and modern worlds is only part of the story. The series is titled Heirloom, and the ties are his father’s. The ties that bind him are from his past in Jamaica, yet allude to Whyte’s present in the US. This confusion of symbols forces US viewers to confront their stereotypes. They have to understand that people in Jamaica do, in fact, wear ties.

Other artists in the exhibition confront American stereotypes more directly. Andrea Chung’s Come Back to Jamaica takes old advertisements for Sandals resorts and removes Jamaicans from the picture. These ads were meant to lure tourists to Jamaica with promises of sand and sun, idealising the lives of native Jamaicans. However, the resorts were placed such that tourists would never see Jamaicans, except in service jobs. The ‘natives’ were rendered invisible. Chung describes this situation by replacing any native presence with an imprinted blank silhouette. These vanishing, idealised natives are also a meditation on Chung’s relationship to Jamaica, as the only artist in the exhibition who was not born there. The daughter of Jamaican parents, Chung’s view of the country risks being controlled by the same stereotypes that she is fighting to break down.

Bishop’s own work focuses around her grandparents’ house in the rural area of Nonsuch, where she spent her summers as a child. Through digital photo collage, she evokes the reordering of past memories, where events blend together, and some blur out while others stand in sharp relief. As with the rest of the exhibition, this story is not only about the idyllic memory of a past that cannot be reached. The house that her grandparents lived in was the infamous Folly Mansion, a symbol of the crumbling of positive relations between the US and Jamaica.

Outward Reach’s multitude of ideas and approaches to photography mimics Bishop’s artistic practice. Far from being limited to photography, her practice also includes teaching, writing, painting, poetry, and filmmaking. Of the other six artists in the exhibition, only Radcliffe Roye is solely a photographer, and even he has begun experimenting with abstract painting. This is partly due to the marginalisation of photography in Jamaican culture – photographers feel that they have to be adept at another medium to be considered “real” artists. However, it also comes from the duality of these artists’ identities. This further reinforces the themes of the exhibition: none of these artists can be defined by only one thing. Like the protagonist in Tal Rickards’ video, they are wanderers, displaced and searching for something that may never have existed.

That this mirrors Bishop’s statement quoted above is no accident. She freely admits that the feelings in her work are autobiographical, even when the facts are not. Through her choices in Outward Reach, Bishop weaves her own story out of the work of others, creating an account of an immigrant’s attempts to reconcile her past and present lives. The story that she creates is one that she has been contemplating since her poetry collection Snapshots from Istanbul in 2009, which describes Ovid’s exile. Bishop states that, “Not only was I seeking to understand Ovid’s predicament in this book, but the predicament of many different people, including several artists, who feel the need to create and create things that might not be acceptable to their society. And, ultimately, I guess I was trying to understand my own predicament as a creator who is creating far from home.” This book considered not only the plight of the immigrant, but also of artists who create work that has been marginalised by their societies. This marginalisation of photography in Jamaica has kept the exhibited artists in the United States. Bishop says that there are more opportunities to succeed here, no matter how much she wishes she could go back to Jamaica: “There’s a community of artists here, and the great wide world also, and that does not exist in Jamaica.” She believes that Jamaicans in the US can come to grips with their dual identity and turn it into something positive.

Fostering a dual identity realises the goals of Outward Reach’s venue, the Art Museum of the Americas (AMA). The AMA seeks to showcase a constructive vision for the future of the Americas. This mission runs a great risk of producing exhibitions that are either propagandistic or clichéd, but has been realised quite successfully in Outward Reach. The work on exhibit wrestles with complex issues of personal and national identity that have no simple answers. It manages to do so, however, in a way that remains hopeful and intent on the future that the AMA seeks to represent. It’s as if Bishop intends in Outward Reach to rebuild the Folly Mansion that was so instrumental in her own past, as well as in the disintegration of positive relations between the US and Jamaica.

It’s interesting that the Art Museum of the Americas decided to host an exhibition of photography, a sidelined medium in Jamaican art, in celebration of the country’s golden jubilee. Instead of honoring the history of Jamaica, the museum has chosen to look to the country’s future, working to put a newer, edgier face on Caribbean art. Bishop had originally planned to put together a survey of Jamaican art, but she and Andres Navia, the AMA’s director, were drawn most strongly to the photography they were considering. Bishop realised that she could not remember an exhibition ever solely featuring Jamaican photographers, and decided that now was the time. According to Fabian Goncalves, the AMA’s exhibition coordinator, the goal was not to exhibit “photography that informs us about an event, but as a contemporary art form”, showing that there is a place for photography in the world of Jamaican fine art.

That place, for now, is the Art Museum of the Americas’ F Street Gallery, a hallway gallery in the main building of the Organisation of American States. While it is true that this isn’t the greatest space, the location can’t be beat. Few contemporary art exhibitions can get a space on the National Mall, within view of the Washington Monument and just a few blocks from the White House. This position in the middle of Washington, DC, both a major political and arts centre, ensures that Outward Reach will get the exposure necessary to bring new attention and recognition to Jamaican photography and new media arts.

Outward Reach: Seven Jamaican Photographers and New Media Artists is on view at the Art Museum of the Americas’ F Street Gallery until September 28, 2012. The AMA is located at 1889 F St, NW, Washington, DC 20006. The museum is free and open to the public Monday – Friday, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm.

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