The University of the West Indies, Mona, Faculty of Humanities and Education (FHE) will host two book launches during the University Research Days 2014 activities. Abolition and Plantation Management in Jamaica, 1807-1838 by Dr Dave St Aubyn Gosse will be launched on Friday, February 21 at 1:00 pm at the Neville Hall Lecture Theatre (N1). It will be immediately followed, at the same venue, by the launch of Ontologized Ethics – New Essays in African Meta-Ethics, edited by Professor John Ayotunde Bewaji and Elvis Imafidon.

Dr Dave Gosse is a lecturer in the Department of History, UWI, Mona. He has a PhD from Howard University and teaches courses in African, Latin American, Caribbean and North American History, He specialises in 19th- and 20th-century Caribbean history. In Abolition and Plantation Management, 1807-1838, Gosse argues that while Caribbean historians have identified economic forces, along with humanitarianism and the human agency of the enslaved people, as combining to contribute to the abolition of slavery, they have largely ignored the important role of plantation management. Gosse convincingly proposes that white planters contributed to their own decline since they failed to reform their management practices given the exigencies of the 1807 Abolition Act. Abolition and Plantation Management, 1807-1838 is published by the UWI Press.

Dr John Ayotunde Isola Bewaji, is professor of philosophy at Mona. His previous books include Beauty and Culture (2003), An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (2007), Narratives of Struggle (2012) and Black Aesthetics (2013). A former Rhodes Visiting Lecturer, he was a Philosophy Citizen Ambassador to Russia and Hungary, and recipient of the UWI New Initiative Award for Research as well as a Caribbean Exchange Scholar to City University New York (CUNY) before being awarded the Guggenheim Research Fellowship in Philosophy. He was the founding President of International Society for African Philosophy and Studies and founding editor of the Caribbean Journal of Philosophy.

Ontologized Ethics – New Essays in African Meta-Ethics examines an often neglected meta-ethical issue in African philosophical discourse, which is, the extent to which one’s orientation of being, or idea of what is, does, or should determine one’s concept of the good or moral. The book is published by Lexington Books (A Division of Rowman and Littlefield Press).

The public is invited to attend.

PAGE TWO:

Writer credits: Hazel Campbell, Jean Goulbourne, Sharon Leach

Bookshelf:

>>>NEW IN LITERATURE FOR FEBRUARY

This Dark Road to Mercy by Wiley Cash

The critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller A Land More Kind Than Home – hailed as “a powerfully moving debut that reads as if Cormac McCarthy decided to rewrite Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird” (Richmond Times Dispatch) – returns with a novel of love and atonement, blood and vengeance, set in western North Carolina, involving two young sisters, a wayward father, and an enemy determined to see him pay for his sins.

After their mother’s unexpected death, 12-year-old Easter and her six-year-old sister Ruby are adjusting to life in foster care when their errant father, Wade, suddenly appears. Since Wade signed away his legal rights, the only way he can get his daughters back is to steal them away in the night.

Brady Weller, the girls’ court-appointed guardian, begins looking for Wade, and he quickly turns up unsettling information linking Wade to a recent armoured car heist, one with a whopping $14.5 million missing. But Brady Weller isn’t the only one hunting the desperate father. Robert Pruitt, a shady and mercurial man nursing a years-old vendetta, is also determined to find Wade and claim his due.

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris

Robert Harris returns to the thrilling historical fiction he has so brilliantly made his own. This is the story of the infamous Dreyfus affair told as a chillingly dark, hard-edged novel of conspiracy and espionage.

Paris in 1895. Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish officer, has just been convicted of treason, sentenced to life imprisonment at Devil’s Island, and stripped of his rank in front of a baying crowd of 20,000. Among the witnesses to his humiliation is Georges Picquart, the ambitious, intellectual, recently promoted head of the counter-espionage agency that “proved” Dreyfus had passed secrets to the Germans. At first, Picquart firmly believes in Dreyfus’s guilt. But it is not long after Dreyfus is delivered to his desolate prison that Picquart stumbles on information that leads him to suspect that there is still a spy at large in the French military. As evidence of the most malignant deceit mounts and spirals toward the uppermost levels of government, Picquart is compelled to question not only the case against Dreyfus but also his most deeply held beliefs about his country, and about himself.

One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by BJ Novak

One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories is an endlessly entertaining, surprisingly sensitive, and startlingly original debut that signals the arrival of a brilliant new voice in American fiction in the form no less than BJ Novak of The Office fame.

A boy wins a $100,000 prize in a box of Frosted Flakes – only to discover that claiming the winnings might unravel his family. A woman sets out to seduce motivational speaker Tony Robbins – turning for help to the famed motivator himself. A new arrival in Heaven, overwhelmed with options, procrastinates over a long-ago promise to visit his grandmother. We meet Sophia, the first artificially intelligent being capable of love, who falls for a man who might not be ready for it himself; a vengeance-minded hare, obsessed with scoring a rematch against the tortoise who ruined his life; and post-college friends who try to figure out how to host an intervention in the era of Facebook. Along the way, we learn why wearing a red T-shirt every day is the key to finding love, how February got its name, and why the stock market is sometimes just . . . down.

The Guts by Roddy Doyle

The distinct wit and lively, authentic dialogue that are the hallmarks of Roddy Doyle’s fiction are on a full display as he reintroduces Jimmy Rabbitte in this follow-up to his beloved debut novel The Commitments.

In the 1980s Jimmy Rabbitte formed the Commitments, a ragtag, blue-collar collective of Irish youths determined to bring the soul music stylings of James Brown and Percy Sledge to Dublin. Time proves a great equaliser for Jimmy as he’s now approaching 50 with a loving wife, four kids, and a recent cancer diagnosis that leaves him feeling shattered and frightened.

Jimmy still loves his music, and he still loves to hustle – his new thing is finding old bands and then finding the people who loved them enough to pay for their resurrected albums. As he battles his illness on his path through Dublin, Jimmy manages to reconnect with his own past, most notably Commitments guitarist Liam “Outspan” Foster and the still beautiful back-up vocalist Imelda Quirk. Jimmy also learns the trumpet, reunites with his long-lost brother, and rediscovers the joys of fatherhood.

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>>>LITERARY FESTIVAL

Two Seasons Talking Trees Fiesta on today [2 pics: Roland, Igoni]

A diverse mix of readings by short-story writers, poets, journalists and a playwright will feature in today’s Two Seasons Talking Trees – Kingston Edition, at Lillian’s Restaurant, UTech, Jamaica, from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm.

Presented by Two Seasons Guest House (www.2seasonsguesthouse.com), located in Treasure Beach, this is the first staging of the Talking Trees Literary Fiesta in Kingston. The fiesta was previously held on the grounds of the Two Seasons Guest House in Treasure Beach in 2011 and 2012.

Award-winning Jamaican short-story writer and novelist Roland Watson-Grant, whose first public reading in Jamaica was at Talking Trees in 2012, says he is looking forward to participating again. “I have always enjoyed being a part of anything that seeks to form a different opinion when it comes to literature and the arts… I enjoyed the eclectic mix of styles. You could pick from anywhere. There was the old nostalgic style of Jamaica with Easton Lee, and [Nigerian short story writer] Igoni Barrett with experiences that we really do not know about, and then there [was] the more contemporary writing that speaks about living in a neo-colonial society. That kind of mix is good with any literary festival but it is upheld in a real way in Talking Trees.”

Igoni Barrett will also be presenting again at Talking Trees – Kingston Edition. He returns to Jamaica, the birthplace of his father, the novelist Lindsay Barrett (Song for Mumu). Reflecting on his first visit to Jamaica in 2012 to participate in Talking Trees, he says that hearing Jamaican writers at the festival was “the best introduction that a writer could have to Jamaican society”.

Short story writer Ruddy Wallace will be the first reader, with a selection from his gold medal-winning pieces included in the JCDC Golden Anthology. He will be followed by Jean Lowrie-Chin, who will read from her popular book of poetry Souldancing. Another JCDC short-story gold medallist, Carroll Edwards, will then share her work, followed by the Trench Town philosopher, Marlon Thompson, reading from his book of poetry Words from Mamma’s Son.

Dutch journalist Femke Van Zeijl will read from her book, Gin-Tonic & Cholera, which is about city life in six urban centres in sub-Saharan Africa, where she has lived and worked for some 12 years. She will also be sharing slides depicting some of her experiences of Africa. Van Zeijl, who is working on her first novel while visiting Jamaica, says that she is “looking forward to the synergy with other writers,” as now she is finding out there is much more that binds fiction and non-fiction writers than makes them different.

Poet Mel Cooke, author of 11/9 and a regular performer on the Jamaican stage, will read next and will be followed by Roland Watson-Grant. Lilieth Nelson will share pieces from her poetic journey through life in Angles of Reflection. Igoni Barrett will then share excerpts from his newest book, Love is Power or Something Like That.

Barrett is followed by poet Ann-Margaret Lim, who will read from her book of poetry The Festival of the Wild Orchid, which received critical attention last year from the Bocas Literary Festival in Trinidad and Tobago, and also the UK Guardian media company. Missionary and ethnomusicologist Jo-Ann Richards will read from Godincidences, her journal of experiences overseas doing missionary work.

Patrons will be treated to the first public reading of an excerpt of the play, Brotherly Love, written by prolific playwright Patrick Brown. It is the story of two brothers who are married to two sisters and all the complications presented in marriage, family bonds, fidelity – all of which unfolds through high drama and comedy.

The event closes with the work of creative writer Nova Gordon-Bell, head of the UTech School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

The detailed programme with links to information on the readers can be viewed at 2seasonsguesthouse.com/blog/?s=programme

PAGE THREE:

Fiction:

Valentine’s Day lunch

By Hazel Campbell [pic: valentine]

If you are married or in a close relationship, you know the signs that someone else might be moving in on you. Suddenly he is cutting back on meals and wanting more vegetables and fruits in his diet. He is exercising “for health reasons” as he is “not getting any younger”, etc. He is paying more attention to what he wears – unmistakeable signs he wants to impress somebody.

That year, Valentine’s Day would be on a Wednesday. Both of us had grown up in the pre-Valentine’s Day outpouring of sentimental gifts and cards and outings. That was something they did in America. But it had started catching on in Jamaica, and the stores and media were trying to make a big thing out of it here.

On Sunday afternoon, as we usually did, he and I went over the coming week’s activities. It was a ritual we both enjoyed, discussing meetings and strategy in our different occupations. He was in real estate and I in journalism. We bounced ideas off each other with usually very rewarding results.

Well, that Sunday, he mentioned that he had a lunch appointment with a woman from another agency on Wednesday. Something clicked in my thoughts when I remembered that Wednesday was Valentine’s Day.

“You realise,” I said, “that anybody seeing you having lunch with a woman on Valentine’s Day will think you are a couple.”

He gave me a slightly startled look, then sucked his teeth. “You know I am not into that pickney nonsense,” he exclaimed. “You mean all over the city a man and a woman can’t have a lunch appointment without stupid people… Jesus!”

“I would change it,” I advised him.

“Come on, darling,” he purred. “You can’t be serious. We’re too old for that nonsense.”

“You mean the fire burn out,” I teased him.

“I soon show you,” he teased back.

But I had been alerted.

On Wednesday morning, I asked, “Did you change your lunch date?”

He gave me his startled look. “It’s not a date. And no, I didn’t change it.”

“You forgot it’s Valentine’s Day.”

“You can’t be serious!”

“I am. I better come with you to prevent gossip.”

I knew him well enough to know that I thrown him the proverbial curved ball.

“I…I had to make reservations,” he stammered.

“Oh, I can get a table for three instead of two. You know I have influence.”

“You will be bored,” he warned. “It’s business. A new deal our agencies are planning.”

“I am never bored hearing what you are up to.” I smiled. “In any case, the food there is good. I’ll be eating and watching the love birds at the other tables.”

He left before me. I dressed very carefully that morning, a mixture of officewear with a blouse with a flirtatious look that I knew another woman would notice. I knew I had got it right when I reached the office and members of the secretarial pool exclaimed, “Valentine’s date?”

“With my husband,” I replied, with a smirk, just in case any gossip had already started. In a small society, you never know.

I left my car and took a taxi to the restaurant. It was, as I had expected, decorated with red hearts and cupids and other paraphernalia of sentimental lovey-dovey stuff. I was early. I went in and sat at the bar and ordered tonic water. I needed my head to be clear for this luncheon.

He came in with her, and I waved at them. The expression of surprise on her face told me he had not told her I would be there. Coward!

“This is my wife, Melva,” he said to her. Melva, this is Carol from the Arakan Agency. As I told you, we are hammering out a business deal.”

I smiled my sweetest smile. She barely managed to conceal her confusion and he was sweating.

This should be interesting, I thought.

We were shown to a table for three, which raised a few eyebrows. The restaurant was full of intimate tables for two. Even the waiter looked at us strangely.

“I pre-ordered.” he said.

“I know,” I replied. “I added my order. Drinks?”

I could see him trying to pretend that he didn’t know what she wanted to drink. It was really quite funny. I had him by the balls and he knew it. I think he didn’t believe that I would have carried out my threat to join them.

After a while, they began to pretend to be discussing some real estate issues. I took out a notebook in which I scribbled from time to time. From the curious glances at our table I could tell that there was speculation about whether we were ménage à trois. When I caught the couple at the next table looking at us, I winked at them and they hastily looked away.

Halfway through the meal, he asked.”What are you scribbling?”

“Just some ideas for a story,” I replied. “I’ll tell you later.” Later would be all mine, I knew.

They kept up the pretence of discussing business while the meal limped to a close, their food half-eaten, their wine barely sipped. I kept up an encouraging commentary. “This is good! Isn’t it?” When the dessert tray came around I ordered the gooeyest, red and white cake and ice cream concoction. Neither of them wanted dessert and sat uncomfortably making small talk while I enjoyed myself.

After he paid the bill, I threw my final cup of cold water on any simmering fires between them. “Darling,” I said. “You’ll have to drop me back at the office. I took a cab here.”

I wondered if he would be barefaced enough to admit that he had picked her up.

“Something wrong with your car?”

“No,” I simpered at him. “I just wanted to spend a little more time with you.”

He wasn’t fooled. He knew exactly what I was up to. He turned to her, “I’ll go over those figures and get John to call you, Thanks for having lunch with us.” I held on to him as we walked away.

She couldn’t manage a smile. She also knew that their cover had been blown. I smiled in triumph as I imagined her annoyance at having to call a taxi. I wondered if he would try to explain away my presence and whether she would be placated. Somehow, I doubted it. I rather enjoy these games we have to play from time to time. No use kicking up a fuss and issuing threats and ultimatums.

Game over.

Dusk

By Jean Goulbourne

Dusk

You never linger long

You never tell the tales of youth

In day’s old age

Dusk

You beckon rest

To day’s hard toil.

Dusk,

beautiful dusk,

cruel beautiful dusk –

your transience

breaks day’s thought,

breaks day’s heart,

for day, this day

can never see

this world again.

Dusk,

silent dusk,

still silent dusk –

linger awhile,

let day hug herself

in her old age.

PAGE FOUR:

Bookends serial:

Love Wounds [pic: love wounds]

PULL QUOTE: Dr Miller explained that to me once when we were in bed together, after he’d stopped being my shrink. He’d lain back, hands locked behind his head while he stared up at the ceiling and muddled his toes together with mine, and said, “Greta, you don’t really have a moral compass.”

Chapter 5

Bill was my second husband.

Well, technically he was Arnoud’s daughter Anke’s husband. He was the second married man I slept with. Although, if one wanted to stick strictly to technicalities, I didn’t technically sleep with him, I suppose. There was no sleep involved in the short time we spent together. We had what Dr Miller refers to as “congress”. Dr Miller is the starchiest person I’ve ever come across. He is in his early- to mid-40s and sharp as a tack – which was why he had a bustling practice; it had taken a few months for me to score an appointment – but he gives the impression, with his clean-cut looks and sensible dress shirts and silk ties, that he is someone much older. Don’t even get me started on his way of speaking. “Congress”. Not “sex”. Who says that? Sometimes he will use the word “intercourse”. It’s hard to pinpoint when my attraction to him began, or even why. He has that studious look I never go for in a man. Perhaps I find him comforting in a way the woman shrink was not. And not judgemental. As it turned out, he was just as attracted to me, too. Or it could just have been that I was a broken person whose frame of reference was only dysfunction, so that my grasp on morality was tenuous at best. Dr Miller explained that to me once when we were in bed together, after he’d stopped being my shrink. He’d lain back, hands locked behind his head while he stared up at the ceiling and muddled his toes together with mine, and said, “Greta, you don’t really have a moral compass.”

I’d rolled away from him, wanting to ask what the excuse for his immorality was, but realised that I didn’t really want to know. I didn’t want to seem defensive, because I wasn’t, although my body language said otherwise. (By this, I’d been in therapy long enough to be hyper-aware of things like that.) Fact was, in private I referred to my family background as Dysfunction Junction. Say, if someone asked me where I was from, before answering I would always think, but never say out loud, Dysfunction Junction. I’d even make the choo-choo sound of an incoming train in my mind.

But any answer Dr Miller could possibly have given would only dilute the therapy experience for me, which, at the time, I still subscribed to, although with a new therapist that he’d referred me to. What would be the point of knowing that shrinks are just as messed up as their patients? That while they can see the beam in their patient’s eye, they were, alas, unable to see the beam in their own? And, anyway, that was before disillusionment had set in, and I was still hopeful that what appeared to be a temporary derailment from the course of my normal life, brought on by Martin’s rejection of me, would, through the guidance of a trained professional, eventually be sorted out.

When I came back from Amsterdam I booked an emergency session with him right away. I told him about the last time Chester and I had made love, and how it had left me cold at the end when he’d suggested I should meet someone else. “He claimed he was joking,” I complained. “But you know how that is: people say the things they mean most when they disguise them as jokes.”

Dr Miller leaned back in his chair and removed his glasses. “You were offended,” he said. It was a question but it sounded like a statement.

“Um, yes, I was offended.”

“Why?”

“Because we haven’t reached anywhere in our relationship yet and already he’s pawning me off on someone else.”

“I don’t think that I would necessarily see it that way.”

“Well, I took him very seriously.”

“You mean, you took him literally?”

“Yes.”

He was usually good about keep his face devoid of emotions but here, his eyebrows went up.

“It wasn’t as though I went out of my way to snare the first man who came along,” I said.

“OK. Tell me about that.”

When we reached Amsterdam, my brothers and sisters and I all split up. After Arnoud’s son Christiaan’s suicide, his wife and their four children had moved in with Arnoud and my mother. Mummy therefore couldn’t accommodate us all. Stewart and Roland, as the boys, stayed at her home that was overrun with children, toys and pets. She gave her bedroom to the boys while she took the lumpy sofa bed, which wasn’t as selfless as it sounds on paper. We girls had to camp out with Arnoud’s other children: Dixie and Opal stayed with Lars, and I bunked it out with Anke.

I’d of course met Anke at our parents’ wedding; she was cordial enough. Her brothers and her all were. Her husband, American Bill, as I called him, was more relatable, however. He hadn’t travelled with Anke to the States for the wedding so I’d never met him before. He, not unlike my mother, was an outsider who’d married into a foreign family. He spoke the language, of course; you had to if you lived there. (It was jarring to hear my mother now fully conversant in Dutch, but that’s the way it was.) American Bill seemed relieved when I got there and he was able to have a conversation with someone in English. Anke didn’t encourage English around their children, which I thought was unenlightened since the more languages children were fluent in, during this day and age, the better it was for them.

On the first night I stayed at their house he and I stayed up till the wee hours talking and watching American DVDs. We had something else in common: we’d both studied at NYU Stern. We knocked back beers and chatted it up like old friends. Before the end of the night I knew he was unhappy in his marriage with Anke – who often made him feel emasculated, that he wanted desperately to go back home to New York, and that he’d come close to having sex with a black woman during his undergraduate days; it was one of his biggest regrets that he hadn’t. And because I felt a certain kinship and generosity towards him, by the time I crawled into bed that night I knew we would end up horizontally.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK