Jamaican sculptor Laura Facey will launch the first of its kind, an interactive digital iArtBook, using video, audio and text (the latter by renowned art critic Edward Lucie Smith) in July at The International Slavery Museum (ISM), National Museums Liverpool, England.

The iArtBook, Radiant Earth, brings together sculpture featured in the Their Spirits exhibition, currently showing ISM, Liverpool and work completed in the last decade. This virtual book gives unique insight into her artistic practice. Lucie-Smith, along with Facey, will give a talk at the time of the launch.

Facey’s seminal 2006 work Their Spirits Gone Before Them is the centre piece of the Their Spirits exhibit.

‘Their Spirits’ has been endorsed by Jamaica’s Ministry of Culture as being “among the world’s most celebrated works of art that encapsulate and embody the spirit and memory of our ancestors…” and has been granted the use of UNESCO’s “Project supported by the UNESCO Slave Route Project” logo as a work which “contributes to the reflection on the ethical dimension of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery”.

Dr Richard Benjamin, head of the International Slavery Museum, said: “We are absolutely thrilled to be able to bring this stunning and iconic work to Liverpool. It is a major coup for the museum to be able to display Laura Facey’s remarkable work which will have a strong impact on our visitors.” He added: “It’s also significant that ‘Their Spirits’ is going on show in Liverpool – a city central to transatlantic slavery.”

The Their Spirits Gone Before Them sculpture, which explores the indescribable cruelty of slavery as well as the resilient, transcendent and reverent nature of the human spirit, is a cottonwood canoe, floating on a wave of sugar cane. Inside the canoe are 1,357 resin miniatures of Redemption Song, a monument which stands at the ceremonial entrance to Emancipation Park in Kingston, Jamaica.

In 2011, the sculpture embarked on an ambitious journey leaving the World Bank’s Washington, DC headquarters and after travelling across the Atlantic for a brief stay at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London, the canoe will remain at ISM, Liverpool through to September 2014.

The intention is for the canoe to retrace the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Route and make stops at the major ports involved and others where the installation can be used as a starting point for wider discussion and activities relating to slavery — with the main aim being reconciliation and aiding the release of negative patterns and pain wrought by slavery.

Radiant Earth will be available on iBooks on the July 19, 2014.

Announcing the Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing

Alice Yard, the contemporary art space and network based in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, has announced the establishment of a new prize which aims to encourage writing on Caribbean art and artists, and identify emerging voices in contemporary Caribbean art criticism.

The Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing is an annual award for an original piece of critical writing on contemporary Caribbean art by a Caribbean writer aged 35 or under, conceived and administered by the co-directors of Alice Yard.

The winner of the prize will receive a cash award of US$1,000 and publication in The Caribbean Review of Books. The inaugural Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing opens for entries on May 16, 2014, with a deadline of July 14. The winner will be announced in September 2014 to commemorate Alice Yard’s eighth anniversary.

The guidelines explain that a piece of writing entered for the prize does not have to be a conventional critical essay or review. The prize administrators are interested in writing that investigates different forms and genres, as long as it is driven by genuine critical engagement.

The 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing will be decided by a panel of three judges, who will select a winner and two honourable mentions. The 2014 judges are Krista Thompson, associate professor of art history at Northwestern University; Charles Campbell, artist and chief curator at the National Gallery of Jamaica; and Courtney J Martin, assistant professor of the history of art and architecture at Brown University.

Alice Yard co-directors Sean Leonard, Christopher Cozier, and Nicholas Laughlin will administer the prize and support the panel of judges in their deliberations.

Alice Yard is a contemporary art space and network based in Port of Spain, which since 2006 has run a programme of artists’ projects and residencies, performances, discussions, readings, and film screenings. The Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing is part of a continuing effort to open spaces for critical engagement and dialogue with contemporary artists across the Caribbean and its diaspora.

Full entry guidelines are available at the Alice Yard website: aliceyard.blogspot.com/2014/05/2014-alice-yard-prize-for-art-writing.html

For queries about eligibility requirements or the submission process, please contact the prize administrators at helloaliceyard@gmail.com

Speech-Writing Workshop at UWI, Mona

The Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Mona will host a speech-writing workshop to be held on the first three Saturdays in June: 7, 14 and 21, from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm in the New Education Lecture Theatre (NELT), Faculty of Humanities and Education. The workshop will be useful to professional speech writers, such as public relations practitioners and executive assistants, as well as non-professionals who want to improve their speech-writing skills. The workshop will be led by Emeritus Professor Edward Baugh, former public orator of the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus.

Now retired from the UWI, Professor Baugh has garnered an international reputation as an authority on Anglophone Caribbean poetry in general and on the work of Derek Walcott in particular. As public orator, he has delighted and entertained audiences at the university’s annual graduation ceremonies with his presentation of citations for honorary graduates. At the workshop, Professor Baugh will share with participants the knowledge, skills and techniques in the art of speech-writing which he has accumulated over his many years as a public speaker and speech-writer.

Members of the public are invited to e-mail litsworkshop@gmail.com or call the department at 927-2217 for further details. Spaces are limited.

NEW IN BOOKS

African-American religion born in Caribbean slavery

Jamaican-born Baptist minister and professor of theology & ethics at Emory University, Atlanta, USA, Rev Dr Noel Erskine says that the black religious experience was born in the Caribbean, where the majority of slaves were taken from their native Africa.

He argues that while the black religious experience in the US was markedly different because African-Americans were a political and cultural minority, the history of the black church, as it developed both in the USA and the Caribbean after the arrival of enslaved Africans, bore many similarities.

Making his assertions in his latest book Plantation Church, Erskine says that “the massive Afro-Caribbean population in the Caribbean was able to establish a form of Christianity that preserved African gods and practices, but fused them with Christian teachings, resulting in religions such as Cuba’s Santeria.

He told guests at a book launch at The Mico University College on Wednesday, April 30, 2014, that “the Plantation Church became a place of solace and resistance that provided its members with a sense of kinship, not only to each other but also to their ancestral past”.

Noting that despite their common origins, the Caribbean and African-American church are almost never studied together, Rev Erskine said, “Plantation Church examines the parallel histories of these two strands of the black church showing where their historical ties remain strong and where different circumstances have led them down unexpectedly divergent paths.”

In so doing, he said, “Plantation Church illuminates the histories, theologies, politics and practices of both branches of the black church.”

OBIT

Poet, Author Maya Angelou dies at 86

Maya Angelou was gratified, but not surprised by her extraordinary fortune.

Her story awed millions. The young single mother who worked at strip clubs to earn a living later danced and sang on stages around the world. A black woman born poor wrote and recited the most popular presidential inaugural poem in history. A childhood victim of rape, shamed into silence, eventually told her story through one of the most widely read memoirs of the past few decades.

Angelou, a Renaissance woman and cultural pioneer, died last Wednesday morning at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, her son, Guy B Johnson, said in a statement. The 86-year-old had been a professor of American studies at Wake Forest University since 1982.

She was an actress, singer and dancer in the 1950s and 1960s and broke through as an author in 1970 with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which became standard (and occasionally censored) reading and made Angelou, with her deep majestic voice, one of the first black women to enjoy mainstream success. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was the start of a multipart autobiography that continued through the decades and captured a life of hopeless obscurity and triumphant, kaleidoscopic fame.

The world was watching in 1993 when she read her cautiously hopeful On the Pulse of the Morning at President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration. Her confident performance openly delighted Clinton and made publishing history by making a poem a best-seller, if not a critical favourite. For President George W Bush, she read another poem, Amazing Peace, at the 2005 Christmas tree-lighting ceremony at the White House. Presidents honoured her in return with a National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honour. In 2013, she received an honorary National Book Award.

She famously was a mentor to Oprah Winfrey, whom she befriended when Winfrey was still a local television reporter, and often appeared on her friend’s talk show programme. She mastered several languages and published not just poetry, but advice books, cookbooks and children’s stories. She wrote music, plays and screenplays, received an Emmy nomination for her acting in Roots, and never lost her passion for dance, the art she considered closest to poetry.

Her very name as an adult was a reinvention. Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St Louis and raised in Stamps, Ark, and San Francisco, moving back and forth between her parents and her grandmother. She was smart and fresh to the point of danger, packed off by her family to California after sassing a white store clerk in Arkansas. Other times, she didn’t speak at all: At age seven, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and didn’t talk for years. She learned by reading, and listening.

At age nine, she was writing poetry. By 17, she was a single mother. In her early 20s, she danced at a strip joint, ran a brothel, was married, and then divorced. But by her mid-20s, she was performing at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, where she shared billing with another future star, Phyllis Diller. She also spent a few days with Billie Holiday, who was kind enough to sing a lullaby to Angelou’s son, Guy, surly enough to heckle her off the stage and astute enough to tell her: “You’re going to be famous. But it won’t be for singing.”

After renaming herself Maya Angelou for the stage (“Maya” was a childhood nickname, “Angelou” a variation of her husband’s name), she toured in Porgy and Bess and Jean Genet’s The Blacks and danced with Alvin Ailey. She worked as a coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and lived for years in Egypt and Ghana, where she met Nelson Mandela, a longtime friend; and Malcolm X, to whom she remained close until his assassination, in 1965. Three years later, she was helping King organise the Poor People’s March in Memphis, Tenn., where the civil rights leader was slain on Angelou’s 40th birthday.

“Every year, on that day, Coretta and I would send each other flowers,” Angelou said of King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, who died in 2006.

Angelou was little known outside the theatrical community until I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which might not have happened if James Baldwin hadn’t persuaded Angelou, still grieving over King’s death, to attend a party at Jules Feiffer’s house. Feiffer was so taken by Angelou that he mentioned her to Random House editor Bob Loomis, who persuaded her to write a book by daring her into it, saying that it was “nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature”.

Angelou’s memoir was occasionally attacked, for seemingly opposite reasons. In a 1999 essay in Harper’s, author Francine Prose criticised “Caged Bird” as “manipulative” melodrama. Meanwhile, Angelou’s passages about her rape and teen pregnancy have made it a perennial on the American Library Association’s list of works that draw complaints from parents and educators.

“‘I thought that it was a mild book. There’s no profanity,” Angelou told the AP. “It speaks about surviving, and it really doesn’t make ogres of many people. I was shocked to find there were people who really wanted it banned, and I still believe people who are against the book have never read the book.”

Angelou appeared on several TV programmes, notably the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries Roots. She was nominated for a Tony Award in 1973 for her appearance in the play Look Away. She directed the film Down in the Delta, about a drug-wrecked woman who returns to the home of her ancestors in the Mississippi Delta. She won three Grammys for her spoken-word albums and in 2013 received an honorary National Book Award for her contributions to the literary community.

In North Carolina, she lived in an 18-room house and taught American Studies at Wake Forest University. She was also a member of the board of trustees for Bennett College, a private school for black women in Greensboro. Angelou hosted a weekly satellite radio show for XM’s Oprah & Friends channel.

She remained close enough to the Clintons that in 2008 she supported Hillary Rodham Clinton’s candidacy over the ultimately successful run of the country’s first black president, Barack Obama. But a few days before Obama’s inauguration, she was clearly overjoyed. She told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette she would be watching it on television “somewhere between crying and praying and being grateful and laughing when I see faces I know”.

Active on the lecture circuit, she gave commencement speeches and addressed academic and corporate events across the country. Angelou received dozens of honorary degrees, and several elementary schools were named for her. As she approached her 80th birthday, she decided to study at the Missouri-based Unity Church, which advocates healing through prayer.

“I was in Miami and my son (Guy Johnson, her only child) was having his 10th operation on his spine. I felt really done in by the work I was doing, people who had expected things of me,” said Angelou, who then recalled a Unity church service she attended in Miami.

“The preacher came out – a young black man, mostly a white church – and he came out and said, ‘I have only one question to ask, and that is, “Why have you decided to limit God?'” And I thought, ‘That’s exactly what I’ve been doing.’ So then he asked me to speak, and I got up and said, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.’ And I said it about 50 times, until the audience began saying it with me, ‘Thank you, THANK YOU!'”

Book Bag:

Between heaven and hell

Sitting here in limbo

Waiting for the tide to flow

Sitting here in limbo

Knowing that I have to go…

— Jimmy Cliff, Sitting in Limbo

One of Jimmy Cliff’s most wistful songs, this one written in 1971, came to mind as I was reading Esther Figueroa’s recently published novel — described as arguably Jamaica’s first “environmental novel”.

Limbo is, of course, a state of not doing anything. You’re not heading in any direction. While Cliff sounded calm enough in his song, quietly contemplating his next move, the hero of Dr Figueroa’s novel is far from satisfied with her situation – and that of Jamaica in general. Flora is a feisty Jamaican woman approaching middle age, who heads an environmental NGO. Her mood veers between nervous anxiety and restless frustration throughout much of the novel, and she curses regularly. She cannot sit quietly in limbo, at all. Waiting for something to happen does not suit her temperament.

There are different kinds of limbo. The cover of the book depicts the “limbo” that was once an amusing attraction for the tourists (in the fifties and sixties) with “natives” bending over backwards under a pole, while others shake maracas playfully and beat drums. This reference to Jamaica’s tourism “product” is clever, and ironic. Flora’s expeditions around the island expose the negative impact of all-inclusive hotels on the environment and local people. She sees the monstrous Spanish hotels along the north coast, and in particular the cruise ship pier and the construction of a fake “Historic Falmouth” with oversized parking lots for buses. Of course, we know of the wholesale destruction of coastal mangrove forests that took place to create these tourist havens (heavens?). Flora is also angry at a place called Sea Fun World, where the dolphins are “better off than when they’re living in the wild” (oh, sure…)

But let’s get to the real limbo, now. This is the limbo of Dante’s Inferno, between heaven and all those circles of hell. It’s a place where there are no struggles or torments; but those dwelling there are waiting for redemption, in the hope of reaching heaven. They just sit around there, powerless, waiting for their fate to be determined. Which will it be: heaven or hell? In the novel, the question is asked, “Which circle of hell is reserved for those who have done irreparable damage?”

“Forget vision…It’s about money and power,” says Flora in one of her moments of deep cynicism; she is talking about the government’s vision, or rather lack of it. But she doesn’t have much time for philosophising. She takes the reader along at a rollicking pace, moving through intrigues personal and political, complex deals and corrupt manoeuvrings, family entanglements, love affairs past and present – even a murder mystery. Flora may complain of exhaustion, but her life is never dull. We meet crusading journalists, shady businessmen, wise fishermen, unscrupulous developers and influential talk show hosts. It’s great fun.

Woven into the narrative is a moving and very personal tribute to one particular person: a journalist, a fierce environmental campaigner and a good and true soul – one who is no longer with us. He is a dear friend of Flora’s, and if we know Jamaica at all, we will quickly recognise him (as we may half-recognise some other characters in the novel). The book is dedicated to him, as well as to environmental activist Diana McCaulay — who also heads her own non-governmental organisation, Jamaica Environment Trust.

Flora tackles all of Jamaica’s major environmental concerns head-on. Apart from unsustainable tourism, these include the choking tide of plastic on our seashores, toxic waste, over-fishing, the devastating impact of bauxite mining on rural communities. She does not lecture the reader, however. She discusses, she argues, she seeks to persuade, she uses all her social skills to try to influence others. But the “everlasting arguments” exhaust her. She feels the burden of being an activist with little support. At one point, Flora realises she is “absolutely sick of trying to save human beings from themselves and from destroying the planet.”

And as events unfold, Flora is increasingly seeking to bring balance into her life. There are interludes of rest, enjoyment, sheer pleasure. Her best friend Lilac cooks delicious meals for her; I enjoyed the mouth-watering descriptions of Jamaican food, in particular — cocoa tea, fish and bammy from Port Royal, fragrant cornmeal porridge and much more. One of my favourite chapters describes a visit to Kingston’s Coronation Market with Lilac, where an abundance of local fruits and vegetables is heaped into the van in preparation for an uptown party, complete with soca music. A fishing trip, an escape by boat to a small island, where she stays overnight, sleeping in a hammock with her lover. These are the kind of things one dreams about doing in Jamaica. I think the word I am searching for is idyllic.

These moments of respite, amidst Flora’s weariness and frustration, express her profound love for Jamaica (and one senses, the author’s, too). But the book does not portray a “Come to Jamaica and feel irie!” prettified Jamaica; far from it. There is nothing sentimental about Flora’s non-negotiable, unequivocal love for her home, Jamaica — the land, and the “real” people. Flora simply cares, deeply, for her country, and she has fought for it. She travels, she has studied overseas. But we know she does not want to live anywhere else; why should she?

The message is clear: This island of Jamaica has riches, abundant. We don’t have to tear her apart and rob her of them. She can keep them, and we can nurture them, because they will benefit all of us, for generations to come.

As Bob Marley once sang (and I think he was talking about those “big men” Flora had to deal with):”Think you’re in heaven, but you’re living in hell.” Limbo is, perhaps, the worst option. But the novel ends hopefully, in a small quiet place by the sea, where the breeze blows and the light plays over land and water.

This book is not about Jamaica. It is, truly, Jamaica.

Limbo is published by Arcade in hardcover, and is available at Jamaican bookstores and on amazon.com.

— Emma Lewis

Love Wounds

Chapter 19

Was my miscarriage, alone there in that bathroom stall at my office, the beginning of the end for me and Martin? In hindsight, I see that it most certainly was. I had Dr Johnny — by far the best of all the therapists I’d seen — to thank for making me realise that I’d created a fiction about the true state of my relationship with Martin, after I lost the baby, I mean. That the story of our eventual, inevitable, unravelling, the blame I’d heaped on him, all of it was in fact a case of me reconfiguring the facts to suit my aim of receiving sympathy for anyone who’d listen to me, the wronged woman, the injured party.

He returned from his football workshop later that week to find me looking as outwardly normal as could be. It was a Friday night and I’d just returned home from work followed by supermarket shopping and was helping Eulee to unpack the grocery bags in the kitchen.

I heard his key turn in the front door and felt a twist of apprehension when he called out, “Greta! Baby, where are you?”

“Miss Greta-” Eulee began, blinking rapidly as she vibrated with unsolicited advice. But I cut her off with a glare, a raised index finger and a hiss. “Shut it!”

Besides my doctor and me, and, I imagined, a couple ancillary workers that had to scrub down the bathroom at work after I’d haemorrhaged all over it, Eulee was the only person in my circle of influence who even knew I was pregnant. Now that I’d lost the baby, why did Martin even need to know what had happened?

He entered the kitchen and hugged me to himself for a long time while Eulee hummed self-righteously on the fringes. “I missed you,” he said, when he eventually pulled away. He held me away from him and peered at my face. I smelt his cologne, the citrusy scent that always made me think of him, made me glad to be his girlfriend. “You look good enough to eat. How you feeling? You look better than the last time I saw you. You got over the acid thing, then.”

He rested oily paper and foil packets on the counter. “I brought some jerk pork and bammy for you. I wasn’t sure you’d want it but you’ll have it, yeah?”

“I’m good,” I said softly. “Fine.” Martin had mistaken my nausea for a post-traumatic response from having witnessed that act of violence carried out against Desrene. Why did he need to be made any wiser?

He opened the jerk and took a nibble before popping a piece in my mouth.

“I missed you too,” I said, but I wondered if I meant it.

Lying to him came easy after that. It wasn’t even big things, too, but little things. Stupid things. Like telling him I was somewhere when I wasn’t. Telling him I’d do something, when I knew I didn’t plan to. The first time I remember lying so outrageously was one evening after I left work and ducked into a theatre to watch a movie. During the intermission I saw that I had a few missed calls from him and when I returned his call I fabricated a complicated story about having an emergency meeting at the bank with the top brass. Honestly, I don’t even know why I did it. It was stupid; I didn’t have any reason to tell him lies.

I’d unconsciously begun the process of separating from him. Why did I pull away? It wasn’t like the pulling away, swift and ruthless, that I’d experienced with the guy I’d been with right after college, Dizzy, for whom I’d become pregnant. We’d both felt we were too young to begin a family and so we’d decided on an abortion. Secretly, I felt I wanted better for myself and my unborn child than a man whose given name was actually Dizzy. Because it spoke to who he in fact was as a person. But that’s another story for another time. Within six weeks of the abortion, we’d broken up. Which is, according to the literature, what happens more often than not when couples, especially unmarried ones, decide to go that way. In a way, the break-up is a response to the reality that the relationship is in trouble, which it almost certainly is if both parties are willing to go to those extremes to keep their lives separate, uncomplicated.

And then there was this: I slept with somebody. Somebody else…

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK

TAXIMAN

By Earl McKenzie

With photocopied pages of the Bible on his lap

he negotiated the Mammon of the streets, reading a verse or two

while waiting for the lights to change, or while his engine throttled.

I wondered about his theology of potholes, his theodicy of traffic fatalities,

his spirituality of rising gas prices, and the hermeneutics with which he read the sudden and dramatic appearances of pedestrians and goats in front of his engine.

The Holy Writ did not prevent him from swearing at other motorists.

His preference for crooked back-lanes showed his belief

that straight is the way that leads to the hindrances of traffic lights, loss of income,

and perhaps the police. We were grateful that the sacred writings on his lap

may have played a role in his decision not to overcharge us.

Clouds

By Jean Goulbourne

All my years

upon the earth

I have contemplated

Clouds.

In my infant dreams

I slept upon them

loving their angel softness,

their closeness to heaven’s skies.

I have seen clouds as blankets,

as cirrus wool

upon a lamb’s back.

I have seen them grey with threats

or silver with sunlight.

Sunset touches clouds with orange.

Sunrise sees them

silver yellow,

dazzling with brilliance.

Clouds…

Now they kiss the blue

like feathers.

The wind has pulled them haywire

between its fingers

and now they look like white pen-strokes,

splendid,

beyond the glistening elegance

of the palm trees

in the sun.

Season of fear

By Nicholas Alexander

The Friday afternoon heats up

to the pace of feet to and from

work and school. The cup

of life passed from weak to strong

predicting Messiah’s death so near

in this season, sparking fear.

The golden glare of tropical heat

is anything but the normal sign

associated with this day. Feet

frisk to their destiny – time

speeds up; tradition calling,

a verdict cast, idols falling.

The men are quiet, the music none,

the faces pale though dark;

so frigid the rays of the sun,

they seem to reflect the heart

of those in mourning for their king:

not Christ but a Kartel of sin.