I’ve had two recent visits with doctors — to write features on them. My interview with Dr Wendell Bobb, a US-educated Trini neurologist living in Washington, DC, was published in the Newsday yesterday. Last week my interview with Dr Sarah St Louis, a Florida urogynaecologist with TT roots, also appeared in Newsday.
Dr Sarah St Louis is a urogynaecologist — she medically and surgically treats women’s pelvic floor problems, like a urologist only for women. Photo: Lisa Allen-Agostini.
I love medicine. I think, had I more discipline and a head for maths, I would have studied to be a psychiatrist or neurologist myself. (I joke that I watch so much medical TV — some documentaries but mostly medical procedurals like House and Grey’s Anatomy — that I practically have a degree in TV medicine anyway.)
I also enjoy doing health reporting, and serving women especially. Both stories did that. Dr Sarah told me about women’s incontinence, a topic that affects so many women but which is not often discussed. Dr Wendell told me about epilepsy and the importance of women with epilepsy planning their pregnancies.
Pat Bishop. Photo from: The Trinidad and Tobago Web directory
Pat Bishop’s passing leaves a hole in us. Not just the Trinidad and Tobago visual arts community, of which she was a significant part as a painter, or Despers, the venerable steelband with which she worked, or the Lydians, the magnificent choir which she directed from 1987 until her death on August 20, 2011. The work she did and the direction she articulated for our national and cultural identity is irreplaceable. It sounds trite but the lady was really a national treasure and we are the poorer for her passing.
At the memorial for her on August 28 at the Holy Trinity Cathedral, I cried and cried. Not just in sympathy for my friends who are members of the Lydians but for myself that I didn’t have the courage while she lived to spend more time with her instead of holding up that silly veil of some kind of separation between journalist and subject—after all, I had in the past been called upon and could conceivably be called upon again to cover her work or canvass her views on something, anything. What contact I had had with her was professional, not personal, and I always left our interviews with a feeling that I had only glimpsed her creative genius and her understanding of us as Trinidadians.
Consider this unpublished statement she made in a 2007 interview I did with her for Caribbean Beat on her work as director of the Carnival Institute: “If we are not to get to Darfur it is important that we collect and show the various public art processes and what they say about ourselves.” As we enter the third week of the State of Emergency in Trinidad and Tobago don’t those words seem prophetic?
And this, from the same interview: “I have all sorts of fantasies. I have in my head a flock of robot corbeaux—they will have beak caps and radar—and an encounter between the King Douen and Spongebob.
“The only way our children are going to find their place in the sun is to know who they are and to get on to the information superhighway. If I did my cartoons of Mama D’glo combing her hair, Yugioh would fall in love with her. They would know they are part of the world and not just someone that must say ‘Yes, master’ to Miami and survive on barrels from that part of the world.”
I was disappointed, to say the least, at the remarks made by Bhoe Tewarie at the memorial. Dr Tewarie, in his capacity as Minister of Planning, Economic and Social Restructuring and Gender Affairs, was one of the last people to see her alive, as he had hosted the meeting at which she collapsed, never to recover, on August 20. He talked at the memorial about the young Pat Bishop’s desire to be seen yet he failed to mention that the better part of her career as historian, musicologist and cultural researcher was far more devoted to looking than being seen. Not “look me,” but “look we” was what she in her latter work was all about. More than anywhere else, you could hear it in the magical way she fused tassa, African drums and steelpan with European Baroque tradition in her epic signature piece the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah as performed by Despers and the Lydians and Malick Tassa Drummers at the very memorial service.
It was this that stuck in my throat: rage. The government would make sure that Pat’s work was remembered, he said; but I somehow got the impression that it was the works themselves and not her intention that the government would celebrate. Pat Bishop was an artist’s artist, and even greater than her desire for making her own work visible was her passion for protecting our arts and fostering their growth, probing them for an understanding of our national possibility and potential. Dr Tewarie, in addition to your tributes and a retrospective exhibition or whatever is planned to memorialize Pat Bishop, why not found a National Arts Council that would give significant and transparent grants to the arts in this country? Would that not be the better way to celebrate her legacy? Wouldn’t she be glad to know that some artist here, digging in the rich soil that is our cultural heritage, would have it that much easier? That our arts could be as respectable and comparatively well funded as any? That the hardscrabble life lived by some artist could be a little easier for it?
My friend writer Barbara Jenkins, who writes for the Lydians, eulogized Pat Bishop in a note published in the programme for Winterreise, the show Pat was directing at her death. With Barbara’s permission I’ve republished her words here. I wonder if Dr Tewarie will read them and I wonder if he will then understand.
A Winter Journey of the Soul
Do not go gentle into that good night…
…Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Pat Bishop died on Saturday 20th August 2011. She had been working on this Winterreise concert when she died. As was her way, she was also working on a collection of paintings, She Sells Sea Shells by the Sea Shore. For Pat, one creative activity inspired another, even segued into another. She could never do just one thing at a time when she was on fire; she had to find outlets everywhere or be consumed by her own energy, go into meltdown. This time, as she completed both – preparing for the concert and putting the last brushstroke on the last painting – she did self-combust.
I would venture that it was not the strain of the work she did do, that killed Pat Bishop – she was tireless with the choir, the steel, the painting, the teaching, the guiding, the writing, the thinking. These gave challenge, gave hope, gave reward in lifting the spirit, her own and those she worked with. It was the stress of what she did not do, could not do, that broke her.
More than anyone, I think, Pat recognised how lucky we are to have found ourselves here, in this miraculous space that is Trinidad and Tobago. How lucky we are to have arrived here with the gifts of intelligence, creativity and endurance and the blessed serendipity of being thrown together to share and fuse and mix and blend and make newer, better, more original creations, of people, of things. A people who, musical illiterates in the conventional sense, could take industrial waste, an empty oil drum, use heat and hammer, and create a musical instrument. A people who, colonised and coloniser, enslaved and slave-owner, plantation overseen and overseer, heated together in this crucible, could emerge as us! Look at we! Just look at we! Yes, WE the subject, not the object.
How many times must you say to a national community; how many times must you say to the corporate world; how many times must you say to ministers and governments of how many regimes, that the wealth of a nation is the people, their creativity, their natural born gifts, their talents? Not just say, not just talk, speechify, posture, but show by example, demonstrate by unceasing labour, by walking the walk, barefoot over beds of nails, through coals of fire, decade after decade after decade?
Say over and over and over, that our wealth, the treasure of our human capital, is inexhaustible, renewable, sustainable – the only long-term capital that this country possesses, the only investment worth while, the only thing that could, would, last beyond all other wealth. That this wealth must be recognised, nurtured, developed, cherished, rewarded?
That all else is ephemeral, all else, dross?
It was while she was called upon to say it one more time that the fragile clay vessel that housed her soul broke beyond repair and Pat Bishop died.
Pat had been going through A Winter Journey of the Soul for a long, long time. She had been soldiering on, putting the last of her energies into what she could do, while still hoping to persuade others, the powers-that-be, that the key to this country’s salvation lies, not in physical structures, but in empowering institutions; not in consumerism, but in conservation; not in $GDP, but in human GDP – Greatest Development of all People, ALL people – through their myriad talents, their boundless creativity. And she died, while saying so, one last time.
My younger daughter, The Lady, announced some time ago that she wants to be an inventor. I am not sure where she got the idea but she has been consistently coming up with inventions since then, some zany and some really practical. (If I told you what they were it would be copyright infringement. Sorry.) I’ve always encouraged both my girls to love science as well as the arts and humanities. We have books on biology, physics and general science all through the house and there’s a couple of science kits floating around the house, so it’s not completely out of the blue, but there aren’t really a lot of role models for her, especially in the Caribbean, and most of my friends are artists and writers, with the exception of her godmother, who is a petroleum engineer. That’s why I was so excited this week to hear from a friend of mine that a Trinidad-and-Tobago-born scientist was coming here for a visit.
The scientist is Camille Waldrop Alleyne, and she went to Mucurapo Girls’ RC, The Lady’s alma mater, and St Francois Girls’ College, the school for which The Lady passed in this year’s SEA. The bio sent to me by NIHERST, the organisation hosting her visit, is tremendously exciting:
“For the past 15 years, Camille Wardrop Alleyne has been dedicated to the advancement of aerospace and space technology. She is currently Assistant Program Scientist for the International Space Station (ISS), based at the NASA–Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, with responsibility for communicating the ISS’ scientific research and education programmes to stakeholders and the public.”
Wow! I couldn’t ask for a more tailor-made role model for The Lady.
A little background: because her elder sister Miss Thing and I both went to Bishop Anstey High School, The Lady was disappointed to have passed for St Francois. I didn’t share her feeling; I was over the moon. St Francois, a government secondary school, is a very sound educational institution with a brilliant track record and I’ve heard nothing but good things about them for the past few years. I hope that, as a business magnet school, they will understand The Lady’s forceful temperament and know how best to shape that bold spirit so that she is a leader and unafraid of her power while still compassionate and human. I think this is where she is meant to be and I intend to do everything I can to support her and her school as long as she needs me to. And that includes bigging up a St Francois alum!
While The Lady won’t be at the lecture because she’s visiting family abroad on a well-deserved holiday, I hope to go and make copious notes. If she wants to be a scientist, I have her back.
Here’s the flyer for Camille Waldrop Alleyne’s lecture. Here’s hoping other little girls and boys from T&T can get inspiration and guidance from her too.
Amy Winehouse. Photo by nuflicks/Flickr Creative Commons License
On Saturday I was in a sailing boat in St George’s, Grenada, getting ready to cast off when the skipper announced that Amy Winehouse had been found dead.
I’ve never met Amy Winehouse. I’m not a musician. I’m not British or anything even remotely connected to her. I only discovered her music about three years ago and, honestly, there were people who were more ardent fans. I do know, however, that hearing the news of her death made me deeply sad. She was an epic talent, writing songs that cut sharply into the pain of love and loving and singing them in a voice that wrung each drop of that pain from the poignant lyrics, the voice that her friend Russell Brand described as having “rolling, wondrous resonance”. I often put what I consider to be her best song, “Back to Black”, on repeat, feeling the music just probing my own pain the way a tongue will probe an aching tooth, flinching from the agony but going back for more and more of it.
I was in Grenada on assignment –I might not be able to make rent every month, so to speak, but I do have a fantastic career that lets me do things like that sometimes. My assignment called for me to experience Grenada’s beauty, and I had my morning tea on a balcony overlooking the two-mile stretch of white sand that is Grand Anse Beach. I had woken up Sunday morning with Amy on my mind and I wrote this poem in her memory.
The internet publication sx salon (produced by the Small Axe people) features a new story from me this month. The story is a noir-ish short called The Gun.
I have to say thanks to my writing workshop group–Sharon, Barbara, Alake, Rhoda and Monique–for their support in the editing and publication of the story. Could not have done it without them. A real tribute to the power of community. 🙂
The story is up here, but do also check out the rest of the magazine. Other pieces include reviews of books by Christian Campbell, Anton Nimblette and Geoffrey Philp, and the issue is a tribute to Peepal Tree Press, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.
My daughter’s brother the Boychick is visiting us from Tennessee and we are doing the tourist thing. Over the past week we’ve been to Maracas Bay, the Military Museum, the National Museum, the Pitch Lake and the Temple in the Sea–all great outings, in theory. But in Trinidad, tourism is so poorly developed it’s a shame. I was horrified and embarrassed half the time at the paltry quality of our tourism product.
Maracas Bay was great. The bathrooms are clean, the beach has lifeguards from morning to evening, and there was room in the parking lot.
Maracas Bay picture I found on Wikipedia
Things went downhill from there.
The Military Museum (officially the Chaguaramas Military History and Aviation Museum… you can see photos here) is a bit of a wreck. It is supposed to show our military history from pre-Columbian times to the present, and the exhibits actually are clearly thought out. We found parts of it engaging: the WWI trenches (a walk-through exhibit), the sack of a Trinidad village by pirates in the 17th century (another walk-through) and the amphibious transport vessel (which we got to board) were some of the highlights in our visit. However, the majority of the exhibits are so poorly kept that they are literally crumbling. Photos are fading and peeling, uniforms are dusty and tarnished (even the newer ones) and swords are rusting. There was a dead bird in the grounded BWIA jumbo jet on display–and the jet was gutted, which puzzled us greatly. The whole place needs to be overhauled and some sort of climate controlled environment be built to preserve these unique pieces of our history. The single attendant couldn’t leave the door to guide us through the museum, and there are no guidebooks or narration to help; one entered, walked through, left. That was all. It’s sad, because the idea of it is so cool, and there are things in there that were really intriguing. *sigh*
The National Museum and Art Gallery was also disappointing. The building is under renovation, but instead of closing the museum for a while, the museum’s administrators have left it open so visitors can go in and see part of the display of natural and cultural artifacts, but not the art gallery, which is closed. Only the Cazabon gallery is open. We loved what we saw but it was very annoying to set aside an afternoon to tour a museum only to find that it would take no more than half an hour, at best. The dioramas of early 20th century Trinidad culture are excellent (even if I’ve seen them a million times); and the Cazabon gallery, as previously noted, truly rocks. However, the natural history section features decaying taxidermy and faded specimens. Surely, if we can build a half-billion-dollar performing arts academy we can invest some money in the preservation of our history? And why not just close the museum while it is being renovated?
The Pitch Lake, one of our natural wonders, is pretty awesome. I’ve never been there before and was quite interested in the tour. BUT. BUT. BUT. I couldn’t find an official website for the tour and we went down there with the impression it is TT$30/person for a tour led by an official guide, info given on a tourism review website. Not so. Not only was the visitor’s centre CLOSED, the official guides were nowhere in sight. We ended up paying a guide US $30 per person. It was a decent tour but I hadn’t expected that hugely inflated price. We should have been told (on the invisible official web site) to wear flip flops and shorts. DO NOT TOUR THE PITCH LAKE IN SNEAKERS AND JEANS. You’ll have to take off your shoes and roll up your jeans and you’ll STILL get wet.
But guess what? There were prayers going on and we couldn’t go inside. We settled for a quick walk around it (still pretty impressive, by the way). And the bathrooms, in the adjoining cremation site, are frightening. To the Trinidadian or Tobagonian reader who went to government school: remember the worst toilet in your primary school? Yeah. Like that. Only worse. There were also about a dozen stray dogs wandering the site (I shudder to think what they eat, since there is no meat allowed on the compound).
We wanted to go to the Point-a-Pierre Wildfowl Trust, a gorgeous nature reserve on the Petrotrin compound, but it was open only by appointment. I wrote on the wall of the Asa Wright Nature Centre’s Facebook page on June 21, asking about a tour. I haven’t yet got a response.
We’re off to Tobago for a day on Friday. Let’s see what they have to offer.
Possibly because my mom was an avid Mills and Boon reader, I was weaned on romance novels. I loved these books for their ability to translate dreams and fantasies about love and happiness into 200-page packages in which the girl always got her man AND the amazing career she wanted, a perfect house and babies, to boot. A bonus was the settings–I learned about Australia, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Kenya, Fiji, the Seychelles, all through the writings of such romance stars as Barbara Cartland, Penny Jordan and Margaret Way. Later, I learned about the US through the Desire brand and Harlequin Romances. All the characters were white and the men were rich and the women mostly middle class. Somewhere along the line I discovered that the characters didn’t have to be white; there were black–even Caribbean–romances, too. Trinidadian author Valerie Belgrave has written some, including one called Tigress, which I planned, once, to write a thesis on.
Another Trinidadian author, Roslyn Carrington, has made a career writing black romances under the pen name Simona Taylor. (Full disclosure: Roslyn has been a speaker and a judge for various aspects of my NGO, The Allen Prize for Young Writers.) She gave me a copy of her latest, Intimate Exposure (Kimani Press, 2011), a couple of weeks ago and I read it hungrily. I found to my delighted surprise that not only was her story intriguing and captivating like a good romance novel ought to be, I liked her characters as well.
Romance novels rely on a formula that is seldom, if ever, deviated from: the male lead is very rich, charming and a chick magnet, while the female lead is unspeakably beautiful but for some reason in an awkward spot. They meet and he immediately falls in love with her but tries to deny it (and she does the same for him). After triumphing over some betrayal, they live happily ever after. (Think Pretty Woman, except that Julia Roberts’ character is a secretary, not a whore.) That holds true for Intimate Exposure, but with some surprising twists–which I won’t give away because I don’t want to spoil them for you.
What most impressed me was the writing of the characters as feminist. The woman enjoys sex thoroughly (all the time, not just with this magical man in the book) and has an actual career in which her intelligence and education–not her great fashion sense–are paramount. She rescues herself from the betrayal, albeit with a push from the male lead–hey, it’s still a romance novel, and some things are inviolate here, including the man’s role as leader. She is, in short, a three-dimensional, smart, self-motivated woman. The male lead is allowed to cry and show weakness, and while he abets her in her struggle, he’s not the one who “saves” her. She saves herself.
The writing is tight and carries the reader along nicely, and there is the requisite stop in an exotic, pastoral destination–in this case the Caribbean island of Martinique; and the sex scenes are spicy and credibly written. In short, it provides all that a romance novel needs to be an entertaining escapist read, and more.
When I first started buying my own books, one of the first I picked up was a screenplay of Caryl Phillips’ Playing Away. The Kittitian-British writer has always had a special place in my heart because of that early memory and it was a pleasure and a privilege to interview him for Caribbean Beat Magazine last year when he was here during the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival.
I’m posting here three poems. The first is a poem I wrote some years ago after my mom died, and which I read at the Bocas Lit Fest Poetry Lime Friday night; the other two are poems that came out of the Bocas poetry writing workshop I did. (Check the previous blog posting for details on that). I’m also putting up, for the workshop poems, the prompts that comprise the material that went into the poems.
Once
(For Dolsie)
Frail as hope
her wasted body
smells of soap
and soured dreams.
Once she was
much more than this.
Once she kissed
our smooth young faces.
She held us hard
against the world
outside her yard,
kept us safe.
Once she loved.
Once she moved.
Merle Collins, who led the workshop on Saturday with Christian Campbell, had the participants write for a minute after being given a prompt, and then we had to take those writings and shape them into a poem. These were my responses to the prompts and the poem that came from them. (It’s not very good, I warn you!)
Stew–stew in your own juices watching that ass slip slide hiccup down the hall oh lord will I never stop stop stop stutter to a halt
Friday–payday just got paid money in my pocket hey hey* (*you recognise this song?) but that is not me hungry when is my friday coming
Mango–sweet and slippery flesh sliding on lips nature is a boss fragrant flesh a gift thank you Jesus his face in every mango
Soft–but soft what light through yonder window breaks the window break? no yuh ass is shakespeare yuh ent ha no culcha or wha
Islands–her eyes were islands drowned in milk open only to what was inside her drowned
Drunk–like his blood eaten like his body consumed by the world that scorned him
Sky–open Irish frizzy hair delight bright smile heart-shaped face shape of her heart
Empty–Fennec on my lap warming my empty womb the son I will never have he answers when I call with a polite mew to say yes? you called?
Sea–me here in you so big and I so small and never could swim too good splash but not hard softer, a lapping more a lapping
From which I constructed:
You sea
me there in you
so big
and I, so small
and learning to
swim through
the softly lapping
waves of your hipsway
watching that
ass slip slide
hiccup down
the hall
slippery like
a mango
flesh a fragrant gift
but you
open to only
the islands of
her eyes
what is inside her
and me stroking
the kitten on my lap who
warms my empty womb
the son I will
never have
when I call him
he answers
with a polite
questioning
mew
I am become
the cat’s mother
she
Finally, Christian Campbell’s exercise was to use mimicry–like jazz singers scatting, like a soucouyant taking the shape of an old woman–to shape our poems.
I chose to mimic the form of a radio death announcement.
If the Bocas Lit Fest (Trinidad and Tobago Literary Festival) had been held in another country, right now I would be packing, looking for my earrings on the floor behind the sideboard in my hotel room, clearing my non-existent room service charges and being driven to the airport in a shuttle or by a member of the organising committee. As it was, Bocas took place in my country and I just had to get into my car and drive home last night. The feeling at the ending of a great event is the same, though. Bocas left me replete, yet hungry for more.
It ran from Thursday April 28-Sunday May 1. Thursday’s highlight for me was my leading a creative writing workshop for 9-11-year-olds at the National Library in Port-of-Spain, where all the Bocas main events took place. There were 20 boys present, all from Richmond Street Boys’ Standard Three, and their teacher Mr Hercules. I did a quick talk about the basics–every story has a beginning, middle and end, and what is conflict and how it’s used–and then set them on a free writing exercise. I was honoured to be the scribe for a visually impaired boy, Kishon, as he told a wonderfully creative story about a boy reading a book about a wilderness explorer who gets savaged by a wild lion.
Another Thursday highlight was moderating a reading by two talented authors, Prof Barbara Lalla, and Prof David Chariandy. Prof Lalla is the author of two novels, and she read from her most recent, Cascade. I’ve read it, and it was as puzzling and beautiful as an impressionist painting. Up close it was hard to see the pattern in places, but once I was done and stepped back a bit it was gorgeous, a detailed, breathtaking vision of aging and friendship. Prof Chariandy’s debut book Soucouyant is a shortish novel that has won many plaudits in Canada, where he’s from, and I found it spare and gut wrenching. Having watched my own mother fall to dementia, the main theme of the book, I saw many things in the story that were painfully familiar.
Friday night I read in the Poetry Lime. It was originally supposed to be a poetry crawl, going from bar to bar in Woodbrook, a wonderful entertainment zone in Port-of-Spain, but was changed at the last minute to a lime at the Reader’s Bookshop in St James. While I would have been happy to tramp up Ariapita Ave drinking and reading increasingly slurred poetry, perhaps this worked out better–especially as I had to drive home! I read four poems, three tiny ones on love, and one short one on my mother’s experience with dementia. (I’ll post that poem separately.) It was an excellent, if packed reading. Some of the poets taking part were Phillip Nanton, Lorna Goodison, Tanya Shirley, Mark McWatt, Jane Bryce, Christian Campbell and Merle Collins. I was extremely flattered to have been invited to read in such distinguished company!
Jamaican author Marlon James takes in the poetry at the Bocas Lit Fest Poetry LIme
Saturday I took part in a poetry workshop with Christian Campbell and Merle Collins. The theme was mimicry and improvisation; participants had to use random prompt words given by Merle to write as much as they could, and then combine those slivers into a whole that, hopefully, would make sense. Christian made us think up a pattern to mimic and write a piece using that structure. It could have been anything. I chose the form of a radio death announcement. (I’ll post those poems separately, too.)
Sunday I was exhausted and so overstimulated I felt I had bees under my skin. I was constantly on the verge of tears and I couldn’t sit still. Thankfully, I had only a couple things planned and I could–and did–spend the day drifting around getting in people’s way after I finished taking part in a workshop on getting published. Now, since I’ve already been published one might say I shouldn’t have gone. But I nevertheless enjoyed the workshop and I thought the facilitators, Margaret Busby (founder of Allison and Busby), Jeremy Poynting (of Peepal Tree Press) and Ken Jaikaransingh (of Lexicon Books), did a terrific job of explaining the process. They gave tips to writers–including on finding an agent, looking for the right publisher, and formatting work for submission.
Oh! and Sunday too was readings from the winning OCM Bocas Prize books, Edwidge Danticat’s Creating Dangerously, Tiphanie Yanique’s How to Escape from a Leper Colony, and Derek Walcott’s White Egrets. Tiphanie, who was a contributor to Trinidad Noir and with whom I did a short book tour in NY in 2009, reads beautifully. Her story was about a convict who had been wrongly convicted of a crime he did commit. You’ll have to read the story to see what I mean! Prof Eddie Baugh, a Jamaican scholar and poet who I absolutely adore, read from Walcott’s poetry. His reading of a piece dedicated to Lorna Goodison made me shiver.
With Prof Eddie Baugh at a reception hosted by the French Embassy at the close of the Bocas Lit Fest
As always at the end of a really exciting and connected literary event I’m exhausted and sad but also invigorated and hopeful because of all the interesting people I’ve met, all I’ve learned and heard, all the books I’ve bought. I got poet Tanya Shirley’s collection She Who Sleeps with Bones, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, ARC Magazine’s second edition, and Earl Lovelace’s Is Just a Movie. Gobbled up Tanya’s book already and want to start on Tiphanie’s any moment now, once I’ve done some of the work I’ve neglected for the past few days!
I’ve put up a zillion photos from the weekend on my FB author page. Check them out and see if you can pick out the world famous Caribbean writers who were there!
