I came to Calabash in 2006 and since then every year around May-June I feel the ache of a phantom something. A ‘something’ that is both intangible and hard to describe, except to say that at the heart of my trip to Calabash and Jamaica (for the first time) was one of my greatest adventures. Did i mention I came alone?
I came alone and ended up rooming with two rastas and an American woman who assummed the role of surrogate mother and companion. We trekked around the festival, mixing yet not blending in (on the organizers’s advice of course), taking in poetry during the day, and dipping our toes in the saltwater while staying warm by the bonfire at night (taking in Colin’s scanting too)
Grace? Grace. Every year around May-June I feel the loss of grace, “the ease and suppleness of movement or bearing.” Where we are all live in this seaside village, on the coast of Jamaica, at the start of the archipelago that is the Caribbean, surrounded by others who offer neither validation or criticism, but the safety net to be as mad and creative that souls like us tend to be.
This is the 3rd review i’m reading, congratulations! I will shoot Mr. Channer a congratulatory note as well and i hope that I will be there next year to share the Festival’s 10th anniversary and my portion of grace.

Bless
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Actually, I do like Calabash. I like being there. My report is “official” only because it comes from someone who has plannd the festival. When I “report” on my children to others, I do so with a full understanding of the implications of my role in making them who they are, and what I have not contributed to who they are. If this is “official” then we are always official in that we are always giving our views based on our discourse and our relationship to those listening (reading) and to whatever it is we are talking about. But I do think poets tend to avoid shallowness unless the shallowness is actually profound.

Too often we speak of “the universal” purely from our limited vantage point. When someone in America says, “hey this guy’s work is universal”, more often than not, what they mean is that “this work seems relevant to me”. What they rarely mean is “I think this work is relevant to someone living in Namibia.” In that sense, the so-called “universal” is profoundly subjective and defined by a subjective sensibility. I have found that those who write for the universal have, through no fault of their own, a limited sense of what is universal. After all, it is impossible to have a genuinely “universal” sensibility. Which is why I dispense with that phrase. It becomes quite useless, after a while, because it is loaded with too many poor assumptions. It is, in many ways, what Langston Hughes was speaking against in his brilliant essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) when he spoke of this thing called “American Standardization”. His quarrel was against the presumption that “American Standardization” is free of the bias of race, class and gender, but actually represents what is almost platonic in its “essentialism”. Hughes was coaxing a young black poet to embrace the specificity of his own Black aesthetic and to se beauty and power and relevance in it.

Of course, Thomas, you may rightly argue that all such efforts lead us to one basic desire, to connect with all, and in this sense the quest is for “universality”. I don’t mind this argument, but it does not undermine my point which is more about how we get there than about the “there” of the thing.

best, Kwame
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Thank you for sharing with your beautiful words what sounded like an exquisitely beautiful poetry and musical festival. I love the way the sun plays almost a heroic role in your story.

As a hopeless intellectual, I cannot help but comment on the following:

“But Chin, it is clear, is smarter than that and she understood what the best writers understand, that people connect with the honesty of the specific. Indeed, the universal is the enemy to understanding and human connection. We connect to that which is familiar and what is familiar is the fact that things are intimately familiar to each of us, even when those things may be different for each person. Of course, Jamaica,s understand migration, they understand complicated pasts and heritages, they understand the dilemma of fatherhood and absence and the triumph of motherhood and presence, and they understand race—complex race—mix-up and blenda, as we call that history of racial mixing that is rife with contradictions.”

Do you really think ‘the universal is the enemy to understanding and human connection?’ All the things you describe in your piece have a universal meaning for me. I guess I’m a little confused.

Poetry makes palatable, through elevation, uncomfortable truths of universal character, the sorts of truths covered up in polite (public) or vulgar (private) discourse.

Poetry joins public and private, shedding the vulgarity of the one and the official nature of the other.

(Your ‘festival report’ with its positive take on all the performers, leans, I suppose, towards ‘official’ rhetoric.)

Poets themselves may be vulgar persons in private, but never, I think, shallow officials in public, since elevation lifts the vulgar up, not politeness down.

Thomas
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