by Shivanee Ramlochan, 2013 NGC Bocas Lit Fest Blogger.

The driving question that prompted novelist Lawrence Scott towards writing Light Falling on Bamboo was this: “What was Michel-Jean Cazabon’s life like?” From this seemingly simple interrogation, particular threads of an autobiographical influence can be discerned. The novel, which was longlisted for the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, is about an artist trying to make his way in the Caribbean, the land of his birth that is, at the same time, new terrain to the artist in several ways.

This was among the several revelations shared by Scott, during his April 27th fiction panel with Oonya Kempadoo, chaired by Trinidadian writer Alake Pilgrim. Answering the same question of motivations, Kempadoo, discussing her recently-released novel, All Decent Animals, described the novel as a protagonist’s attempt to come to terms with creativity, and the forms in which it comes. Kempadoo added that the novel seeks to engage with the question of how people deal with difficult emotional positions, such as terminal illness — how do we grapple with the hard and ugly times we don’t want to face?

Lawrence Scott responds to a question posed by panel moderator, Alake Pilgrim.

Addressing Pilgrim’s question of Cazabon’s simultaneous reflection and rejection of his class privilege, Scott drew on the beauty for which the artist’s work has repeatedly been lauded. If one looks deeper than the surface aesthetics of these landscapes and portraits, Scott said, one sees that what lies beneath cannot itself be oppressed, and that Cazabon was painting this, too: the oppression of the 19th century, the cruelty of the time.

Oonya Kempadoo, author of All Decent Animals, in conversation with one of the audience members at her fiction session.

How does one work and create in a place like Trinidad, a land of so many contradictions? In answering this query, Kempadoo related that wherever someone is, a connection of uncomfortable journeys embedded in the landscape may persist. Into this milieu, the reflection and interrogation of formal and informal art unfolds — making every destination a map marker of a place where questing can happen, of where the purpose of one’s life may be defined. Carnival, Kempadoo said, was of great importance to her in the new novel, because it is, in her estimation, the indigenous art form of Trinidad. Noting resonances with this and his work, Scott added that carnival’s position in Trinidadian society creates a complex relationship. It gives rise to a struggle that Cazabon himself experienced with culture in his own time.

Set in distinct time periods of Trinidad’s development, these novels of Scott and Kempadoo are no less that impressive textual portraiture: they present (and represent) faces of Trinidad that are both persistent and crumbling, affected by time, development and remembrance.

Photographs by Maria Nunes, Official Festival Photographer.

by Shivanee Ramlochan, 2013 NGC Bocas Lit Fest Blogger.

Well. This is weird, right? When I asked Nicholas Laughlin, the Festival Programme director, how blogging about my own New Talent Showcase reading, held on April 27th, would work, he seemed blissfully unbothered. “Just write about what the experience was like for you,” he said – and so, this is what I’ll do.

I’m immensely lucky to have grown up in a household where reading was more than a frivolous “other”, or worse, perceived as some counter-productive act of treason against a serious, well-considered life. For this, I credit both my parents, and my mother in particular. I’m lucky, too, in that, though I write in isolation, locked up in my room (as do most writers I know), my writing community is generous, intuitive, and far-reaching. My fellow 2010 Cropper Residential Writers’ Workshop alumna, Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, and now, my fellow 2012 New Talent Showcasee, is in herself an immediate reminder that it’s more useful to think of one’s creative peers as company and not competition.

Reading my work, and staving off a million kinds of nerves.

I read from my poetry, as well as from my fiction, and Nicholas, who moderated the session, asked me about my difference of process between the two. He also wondered how my critical writing fit in, or didn’t. I said that writing poetry is often the most visceral of the three, and more likely than not, the most painful, whereas I approach fiction with an almost obsessive eye for detail and for cutting out the extraneous. My desire for economy in fiction stems, I think, from the influence of my “Everything” writer, Jean Rhys.

I can only say what others have said about my work. It’s been called unsettling, a weird mixture of the domestic and the feral. I’ve been told that it cuts and stings and is often too much to sit down with for any extended period of time. I think I’m still (and probably always will be) in the process of learning to write as authentically as I can, and the simple, incredible act of being at the Bocas Lit Fest is as powerful a reminder as any, of the reasons why I try.

Photograph by Maria Nunes, Official Festival Photographer.

by Shivanee Ramlochan, 2013 NGC Bocas Lit Fest Blogger.

Fifty years ago, a dynamic series of talks on literature emerged in Edinburgh. A gathering of writers from around the world brought pressing questions surrounding literature’s purpose to the fore, prioritizing these lively, oft-raucous debates and driving conversations that had resonances not just in Scottish letters, but in global discussion. The 2012-2013 Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference made its official stop at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest to continue the conversation, and found the stage primed for two explosive and engaging panels. The first of these took place on April 27th, and focused on the troublesome notion of A National Literature?. The panel was chaired by Marina Warner, and featured a keynote address from Marlon James, with Irvine Welsh, Hannah Lowe and Vahni Capildeo filling out the writers’ table.

James’ keynote masterfully butchered the determinism that tends to fuel the titles we ascribe to what we read, and how we then purpose to think about it. Here are just a few lines of brimstone from his full keynote address (accessible here, on the official EWWC site):

“… the danger in the term ‘national literature’, the same danger in terms like ‘black music’ or ‘women’s fiction.’ That this is a categorization and any attempt at categorization is reductive, like the library of congress reducing your novel to three words. Take away literature and substitute any other art and this is quickly apparent: a national music, a national painting, a national dance step, especially in this post-everything age where national boundaries are not only irrelevant but sometimes anti-art. Because at the core of categorization is an attempt not only to make something smaller, but also easily definable.”

Jamaican novelist Marlon James delivers his keynote address to the capacity-crowded Old Fire Station audience.

Livetweeting for both this and the Sunday panel (on whether or not literature ought be political) was an unrelenting marathon of insights. James’ speech alone contained any number of takeaway gems, including this, my favourite of his hard-hitting declarations: “If you spent your early years with Enid Blyton, you’re gonna need a lot of cultural correction!”

The discussion that followed swiftly on the heels of the keynote was peppered with trenchant perspectives from the writers’ panel. Trinidadian poet Vahni Capildeo explained that the title of her newest collection, the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize longlisted Dark and Unaccustomed Words, was itself a reclamation, a counterpoint of resistance against an ancient hierarchy of “Who owns words; who dictates the pace of poetry?”

British poet Hannah Lowe expressed deep discontent at the fact that Britain has been a nation “foghorning its own stories for centuries.” She vehemently expressed the desire to write away from that, stressing that ”The nation is not necessarily related to geographical space – there is a big gap between being a writer and a national.”

Vahni Capildeo reads some of her remarks, following Marlon James’ keynote.

Hannah Lowe and Irvine Welsh, during the post-keynote discussion segment, responding to one of the audience’s numerous questions.

Scottish writer Irvine Welsh  pointed out that culture is always contested, by governments, community groups and writers themselves. “The proof of the writing is in the pudding,” he baldly asserted, stressing that writers will, and should, write what they’re most driven to write, without obsessing overtly about how it fits, or doesn’t, into the prevailing hierarchy of accepted “Scottish literature”, or any other territory’s stamp.

Questions rained in unrelentingly, and the session threatened to spill well over its allotted ninety minute mark. The panellists concluded that one of the best uses of National Literature can be each writer’s right to vociferously deny or accept its constructs as they see fit: to write against, around, or alongside ideas of nationalism. Writing itself, Lowe thoughtfully said, is a process of active reconstruction. The spaces, the gaps and silences on the page, these declare as much about the writer’s work as the words themselves.

Photographs by Maria Nunes, Official Festival Photographer.

A full album of official 2013 NGC Bocas Lit Fest photographs from this panel is accessible for viewing on our Facebook page.

by Shivanee Ramlochan, 2013 NGC Bocas Lit Fest Blogger.

Margaret Thatcher, Scottish writer Irvine Welsh joked, ought to be heralded as the uncredited ghostwriter of his newest novel, Skagboys: indeed, of his first novel, Trainspotting, too. Maybe, Welsh added with (what we may only hope to be) faux-sobriety, Thatcher ought to receive kudos for the vast majority of his writing, to date: the work would not, he emphasized, be borne out of quite the same realities, without her presiding influence. Skagboys couldn’t be a novel about what happens to the four fine, upstanding men of Trainspotting - Rention; Begbie, Spud and Sick Boy – but what it does aim to do, the novelist said, is to present the quartet on the cusp of a pre-Thatcherite age, a world in which heroin was starting to flood into Edinburgh for the first time.

In his one on one session, a conversation with BC Pires on April 26th, Welsh shared news of his forthcoming film Filth, based on his 1998 novel of the same name. Perhaps, he chuckled, it might help to get the Trainspotting film monkey off his back. Welsh won’t, perhaps, be gutted if his new film flops (though every indication points to a diametrically opposite response), because writing about failure is what interests him, arguably more than anything else. Through failure, he told the audience assembled in the AV Room, you get to see new and intriguing things about yourself that you otherwise wouldn’t have done, were you coasting along obtusely on wave after wave of “boring success”.

How, then, does his perception of his own mainstream literary celebrity fit into that? “Celebrity is neither here nor there,” reported Welsh, saying that the principal thing is to have both money and time to write, the latter being purchaseable by varying quantities of the former.

Scottish author Irvine Welsh, gesturing as he responds to an audience question.

Frankly, Welsh observed, it might be vastly more difficult now to get Trainspotting published than it was when his manuscript was accepted — since in several ways, publishing is actually, astonishingly less dynamic now than it was then. “Nowadays, people write into such genre-oriented, marketable and sellable holes,” Welsh said, noting that, “there’s a tradition of idle, rich people involved in literature, and they sometimes exercize their fifedom in curatorially limiting ways.” Writing in the face of all that, though, continues to make sense to him — after all, according to Welsh, one never knows when one’s next really thrilling failure might be in store.

Photograph by Maria Nunes, Official Festival Photographer.

by Shivanee Ramlochan, 2013 NGC Bocas Lit Fest Blogger.

Nary a free seat could be scrounged at Olive Senior’s packed Old Fire Station one on one session, on April 26th, in conversation with 2013 OCM Fiction judging chair, Michael Bucknor. Senior’s life was meant to be lensed beneath the spotlight, but the veteran writer skilfully and graciously dodged the vast majority of probing, personal queries put to her. Those answers she graciously offered added to the audience’s perception of the fullness of her life in words. For instance, early on in the session, Senior remarked that she grew up a child of both the written and oral tradition. Reading deeply and voraciously, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prizewinning author said, became essential to her childhood — she read, she smiled, “almost in self-defense, because the company of adults did not please me.”

Many of the things Senior declared could be compiled into a manifesto of inspiration for determined fledgling writers (and might well be, if the starry-eyed heroine worship in the expressions of several secondary school students were to believed – Senior’s work is currently on the CAPE English Literature syllabus). Here are a few of her self-declaring gems of wisdom:

“Writing is my imperative.” – on the early realization that she had to allow her characters to speak in the language they used in real life, and on growing into the strengths and truths of a writing voice that represented her community and society.

“I’ve never written in response to commercial requirements.” – on avoiding the specific terms of “novelist”; “poet” or “short fiction writer”, which she described as being terms that tend to lend themselves to ideas of marketability. Senior refers to herself simply as a writer.

Olive Senior responds to one of numerous audience questions at her One on One panel.

Senior read a passage from her 2011 novel, Dancing Lessons, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize. The protagonist of Dancing Lessons is, in Senior’s words, “a countrywoman silent most or all of her life”. In the writing of this, her inaugural novel, Senior expressed the desire to write an affirmative, positive sort of narrative, as well as to tell a story that could show the possibility of change at any age.

Her advice to young, aspiring writers was both straightforward and steadfast: “Learn your craft. Learn your tools and how to use them,” Senior advised. The best way to learn, she added, was to involve oneself deeply and rigorously in the practice of two things: writing, and reading. As for the fickleness of inspiration, Senior made reference to her beloved poet, Pablo Neruda, as an antidote against ennui:

“Never say you have nothing to write about. You can write about anything, even thread.”

Photograph by Maria Nunes, Official Festival Photographer.

by Shivanee Ramlochan, 2013 NGC Bocas Lit Fest Blogger.

Bahamian poet Sonia Farmer, the second of this year’s New Talent Showcase writers, shared readings from her work on April 26th at the Old Fire Station. Farmer is the winner of the 2011 Small Axe Literary Competition for her poetry, and has been published in tongues of the ocean (where she’s also the Prose Fiction editor); Poui; WomanSpeak Journal and Ubiquitous. Her two chapbooks of poems are titled What Becomes Us (2007) and Grow (2008), both of which were limited-edition, handbound releases, published by her small press, Poinciana Paper Press. Farmer brought along a selection of Poinciana titles, which she proudly displayed following her reading. The Poinciana ethic, she elaborated to panel moderator and festival Programme Director Nicholas Laughlin, is that literature can to be beautiful to behold, in printed form. Her well-honed techniques revolving around letterpress; book-binding; paper-making and print-making bear this out: each Poinciana product is a treasure of image and text, an intimate sort of reader-publisher correspondence in times where the art of the small or boutique press often becomes swallowed up in mass market paperback syndrome.

New Talent Showcase writer Sonia Farmer, with The Twelve Foot Neon Woman by Loretta Collins Klobah.

Many of Farmer’s poems are written as a kind of authentic interrogation of the history/histories surrounding the infamous pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, both of whom were convicted for piracy in the 18th century. Farmer’s work delves deep, beneath the maritime considerations of what’s lazily conjectured about this duo, as both buccaneers and women. Writing about their lives sees the poet addressing the significance of these figures to Bahamian history, and in so doing, revisiting the Bahamian cultural landscape with a fresh, unstinting pair of eyes.

Photograph by Maria Nunes, Official Festival Photographer.