sx salon, issue 11 (February 2013)

In this first 2013 issue of sx salon, we publish an extended discussion “The Fiction of Independence.” Our contributors for this special issue have each taken a unique approach to the double meaning of our chosen title. It is easy to, especially with the distance of time, see the fiction of the first flag-raising, to question its meaning and import. But there is also pride, and pleasure, and lasting change to be found in the stories we tell ourselves about independence.  Brian Meeks “reminisces” about “the night the black, gold, and green unfurled” and the stories behind that ceremonial moment. For Margaret Cezair-Thompson, that first Independence Day also sparks memories of familial intimacy, and she writes here about the connections between personal and national narratives. In lieu of an essay, my coeditor Andrea Shaw addresses the topic via poetry, with a series of poems set in Jamaica, building subtly toward midnight, 6 August 1962. These first three pieces blur what borders may exist between discussions of the private and public experiences of independence. The following three pieces tackle the impact of independence on cultural production. Harvey Neptune considers “a story about a story about independence in the British West Indies,” specifically, Island in the Sun, both film and novel. Next, Mark Raymond examines the relationship between “architectural culture” and the “profound historical sociopolitical transformation” of independence. My own essay focuses on the literature of the period and the pleasures we may still find in novels such as Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron. We hope you find this collection of writings on independence illuminating and enjoyable.

As this is a special issue, we have not included any reviews, interviews, or additional creative pieces. In our Poetry & Prose section, however, we announce the short list for each section of the 2012 Small Axe Literary Competition. The winners of the 2012 competition:

• In the Short Fiction category, first prize went to Sharon Millar and second prize to Alexia Arthurs.
• In the Poetry category, first prize went to Danielle Boodoo- Fortuné  and second prize to Lynn Sweeting.

The competition is once again open for entries; the 2013 deadline is 31 May. sx salon is also once again open for submissions of reviews, interviews, poetry, creative prose, and short discussion articles. For more information, please click here. We hope you enjoy this special issue of sx salon (table of contents below).

Kelly Baker Josephs

sx salon 11 (February 2013)

Introduction and Table of Contents—Kelly Baker Josephs

Discussion—The Fiction of Independence

Reminiscing in Black, Gold, and Green—Brian Meeks
History, Fiction, and the Myth of Marginality: Portrait of the Writer as a Young Woman—Margaret Cezair-Thompson
The Whisper of Doctor Bird Wings—Andrea Shaw
Is Just a Movie? “Island in the Sun,” Eric Gairy, and the Fiction of West Indian Black Power—Harvey R. Neptune
Architecture, Independence, and Identity in the Commonwealth Caribbean— Mark Raymond
Adultery and Anticolonialism: The Pleasures of Independence Literature— Kelly Baker Josephs

Brian Meeks

I don’t know whether I can call myself an independence baby. I wasn’t born in 1962—the year the flag went up—nor did I come of age in that time, with the implicit suggestion that I might possess some fuller understanding of what the whole occasion meant. Indeed, I probably don’t qualify at all, being born in Montreal, Canada, despite my always reminding anyone curious enough to ask that I arrived on the Rock only a few months later. Even this minimal claim though, I wryly discovered in the wake of Pluto Shervington’s 1970s hit song, would inevitably fail the “I man born ya” examination of national authenticity.

Yet, in a fallback attempt to secure a pass, I submit that I was present in the National Stadium the night the black, gold, and green unfurled, and this must count for something. And though only a tender nine years old, I remember it sharply. There were these rapid strobelike flashes, or at least I think it was a strobe, which I had never seen or heard of before. Or it might just have been the multiple flashes of hundreds of cameras as the red, white, and blue Union Jack slithered down and the new symbol of hope clambered up, illuminated intermittently and tentatively, like the new nation herself. Then it was up and fluttering as the strains of “Jamaica, Land We Love” filled the already overflowing stadium for the first time. Read the rest of this entry »

Portrait of the Writer as a Young Woman

Margaret Cezair-Thompson

This race and this country and this life produced me . . . . I shall express myself as I am.
―James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

As a novelist, I’ve always had a deep interest in history, particularly in Jamaica’s transition from colony to independent state. In The True History of Paradise and The Pirate’s Daughter, I describe, among other things, the nation’s independence from Britain in 1962, and my interest in this occasion arises from the fact that, like my protagonists, my own birth occurred just a few years before the nation’s.[1] My earliest memories are of a colonial society, and over the years I’ve sometimes felt like an older sister watching the triumphs and failures of her younger sibling—independent Jamaica. And this connection has found its way into my novels in the sense that they portray the coming-of-age not only of the female protagonists but of the nation.

Last year, 2012, marked two events of profound significance for me—one sorrowful, one celebratory: the death of my father and the acknowledgment of half a century of independence. Having served Jamaica most of his life as a member of parliament, senator, government minister, and ambassador, my father, along with people such as Norman Manley and Rex Nettleford, was one of the architects of nationhood. He didn’t live to see the fiftieth anniversary celebrations, and in his absence I recalled that historic day when the Jamaican flag was first raised. I vividly remember being there, holding a small flag, my father lifting me so I could see above the crowd, and both of us watching a procession of cadets. Fifty years later, I watched members of that same Jamaican constabulary marching alongside his flag-draped coffin. I felt a nation mourn with me, not just for the one man but for the generation he represented, of which so few are left, a generation that bequeathed a vision of self-rule. With this double sense of loss and legacy, I find myself reflecting on things that have shaped my writing and also about the Caribbean novel’s dynamic relationship with history. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrea Shaw

Daybreak

Needles of coconut husk
shoot from the kaya mattress
through the well-worn sheets
to sting Reginald’s little-boy body
like thirsty mosquitoes
each time he wriggles in bed.

He tries to stay still under the warm blanket,
but awakened by their father’s beating
of his boots
against the side
of the small wooden house,
his sisters twist and turn, and turn and twist
in bed beside him, murmuring little-girl sounds,
while Reginald rises to make himself a man.

He trails behind his pa through the morning fog
and searches by the sparse light of his father’s lantern
and the blue Jamaican moonlight
for his father’s footprints,
but instead stumbles on cold chips of marl that crunch like ice
under the soles of his small bare feet.
His pa looks back: “Come on, Reginald, make haste bwoy; morning soon light and the cow them need to move.”

The rope scorches as he strains
to pull
the vexed calf
out of its dreams of sunshine and sweet grass.
Reginald recites his father’s favorite curses under his breath
as he marches the calf through the grass
over the yellow yam, cocoa, and dasheen
swelling in the soil under his feet. Read the rest of this entry »

Harvey R. Neptune

Yes. Yes, because if . . . if indeed it was just a movie, did he, did they not consider that I was . . . we were just actor?
—Earl Lovelace, Is Just a Movie        

This is a story about a story. Partially recounting the British West Indian career of a fictionalization of the contemporary region in the years leading up to independence, it crosses curiously between history and creative historical representation. In this recollection of the fate of a storied depiction of Great Britain’s Caribbean territories, a portrait that dramatized the region’s postwar predicament in stark terms of color, the purpose is to do more than document the racialized cultural politics of decolonization through a turn to “fiction in the archives.”[1] It is to chronicle also a marvelously real episode in the history of “black power.”

The story at the heart of the following essay began its material life as a novel published in 1955 and titled Island in the Sun: A Story of the Fifties Set in the West Indies. Authored by Alec Waugh, the self-consciously less-famous older brother of Evelyn and a long-promising writer, the book bore a grandiose ambition betrayed in the mostly uncited subtitle. Indeed, for Waugh Island in the Sun was intended to be what one of its characters with serious writerly aspirations dubbed a great “novel of the West Indies.”[2] Yet despite lofty literary intent of reckoning with the racial politics of empire as the sun set on its British Caribbean shores, the novel garnered little critical esteem. As literature, in fact, it flopped, falling under the weight of its heavy melodrama. Whatever gravity Waugh invested in the narrative was in the end overwhelmed by his penchant for naturalistic sensation, for an extravagant reliance on rape, murder, and mayhem.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Raymond

Queen's Hall, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Competition entry rendered perspective, Architect Colin Laird c.1956

The attainment of independence for Commonwealth Caribbean states was informed by ideologies consistent with many of the socially driven political agendas that guided global politics in the latter half of the last century. The independence movement was driven by an essentially modern ideology and vision with a clear and determined focus on the future, one that entailed the emphatic rejection of the colonial past. The political and social significance of independence and the subsequent transformation of the various societies cannot be overstated in light of the fractious and repressive history from which these Caribbean states emerged. This essay investigates the relationship of architectural culture to this profound historical sociopolitical transformation, particularly in relation to the idea of cultural identity.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Pleasures of Independence Literature

Kelly Baker Josephs

In the poem “Hope Gardens,” Lorna Goodison writes of the disjuncture between what a would-be poet learns in a seminar led by a postcolonial scholar and what she remembers of Hope Gardens in Kingston. Listening to the scholar reveal “plot / after heinous imperial plot buried behind / our botanical gardens,” the speaker can remember only the delights of picture taking, sky gazing, daydreaming in the gardens. Charming memories that inspire her to memorialize the gardens in verse; but this verse, and the pleasures it aims to record, is threatened by the scholar’s revelations about the pervasiveness of colonial power. Goodison closes the poem:

We the ignorant, the uneducated, unaware

That the roses we assumed bloomed just
to full eye were representative of English
lady beauty; unenlightened we were, so we

picked them on the sly to give as token
to the love we got lost in the maze with—
quick thief a kiss—and this colonial design

was nowhere in mind or sight; but even if
and so what?[1]

Goodison’s poem raises more than some simple question of ignorance being bliss. She pits pleasure against postcolonial enlightenment. Though she focuses on gardens here, I take her words as an opening to my discussion of pleasure to be found in Caribbean fiction published in the 1960s, the era of independence in the anglophone islands. Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction and Table of Contents

Read the rest of this entry »

Representing the Caribbean

Kristina Huang and Jonathan Hill

Following is a review of the art exhibition Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, currently being held at three locations in New York: El Museo del Barrio, 12 June 2012 to 6 January 2013; Queens Museum of Art, 17 June 2012 to 6 January 2013; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, 14 June to 21 October 2012. See caribbeancrossroads.org.

Our conversation began with a print image of the Caribbean: a large, blue, textile tapestry, formed by a repeating golden pattern that rotated to create an illusion of chaotic variance. Rossana Martinez’s Golden Island (2000) is a visual representation of what we, two doctoral students of different disciplines and regions, were doing as we walked through these exhibits. We examined Caribbean: Crossroads of the World from different sides. With each pivot, we turned to think about the other’s methodological concerns in order to consider another angle of interpretation. It became clear that the Caribbean is not simply a global crossroads but a disciplinary crossroads as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Responding to Sex and Gender in The Sly Company of People Who Care

Nalini Mohabir and Vidyaratha Kissoon

Unlike a certain representative in the 1938 Indian legislature who commented that “most of the Guiana Indians have adopted . . . a hybrid, a half-baked Afro-American culture,” Rahul Bhattacharya, author of The Sly Company of People Who Care, clearly delights in the mélange that is Guyanese culture.[1] As several reviews have so far been published, instead of merely rehearsing details of the book, we would like to focus on conversations about the book and its representation of women, brought to light in a series of letters to the editor in Guyana’s Stabroek News (2011–12). These letters provide important glimpses into how depictions of gender relations, by an “Indian national,” have been received in the Caribbean. We follow this with our own thoughts on sex and gender both in Bhattacharya’s book and in lived experience in Guyana. We have included conversations from other readers, since in the wake of accolades (winner of the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje award and the 2011 Hindu Literary Prize; shortlisted for the 2012 Man Asian and Commonwealth Book Prize) we have heard very little about the book’s reception in the land it portrays. The book’s celebrated status positions Guyana on an international stage, but renders the real Guyana mute in the process—observed but not heard. Read the rest of this entry »