One of the things I admire best about Bocas it its inclusiveness. Its team has never declared, “No, you’ve got not one drop of Caribbean blood in you, so you’ll be barred at the gates, foreign writer!” This isn’t to say that the overwhelming majority of the festival schedule oughtn’t be about celebrating regional and regional diaspora talent; it should. I think that the heart of the matter is this: that there’s incredible value in inviting exciting, resonant talent to read, participate and share, on our shores. It extends the circle of bookish community even further, and how can this be a bad thing? This is what I had in mind when I listened to Canadian-American writer Rivka Galchen read from her novel, Atmospheric Disturbances.

The plot of her book, without giving away too much, centres on a man in search of his wife, who’s improbably gone missing. In an act of calculated desperation, he returns to the place he met her first, against all reason, but with the instinct of someone struggling to hold on to hope. There was turmoil aplenty in the reading that her colleague, Trinidadian writer Monique Roffey, delivered, following Galchen’s brief but searingly emotive sharing. Roffey’s novel, Archipelago, seems on the surface to concern a man, a little girl, and a dog. (Oh, how much deeper it dives than that.) In the excerpt gifted to the audience, I listened, utterly rapt, to the tale of a journey growing by turns more perilous for unexpected reasons, to the brutally difficult decisions a father must make when precious, terrifying cargo winds up aboard his vessel. Immediately after Roffey’s reading, session moderator, British writer Anita Sethi described it as a “vivid evocation of the pleasures and perils of being at sea”, which struck me as a spot-on assessment.

Both writers were asked by Sethi to describe the sense of journeys that run through their novels. Roffey noted that her stories usually have a sort of biological genesis, but that in this case she felt compelled to chronicle the tale of the antihero’s quest, a non-Odysseus for our times and global concerns. A meteorologist’s pulse throbs at the core of Atmospheric Disturbances, Galchen elaborated, adding that weather is something onto which most emotional states can be mapped. In surprisingly evocative ways, both works of fiction seem to echo a resounding sentiment: that there can be no escaping nature, nor one’s response to it.

The scope and ambition of the novel place demands on a writer, Roffey told the audience – and it’s hard not to admire the willingness, the bravery with which she responded to that demand, sailing to the Galapagos Islands as part of the process of creating Archipelago. Terrain is a curious thing to a creative artist, Galchen grinned, stating that any kind of art can resemble a rare, exotic bird: entirely justifiable unto itself, even though it sticks out, sore-thumb-esque, on orthodox land. Immediately post-session, I rushed out to get Galchen’s book, and I’ve no doubt that it will form part of my May reading. I’ll have to wait a little longer for Archipelago, which launches officially in July this year. I can’t shake the persistent feeling that, for both books, the terrible splendour of Nature will crash over me while reading, that the emotional journey will be as riveting as the one in paper and ink. I can hardly wait.

Photos by Rodell Warner, our official 2012 Festival photographer.  

It’s frankly amazing, the ways in which attending the Bocas Lit Fest can make you feel that you’ve absorbed months of vital creative atmosphere, in the space of just four days. My enjoyment of the poetry sessions at this year’s Bocas kicked off with a reading by Lasana Sekou and Kendel Hippolyte, and it ended in a similar vein, of deep appreciation at the poetic voices of Fred D’Aguiar and Shara McCallum.

McCallum, a Jamaican poet, whose most recent book This Strange Land was longlisted for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize, took the stage first. Each of her shared pieces was delightfully (and, on occasion, disturbingly, but in the best fashion, in the way we want poems to disturb us) vivid, equally picturesque and unsettling. Lines like “There are moments in a life when everything is ripped apart” (with apologies for potentially inaccurate structuring) still linger, refusing to leave my thoughts even now. McCallum beamed when she prefaced the poem “Dear History” by saying that it was such a pleasure, given her audience that day, to not have to gloss over the names in this poem, names that are part of our language, names like Marcus and Manley.

Fred D’Aguiar, Guyanese-English poet and fiction writer (and the chair of this year's poetry judges) followed, his selection of poems truly running the gamut. He shared a piece wherein the mention of the word “mosquito” was meant to be synonymous with the thought of politicians, a concept that no member of the audience found difficult to grasp, tellingly. His poems elicited both uproarious laughter and silent contemplation. I most appreciated slivers of frank admissions he made, such as the fact that he loves Guyana abidingly, but is most drawn to writing about its problems. He ended his reading with three poems from his 2009 collection, Continental Shelf, to a room full of grateful hands coming together in resounding applause.

Literary academic Giselle Rampaul asked both writers to engage the notion that they speak about trauma in their work, in distinct patterns, endowing it with fresh, thought-provoking considerations. Shara McCallum voiced what she thought might’ve been an unpopular sentiment, stating that, for her, the act of writing itself can be its own catharsis, at times even more so than the content, than the story her words have told on the page. (I see why this rationale could be thought of as less flattering to the sensibilities of a reader, but I remind myself, time and again, that there are no hard and fast rules for writing/appreciating poetry, and that poets have every right to respond to their poems differently, with a separately engaged narrative than their audience does.) D’Aguiar’s response had much to do with gratitude: the sense that he is deeply thankful in the here and now, and has been growingly grateful over time, for all his poems as they’ve come to him; for all the things they revealed, even miles and miles after they’d been written. Both poets urged, to young writers: read, read, read, read! Seek out as much work as you can, by as many writers as fascinate, intrigue and shock you. Poetry, they concurred, is someone’s life, someone’s testimony to being alive… so absorb as much of it as humanly possible. I could think of no finer sentiment on which to conclude this year’s poetry sessions. I know I’ll spend every day I’m fortunate to read fiction carrying out just that advice.

Photo by Nicolette Bethel.

Immigration has become more than your grandparents' or great-grandparents' yellowing photographs on the mantelpiece. Rabindranath Maharaj, author of The Amazing Absorbing Boy, makes the case for this in his most recent novel, in telling the story of a new type of immigrant – one who is younger, savvier, better-versed, arguably, in ways of navigating foreign systems.

The generous excerpt that Maharaj read from his newest novel, which was longlisted for the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize, engages with two kinds of immigrant voices – the previously mentioned, less fettered perspective of Sam, and the more jaded, cynically mired influence of his father, with whom Sam comes to stay in Toronto for a six-month haul. The audience roared with laughter at the description of intervening force, Aunty Umbrella, who, in Sam’s comic-book-guided mind, resembles “a Dalek robot from Dr. Who”. (Not previously familiar with this image, I paused in my write-up to conduct a Google search, and now I’m giggling anew.) Maharaj’s reading is peppered with piercing observations about how the immigrant voice, both young and old, perceives Canada. Sam remarks that, in the mere act of crossing the street, it can seem that you’ve wound up in another country: not simply the next-door United States, but the countries formed by people from the world’s distant spaces, sticking together in recognition.

Eminent literary critic Kenneth Ramchand was brim-full of questions and considerations to raise with Maharaj, directly following his reading. The former signalled attention to the powerful statements that the novel makes about the absence, erosion and dilapidation of the family unit, about the plight of the “nowhereian” and how that’s come to acquire a subtly shifting meaning as time progresses. Maharaj mused that the immigrant’s dialogue that his youthful protagonist conducts with Canada allows for far more give and take than it did for Sam’s father. This contemporary traveller is not merely content to absorb snippets and fragments of the country he’s landed in, no. He expects in turn that the country will reach out curiously to absorb snippets and fragments of him. He won’t settle for the stiltedness of a queue that never allows one to the head of the line. His story is meant to be a round, full table, a perpetual self-discovery of reciprocity.

I expected the conversation to turn towards the symbolism and significance of comic book imagery employed by the author in the novel, and so it did. The ways in which Sam is sustained by the strength of his comic book connections, Maharaj explained, parallels the strength he sees in the power of the human imagination, the individual creative spirit, to surmount even the bleakest of hardships. Instinctively creative souls already possess the best keys for survival, for braving a world populated by so many exiles, castaways, drifters all.

There are stories available to you other than those steeped in inevitable assimilation, vocal muzzling and despair, Maharaj’s book says clearly to the immigrants of 2012 (and beyond). Imaginary homelands can fortify; they can build a bridge, a tangible interface between dreams and reality. They are proof that no modern migration experience need ever be conducted in the dark.

Photo by Shivanee Ramlochan. 

We’re special, geneticist Steve Jones reminded the audience as they settled in to hear his talk on the diversity, or lack thereof, inherent among human races. More than special, he stressed: everybody in this room is an almost impossible thing; almost every part of our anatomy is a genius design. Interestingly, hand in hand with this, he noted that we humans are the only species to retain significant visual differences by geographical location.

Jones’ presentation was packed with information that, on some basic level, most people have possibly already considered, but which they haven’t necessarily heard articulated with such clarity, or substantiated by such impressive research. I’ll own to having felt a bit gleeful when I heard that everything we know about melanin is good, not bad… and that melanin is not just in skin, but everywhere. Cheers for melanin!

Certain things are out and out fallacies, Jones maintained, without even a sliver of contrition for potentially offending the sensibilities of some (which I appreciated -- should scientists apologize for their findings? That is, quite likely, a wholly separate discussion.) Any notion not directly related to or supported by evolutionary biology? A fallacy. Plato’s class structure put forth in The Republic? Total fallacy. What can we count on as being rigorously true, then? “Race” as an umbrella term has about as much core meaning as a word like “nice” or “good”, Jones explained, providing an illuminating ray of context in so doing. “Race” comes to be defined as one likes, meaning many different things to many different people (who, it turns out, aren’t nearly as different as they thought they were.) If one begins to think of racism as a purely political, as opposed to biological, construct, then suddenly, so many of History’s seemingly-pointless wars become uncomfortably more grounded.

In the discussion with Kevin Baldeosingh, author and journalist, that followed, the historical reality that social status depended (and still depends) on skin colour was highlighted. A member of the audience pointed out that in the human obsessiveness with appearance, it goes beyond mere skin colour, too. We socially stratify based on details as arbitrary as hair texture, lip size, hip to waist ratio… and the list goes on, really.

It was sobering (and wryly amusing) to hear that, apart from skin colour, human beings are, in a sense, the primate that didn’t really evolve. Nor, it seems, have our attitudes towards physical appearance, and the awful lot of bother we’ll go through to defend them.

Photo by Rodell Warner, our official 2012 Festival photographer. 

“Tissues and bones, it was a trick”

-- Grizzly Bear, ‘Ready, Able’

This is one of the epigraphs that introduces you to Andre Bagoo’s 2012 poetry collection, Trick Vessels. The other is a brief account of how a trick vessel functions: by hidden, possibly elaborate, possibly simple mechanics. These curious, ancient devices, used by the Greeks and Phoenicians for sportive amusement, become a focus in Bagoo’s mesmerizing, equally curious collection. Ponder, he seems to be encouraging us to think, on how a trick vessel is never filled, but by secrets, and with them, too.

I have to admit upfront, rather gauchely, that I have a vested interest in Andre’s work, because the knowledge of his excellent poetic voice is no new news, to me. I’ve been privileged to hear some of the pieces in Trick Vessels when they were freshly served up to the Cropper Foundation participants of 2010 for discussion and often-spirited debate. I know these poems, and I don’t know them. I thrill to them. They have kept me company throughout this year’s festival, and it has been a synaesthetic delight, a walk through several converging paths all at once.

In a clever, charming twist, Andre rounded off his Bocas reading by sharing one of Vahni Capildeo’s poems, and she began her reading with the sharing of one of his. Her reading spanned poems from her three collections, the most recent being 2012’s Dark and Unaccustomed Words. I had a colleague whisper in my ear, mid-reading, “Vahni seems… you know, possessed,” she hastened to add, “but in the best sort of way!” I knew what she meant. Capildeo sounded and seemed taken over by her work, and she read with the intensely charged commitment one hopes most writers will employ to in their readings, but which most never even approximate.

Festival programme director Nicholas Laughlin chaired the session, taking unapologetic delight in interacting with Bagoo and Capildeo, two of his dear friends. He drew from Bagoo this splendid observation, which I scribbled down immediately:

“We are all, to some extent, quite extraordinary… somewhat miraculous, all tricky.”

Responding to Laughlin’s question on the title choice of her newest collection (which is dedicated to him, the audience learnt), Capildeo responded that one person’s dark and unaccustomed words are another’s clear and bright ones: she wants her readers to be aware, to be slightly (or highly) uncomfortable, situation depending. She expressed dissatisfaction with the ethnographic slurring of some of our fantastical folkloric creatures, the lagahoo, the douen. There is value, and a pressing sort of need, she averred, in identifying with every character, no matter how they’re morally cast: the good and the bad, the treacherous and the kind.

Laughlin asks Bagoo to bring the session to a reluctant close, with a reading of the first poem in Trick Vessels, published in the September 2011 issue of The Caribbean Review of Books, shared on the Bocas blog in the countdown to this year’s festival.

It gave the audience goosebump pleasures. It’s startling; it’s inventive. It’s tricky. 

Photos by Rodell Warner, our official 2012 Festival photographer.

More dead bodies, please!

The truly funny thing is that Trinidad Noir editor Lisa Allen-Agostini was only half-jesting when she claimed that this is what’s needed to populate an authentic noir story. Actually, Lisa’s co-panellists, Johnny Temple and Achy Obejas, agreed wholeheartedly: when it comes to writing successful, compelling, wondrously dark noir, there’s no colour-by-numbers pattern.

Moderator Georgia Popplewell asked Temple, the founder of Akashic Books (a publishing house that specializes in, according to their official site, “the reverse gentrification of the literary world”) about the conceptualization of the widely popular noir series. It began, he responded, with tales of cities: the tale of Brooklyn, to be specific, Brooklyn Noir having been the inaugural title in what would come to be a series where every subsequent book printed has been successful. This is a rare feat, I thought, for anthologies: the inevitable mixed bag of style and quality you glean while reading them tends to earn mostly uneven, shaky reviews. Not so for Akashic’s Noir series, Temple pointed out, adding that people are drawn to these regionally-themed collections that explore the gritty underbelly of human motivation.

What, one wonders, is the Caribbean point of reference for noir writing, in a region not commonly associated with the genre? Achy Obejas, editor of Havana Noir, pointed out that in this avenue of storytelling, writers have the freedom to cast their city (in this case, the city of Havana prompted and inspired the stories she edited), in all its ironic and gloriously confusing contradictions. This is one of the beauties of noir work, she added: that it is descriptive rather than prescriptive, that it can describe a city or country’s maladies to the letter without feeling the burden of diagnosing one course of treatment over the other. Allen-Agostini chimed in with the grim reminder that, for an island itself founded on the scarred back of criminal conquest, it’s hardly surprising that the stories in Trinidad Noir are so crime-centric: they’re reflecting, without pulling a single punch, the dangers inherent in merely attempting to live in this complex, chaotic space.

The panellists all concur: in the best noir they’ve encountered, there is an amorality that chills.

Kingston Noir is the next Akashic title on the horizon, Temple informed the audience with entirely justified glee: it’s hard not to get excited about a collection that hosts stories from Kwame Dawes, Marlon James, Kei Miller and others. For a region without any discernible recorded noir tradition, he mused, the Caribbean is ripe for these stories, and utterly receptive to their telling. Most writers who contribute to the anthologies seemed to understand this, the panel remarked: that the telling of good tales went beyond open and shut CSI cases, far beyond Law and Order imitations. That’s the message I took away with me: that noir can mean different, subtle, nerve-wracking things across different countries… that, and that so much depends on where you choose to hide the bodies.

Photo by Annie Paul.

I tell her I’ve been writing since I was 11. A strange thing happens to me when Lisa Allen-Agostini then puts this pointed, precise question to me during our mid-Bocas Festival conversation:

“How did you feel, at 11, as a young writer, beginning to discover your own voice?”

The truth? It was as terrifying as it was liberating. I realized, with the retroactive shock of absolute clarity, of just how isolated I was in my pre-adolescent writing world, of how much I longed, without even articulating it specifically to myself, of someone to let me know: what you’re doing is valid. It isn’t a waste of time. Thankfully, I had my mother’s incredible support in my writing life, as the years went by, but nothing compensates for that 11 year old girl’s absolute uncertainty, her silent, shy worries. I had my mother, and Lisa’s children have her, but we both acknowledge grimly: thousands upon thousands of our nation’s budding writers have had, for so long, no one… and this is the void that The Allen Prize for Young Writers seeks to fill.

“There was no guesswork over my writing ambitions”, Lisa tells me… just as much as there’s been no guesswork about her commitment to furthering the hopes and dreams of young authors and poets. Her love of children’s books has stood her in good stead throughout her life; it didn’t taper off when she became an adult. It’s important to remember the distinction, too, between writing for children, and writing by children, she reminds me. I’ve got to nod in recognition of this, as I know that the latter category often faces severe ordeals in being legitimized, to say nothing of published. This is why initiatives like the well-stocked NGC Bocas Lit Fest’s Children’s Programme bring Lisa joy – because they help mark a clear path forward. The fact that the 16-story collection, Children’s Stories from the Bocas Lit Fest 2011, is available for purchase nationwide: this is significant, too, but how much notice does it receive in our local media? How many good stories do we tell about young people reading and writing, and seeking to script out a future from their passion for literature and storytelling?

The galvanizing moment in Lisa’s writing career came when she won Clico’s annual Put it in Poetry Competition for secondary school students. (Sadly, the prize is no longer active.) The win signalled to her the beginning of infinite possibilities she could imagine for herself and her work. It’s that strength of imagination she hopes to share with The Allen Prize program participants. The foundation is about much more than the bestowing of a cash prize, though that’s one of its highlights. It hosts annual, intensive workshops with established writers in mentorship roles, as well as three seminars yearly, which address multiple aspects of a young writer’s craft, process and everyday concerns. As telling testimony to the practicalities of the program, The Allen Prize also guides and facilitates the potential publication, staging and transmission of participants’ completed works, enabling fresh, promising talent to forge significant relationships that can well last a lifetime.

Lisa and I discuss the worrying dearth of regional young adult fiction, a bemusing irony when one considers the vast popularity of that particular genre in worldwide publishing. We chuckle irreverently over what, to us, seems like the lacklustre presentation (though we use much meaner terms to describe it!) of Caribbean literature in most Trinidadian bookshops (with the notable exception of a special few, such as Joan Dayal’s Paper Based Bookshop at The Normandie). Frankly, Lisa’s tired of Caribbean literature getting the short end of the stick… within the Caribbean, no less, and what gets her hackles up is the underrepresentation paid to young writers in particular. All the better, then, that one of the festival highlights this year celebrated The Allen Prize for Young Writers, rewarding the talent and ambition of our upcoming who’s who in all things local and literary. Held on the last day of full festival activities, the event was a well-attended, inspiring success, and will hopefully serve to draw even more reluctant young writers out from beneath their sequestered stairwells, showing them – look, it’s okay to fully and unapologetically embrace your dreams.

“When I get an idea, an idea worth pursuing, you can be certain that I’ll follow it,” Lisa smiles, and I think I speak for most people when I say that Trinidad and Tobago is the better for Lisa’s unflinching persistence, her fierce dedication which proves that the best stories can be scripted with pencils and crayons just as well as they can with an exclusively adult pen.

For more information on the work that The Allen Prize for Young Writers does, visit their official website, as well as their frequently-updated Facebook page.

Group photo by Rodell Warner, our official 2012 Festival photographer. 

A welcome slice of Bahamian artistry was brought resoundingly to life in the AV Room of the National Library on Friday afternoon, when the writers Nicolette Bethel and Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming shared their poems with infectious gusto, passion and intensity.

Manoo-Rahming read first, quickly turning the mood electric and infectiously upbeat with her work. Even when she shared poems that gave dreadful pause, such as the incest-stained “Full Moon Healing”, I couldn’t help but be forcefully struck by the power of her culturally syncretic imagery, of visions of saris on silken skin versus the defiling of sexual innocence, of ruminations on blood, bindis, the mother moon. Manoo-Rahming read a wondrously erotic piece, “Callalloo Woman”, which might ostensibly be thought of (perhaps in very sheltered circles?) as the ideal way in which to prepare callalloo, the popular Caribbean dish, but which ignites a host of tongue in cheek sensual innuendo directly related to, and entangled within, the beauty of the sexual act. Her poems in honour of departed local cultural figureheads, Ras Shorty I, Lord Kitchener and Andre Tanker, were all lovingly-hewn, prompting reminiscences on my personal remembrances of such great, undeniably talented sons of the soil.

Nicolette Bethel wondered a little about how she could possibly follow gracefully after her colleague’s fiery renditions, but she needn’t have been even remotely troubled. I have had the good fortune to read several of Bethel’s poems online, in journals and magazines, and I’ve been awed at the clarity and strength of her imagery, the deftness in construction of her verses. Hearing them read aloud by the poet herself proved to be indulgent icing on an already sumptuous cake. I was particularly excited to hear her read a selection of the “Lily” poems, each written in episodic chronicling and remembrance of stages in her grandmother’s life. There is something simultaneously otherworldly and grounding, to me, about experiencing a collection of poems that are woven together by a recurring motif/ central figure/ core series of symbols, and when I think on such threaded collections, Bethel’s “Lily” poems are always among the first to spring to mind.

Moderator, literary academic Giselle Rampaul, asked how Manoo-Rahming and Bethel’s respective careers as an engineer and anthropologist came to bear on their writing lives. Manoo-Rahming replied that for her, the marriage between an engineering existence, and a writing existence, was a necessary and vital one, that the communication of all sorts of ideas is constant and rewarding. Bethel revealed to the audience that the study of anthropology melds itself in both unconventional and simultaneously, wholly natural ways, to the art of telling stories through verse. Also brought forward for debate were the issues of quality control in self publishing (the discussion of the nanopress method of publishing, raised by Bethel, was central to this and is well worth further exploration!) and of how religion often manages to sneak into the body and heart of a poem.

A riveting reading matched by the engaging quality of writer-reader communication that followed, this was a spectacular event. It may be a while before I hear Manoo-Rahming and Bethel share their work vocally once more, but I cannot help but think that I’ll be meeting them on the printed page/screen before too long.

Photos by Shivanee Ramlochan.