Author Archive
Kwame Dawes
CALABASH DISPATCHES–SUNDAY
As if on cue, Sunday morning of Calabash arrived with overcast skies. The sofa in the wide living room of the suite I was staying in was getting old already. I was waking up quite early each day because of the firm surface of my bed. On the verandah, the sea is a few yards away, and it makes sense to sit there, and watch the light creep into the sky, and pray and think and make mental notes. On Sunday morning, I could feel the muscles in my legs hurting. At first I wondered what had happened to me the day before—I had not been exercising at all, and yet my legs felt as if I had been doing extreme squats all night. Then I realized how little I sat down on Saturday.
Kwame Dawes
CALABSH DISPATCHES-DAY THREE
Pico Iyer and Paul Holdegraber are brilliant writers whose capacity to articulate with insight and relevance matters of politics, spirit and the basics of life is enviable. This interview between the non-fiction, novelist, travel writer and the Director of Public Programs at the New York Public Library will go down as perhaps the most engaging and memorable of Calabash’s history. Sometimes, the threads of our lives can become entangled with the sources of wisdoms and through some genius of circumstance and effort, lead to a life of insight and enlightenment. You do expect two well-educated and well positioned thinkers to make sense when they come together on stage, but what you don’t always expect is their humanity, their humor, their humility and their genuine desire to communicate to come across. On Saturday morning of Calabash this happened.
Kwame Dawes
CALABASH DISPATCH–FRIDAY NIGHT
On Friday night, the air is cool off the sea. The breaths of wind against the microphone begin to suggest distant thunder. A woman sitting beside me says, “Rain…” I sit with my legs stretched out beyond the shelter of the large tent. I am in the front row of a sea of neatly organized white plastic chairs that stretch over a lush lawn. I sense in every coolness droplets of rain. But it does not rain. The tent is now filling with people. Calabashers, each of them, casual as a Sunday picnic, smiling, lounging around, waiting for things to begin. This is how things feel before the opening readers for the 2009 Calabash Festival. I have asked Carleen Samuels who has been with the festival since the beginning, to make sure that all the readers are in place. I have gathered together all the books by these three women poets, and I have a sheave of notes about the authors and announcements for the audience in my hand. I am wearing my calabash uniform—a beautifully designed t-shirt of full red, with this years symbol—a peace sign made up of the multiple human forms holding hands and suggesting community. It is good to be here. I greet the audience, and the greet me back. Calabash has began.
Kwame Dawes
CALABASH DISPATCHES 2009
The truth of the matter is that Calabash #9 may not have happened. Why might this be important? Calabash is a literary festival that takes place in a small village in a remote parish on a small island each year, and in the larger scheme of things, the possibility of a nine year old festival not happening may seem unimportant. But Calabash is other things. It is an International Literary Festival, it is free to the public, it brings together some of the best writers from around the world who donate their time and talents to read here, and for many people—several thousand to be exact—Calabash is necessary.
Kwame Dawes
CALABASH 08—IMAGINE—Festival Dispatches
Calabash 2008 – Sunday May 25th
Calabash Sunday manages, somehow, to become something of a church service. Of course, the entire festival is about the word, and the spoken word and the received and given word and people at the festival like to talk about spirit and vibe and heart and such the like. But Sunday is Sunday and it is hard to shake the feel of Sunday morning in Jamaica. Early in the morning, in the silence before the sound system kicks into gear in the tent area, you can hear choruses and hymns carrying over the acacia bushes and zinc roofed houses—the rituals of prayer and grace. Some Calabashers want to have a real service at the festival on Sunday. They pull me aside each year, and pitch this ecumenical service for all who will come. I suspect it could happen, but I realize also that in the throes of the festival, I can only think that it would be another brilliant idea to be managed. And we have many brilliant ideas. We don’t try all of them. We simply can’t. But the suggestions will always come. These are not to be seen as criticisms. They are the gestures of those who see the festival as their own and they would like to see it embrace something of their own image. I think, though, that there is so much open beach at Treasure Beach, and praying people do not need the stamp of Calabash to make something happen. Calabashers have been known to turn a simple gathering at the beach into a service to music and dance, or a service to political discussion, or an improvised outdoor hotel, and much else.
Kwame Dawes
CALABASH–IMAGINE–2008
DISPATCHES
Saturday Part 3
Very early on in the life of Calabash, we decided that it would be a good idea to partner with organizations and entities that had something to do with authors. We had thought about deeding out some curating and programming to some individuals, but it seemed to make better sense to think of book agencies, publishers, arts organizations and other entities that seemed to have access to writers, and still had a solid sense of style and engagement that worked well with the basic values of Calabash: daring, earthy, diverse and inspirational. It has amazed me how these words, (at least one that seems rather overused–“inspirational”) conjured up by Colin Channer, with a briefing to support and define each of them, have come to represent a splendid litmus test for what happens at the festival—and here I mean EVERYTHING that happens at the festival. Over the years we have sought partnerships with a handful of organizations, and one of the most productive of partnerships has been with the independent publishing house Akashic Books. This year, Akashic joined with us again and helped us program an eclectic and sophisticated readings that took place late afternoon into the night on Saturday, when the cool air off the sea wafted around us, skirts flicking in the breeze, bodies relaxing with the calming of the sea rhythm, and the moon dangling overhead. The audience had spent a few hours resting, eating, taking a swim, showering, and getting dressed for the evening activities. Where the anticipation for the Walcott session created a frenetic kind of energy, the evening mod was more laid back. Three Akashic published authors would read. Juan de Recacoechea, a Bolivian fiction writer; Nina Revoyr, a Japanese American novelist; and Abraham Rodriquez, a Puerto Rican descent American living in Berlin who writes novels. They would then be followed after a short break by three other novelists, Margaret Cezair-Thompson, a Jamaican living in the US; Gerard Donovan, an Irish novelist and poet; and Lawrence Hill, a Canadian essayist and fiction writer.
Kwame Dawes
CALABASH—IMAGINE—Festival Dispatches
Saturday Part Two
The sky is clean of clouds. Standing on the stage, the sea stretches out towards the horizon, a sheet of turquoise with the interruption of surf a hundred yards out where the reef breaks the waves. Treasure Beach’s coastline is rocky, with the occasional scraggly tree—these biblical structures of gnarled branches and sparse fat leaves—they are made to silhouette artfully against the blue. In the early morning at Calabash people sneak up on you. Jamaicans move with the slow casualness of tropical people who have learned how to conserve their energy in the sun. The empty tent area will slowly fill out—one minute you are looking at the cool insides lined with white plastic chairs and only a spotting of people, and then you look away. When you look inside again, there are a hundred bodies, calmly fanning, sipping drinks, eating fruit. The audience, as Valzhyna Mort, the waif-like Belarusian poet would announce on Saturday night, is so sexy. She is talking about the way the bodies, move, the way clothes flow on these bodies, the complete sensuality of the laughter and the quiet in the audience. It is a spiritual thing, actually, and you watch as these folks, dressed for comfort, dressed for style, and dressed to please the body, walk under the tent that now smells of heated crushed grass, take their seats and speak softly to each other. By 9:45, the hundred or so people, has miraculous multiplied into nearly a thousand bodies and you still have the sense that the place is not crowded, that this is a church picnic, that there is enough space for all these bodies to enjoy their own personal space.
Kwame Dawes
CALABSH 2008–IMAGINE-Walcott
CALABASH 2008–IMAGINE
SATURDAY 1
The hardest thing to do is to find time to Blog at Calabash. All day the audience, true owners of this festival, will accost to ask questions, make suggestions, express gratitude. I can’t bring myself to do stock answers, even when the questions are the same:
“Kwame, Kwame, [fishing into a worn satchel] I have this book, man. This book of poems. I want your critique. Let me read you a poem and I need you to assess it…”
“Right now?” the crowd is thick, people bouncing off us.
“Oh yes…”
I say no, I say it is a bad idea, it is unfair to their poetry for me to try and assess it right now—under these circumstances. Disappointment. But we smile.
Someone has the constant question:
“You, star, you are the man to ask, they say.” I can tell this is an open mic poet. The dread locks, the worn sheets of paper in hand, the pure intensity, the hunger….
“We will announce the open mic in a few minutes check the program.” I say, quickly They smile, nod.
“I just reach.”
“You came for the open mic only?”
“Yeah, I have these poems. I want you to assess them for me….”
Kwame Dawes
CALABSH 2008–IMAGINE
Calabash 2008 – Friday May 23rd
At 7:30 PM, under a cluster of white tents and in the presence over eight hundred people sitting patiently on white plastic chairs, with the constant moaning of the sea in the background and the distant thump of a the bass coming from sound systems kicking up their Labor Day night sessions on the south-western coast of this island, I introduced three writers whose task it is to celebrate the work of other writers in their capacity as editors. M. Mark, Editor of the Pen Journal, Thomas Glave, editor of Our Caribbean: Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writers of the Antilles, and Achy Obejas, editor of Havana Noir yet another in the remarkably readable Noir series put out by Akashic Books. Glave has been apprehensive all day. He is a Jamaican who writes and teaches abroad, but continues to spend a lot of time in Jamaica, being a outspoken advocate for gay rights on the island. He is aware that to speak up on these matters is not without some risk, but he also knows that Calabash is a festival that boasts one of the most open-minded and gracious audiences one could find. The best kind–an audience filled with people with strongly held opinions and yet people who understand that when a writer goes on stage, they are taking a risk, and that hospitality is the overriding spirit that should guide their reaction. Glave, despite his nervousness, is cool, steady and begins with a small speech directed at Jamaica’s Prime Minister who recently declared to the BBC that he would not have any homosexuals in his cabinet.
Kwame Dawes
Jena Six
If you depend on television for your sense of what is hot in the news, you may be forgiven for not knowing about the Jena 6. But there is something happening around these six teenagers from Jena, Louisiana. It is all over Black talk radio. And this is no small thing. These quite popular radio hosts are devoting their entire shows—three and four hours—to exploring issues around this story. Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, and anyone who is anyone in the African American world are weighing in. There is going to be a protest demonstration in Jena and busloads of people are planning to head down there to protest the injustice of what is going. The boys are facing massive jail sentences for being involved in what can be safely called a “school-yard fight”. Tellingly, all the elements of a railroad trial seem to mark this case: peculiarly incestuous juries, small town anxieties and the persistence of long-standing race problems. Jena is, apparently, eighty percent white, thirteen percent of the population is black. The blacks of Jena are coming on the radio talk shows to say that racism has been a way of life in that part of the country for as long as they have lived there. So people are outraged. People want to see justice done. People see this as a case not unlike several recent cases in which African American youths have been meted out absurdly weighty sentences for activities that would normally get a reprimand. And the most damning thing about Jena is that the white kids who carried out their own set of troubling acts, seem to have gotten off lightly.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Thom Donovan
Bhanu Kapil
Fred Moten
Craig Santos Perez
Sina Queyras
Sotère Torregian
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
CHICAGO EVENTS
Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
Fri, March 26th, 6:00 PM
Open Books
213 West Institute Place
Free admission
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