by Kevin Le Gendre
About eight or nine years ago Kadija George asked me to chair a discussion on Black British music as part of a series of events, Black British Perspectives in the Arts. Participants included Kwame Kwaten and Sheila Chandra, two talented musicians and producers, and the session was inspiring. We talked mostly about artists who were active between the ‘60s and ‘90s. All of which whetted my appetite to go further back in time in order to retrace the fearless footsteps of their numerous predecessors.
Matthew L. Miller PhD is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Aiken, and a former student of Kwame Dawes. Dr Miller teaches a course every summer on Caribbean Literature. He creates YouTube videos to teach the novels on his course, including two Peepal Tree Press books from the Caribbean Modern Classics series.
Nii Ayikwei Parkes was the keynote speaker at the Bare Lit Festival 2018 giving the address at The Albany, London UK on May 27, 2018. James Murua's Literary Blog shares the text in full courtesy of the speaker.
In the first of a two-parter, Jacqueline Bishop has interviewed Puerto Rican poet Loretta Collins Klobah for the Bookends section of the Jamaica Observer.
Loretta talks about her collection Ricantations, and how Hurricane Maria inspired the title poem. She also discusses the situation for people still affected by the disaster:
The Cambridge Literary Review is looking for submissions on the theme of manifestos - an exploration of, comment on or example of “manifesto" in any style, any genre, any length (though if you are planning on submitting anything over 5,000 words this should be discussed first with an email pitch). The publication is especially keen to see submissions from BAME writers.
Please send submissions by 22 June 2018 to: cambridgeliteraryreview@gmail.com.
The Caribbean Nobel laureate Derek Walcott paid humorous tribute to Harris in a poem called "Guyana", whose "surveyor", his brain sucked "pith-dry" by the sun, is "dumbstruck by a stone". His admirers have included Anthony Burgess, CLR James and the US poet Kathleen Raine as well as younger authors with Caribbean links - Caryl Phillips, Pauline Melville and Fred D'Aguiar. Yet despite a steady output of novels, essays and international honours, he remains little known to a wider public.
Mr. Harris wrote 26 novels in all. He is generally included among a group of Caribbean writers (Guyana is often considered a Caribbean country because of its demographics and history) who explored themes of identity, colonialism, myth and more in lyrical, far-ranging prose.
We learn only now that novelist Wilson Harris (1921-2018) passed, several weeks ago, in Chelmsford, England. With him passes, very nearly, generations of highly political, English-language Caribbean literature. George Lamming, of Barbados, remains frail but has spent a life on the Left; V.S. Naipaul, raised in Trinidad, is active and as always, on the Right.
This feature appears in the Times Literary Supplement:
He’s got these curious hooded eyes, he never looks at you straight. And this wonderful sing-song voice, this vatic, musical accent. He’s very impressive. But I don’t want to give you the wrong impression because he’s not like John Berger: it’s obvious that he never set out to be impressive. I can only say about his presence that when he said to me about my son, “You have a wonderful little boy”, I felt it was some kind of blessing.
