The Power To
Do Our Part Nature gives us the air we breathe, the food that nourishes our bodies, the peace that feeds our souls. It’s time we do our part. Republic Financial Holdings Limited is an official signatory of the United Nations’ Principles of Responsible Banking. Our commitment: to make a positive impact on the health of our environment by employing environmentally sustainable banking practices. We have the power to make a difference.
A MESSAGE From OUR CEO Resilience: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity. 2020 and 2021 have taught us many lessons. One of the most important is resilience. Another twelve months have swiftly passed, and this brings us to the brink of a new year — a year that will have its own challenges, which we will, no doubt, rise above. The pandemic has rewritten the rules, offering opportunities for renewal, and provided a glimpse of the new economy that will emerge from the old. We have learned to exist alongside many uncertainties, reflecting and re-aligning our expectations. This past year has shown us that, despite the scale of the challenges facing us, we are resilient, and will remain so. We continue to adjust our business model, allowing us to reduce costs without compromising the authentic Caribbean service that you know and love. More will be revealed as we enter 2022. In July 2021, the borders at our base in Trinidad re-opened after being closed to commercial air traffic for sixteen months. This was welcome news for Caribbean Airlines, and our teams worked assiduously to ensure that on 17 July we were ready to safely restart operations and welcome you on board. With all protocols in place, our commercial schedule was re-introduced on a phased basis, including additions to the network of weekly service between Trinidad and Dominica and twice weekly flights between Trinidad and Eugene F. Correia Airport in Ogle, Georgetown, Guyana. We launched some new products, including Your Space, which gives customers travelling in the economy section
the option to pay for the seat next to them, or the entire row. Your Space seat prices start from as low as US$20, depending on the route (conditions apply). Our Duty Free store at Piarco International Airport (POS) in Trinidad is fully re-opened, and arriving and departing customers (from POS) can now enjoy the convenience of ordering your favourite Duty Free items online before your flight. Frequent flyers can keep your miles active and earn more miles by flying with us, shopping at any Massy Store in the Caribbean, renting vehicles with the Enterprise Group, using the RBC co-branded card, or shopping on the Caribbean Airlines website. Club Caribbean members are reminded that your membership is extended until 2022 — the specific month and date of the extension will vary depending on your individual membership. For the 2021 winter schedule, we have added capacity between: • JFK, New York, and Trinidad • JFK, New York, and Kingston, Jamaica • JFK, New York, and Montego Bay, Jamaica (seasonal service) • Toronto and Trinidad • Toronto and Kingston • Fort Lauderdale and Kingston (Tuesday and Thursday from 7 December) Please visit www.caribbean-airlines.com for full details on services to all of our destinations. During this special season, our lives are filled with the spirit of giving, the importance of family and friends, and a sense of healing, rejuvenation, and new opportunity. We are looking forward to 2022 with renewed energy and focus. There are many exciting developments that will unfold in the new year around product enhancements and a brand refresh. We’ll share more details as activities progress. To our loyal customers and partners, a big thank you for your enduring goodwill and the value you add to this airline, as we live our vision to be the Airline of Choice serving the Caribbean, profitably. Your support has helped us to survive and kept us motivated. We are grateful for the opportunity to continue and develop our relationships with you in 2022. To the people of Caribbean Airlines, thank you for being part of this dynamic organisation. And from all of us, we wish you and your loved ones a Happy Christmas and prosperous renewal in the New Year.
Garvin Medera Chief Executive Officer
Contents No. 167 • November/December 2021
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20 38 EMBARK
30 Backstory
10 Need to know
Make the most of November and December, even during the time of COVID-19 — from parang season to Divali treats
Devoted to the dance Trained in the tradition of Bharatanatyam dance at one of the leading academies in India, Trinidadian Alana Rajah dreams of establishing the ancient artform in her home country. Sharda Patasar learns about the discipline and adaptation required to make classical Indian dance flourish
18 Bookshelf and playlist
34 Portfolio
8 Wish you were here Pigeon Point, Tobago
This month’s reading and listening picks ARRIVE
20 Bucket List
Where Next? Almost two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, like everyone else, we at Caribbean Beat are longing for a break. As we look forward to the year ahead, the magazine team shares wishes for future travel
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Assembling fragments A new exhibition in Toronto brings together an important collection of historical photographs and the work of contemporary Caribbean artists, to show how our stories and ideas have evolved over time
38 Closeup
In the light of language Canisia Lubrin’s sense of the wondrous power of words is rooted in her childhood in St Lucia. Now one of
the Caribbean’s most lauded younger poets, she continues to revel in language’s luminous potential, writes Shivanee Ramlochan
48 DID you even know
How much do you know about Caribbean dance traditions? Let our trivia column put you to the test
Caribbean Beat CaribbeanBeat An MEP publication
Editor Nicholas Laughlin General manager Halcyon Salazar Design artist Kevon Webster Production manager Jacqueline Smith Web editor Caroline Taylor Editorial assistants Shelly-Ann Inniss, Kristine De Abreu
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Media & Editorial Projects Ltd. 6 Prospect Avenue, Long Circular, Maraval 120111, Trinidad and Tobago T: (868) 622 3821/5813/6138 • F: (868) 628 0639 E: caribbean-beat@meppublishers.com Website: www.meppublishers.com Cover Common squirrel monkeys — known locally as sakiwinkis — are among the diverse wildlife protected in Guyana’s 371,000-hectare Iwokrama rainforest reserve Photo Nick Fox/Shutterstock.com
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Read and save issues of Caribbean Beat on your smartphone, tablet, computer, and favourite digital devices! Caribbean Beat is published six times a year for Caribbean Airlines by Media & Editorial Projects Ltd. It is also available on subscription. Copyright © Caribbean Airlines 2021. All rights reserved. ISSN 1680–6158. No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher. MEP accepts no responsibility for content supplied by our advertisers. The views of the advertisers are theirs and do not represent MEP in any way. Website: www.caribbean-airlines.com
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A taste of home For Caribbean people far from home, Christmas brings a longing for the familiar — and never more so than during the COVID-19 pandemic, writes Vaughn Stafford Gray
A
family friend recently reminded me that we in the Caribbean are lucky to call home a place where people pay to escape their lives for a week. Despite being called the developing world, the Caribbean is rich — in culture, in experiences, in history. The soil our ancestors toiled continues to nourish us, and the sun that burned their backs warms our sea. Their strife has imbued us with a grit that allows us to weather any disaster, whether hurricane, volcanic eruption, political unrest, or pandemic. “Better must come” is the fulcrum around which our Caribbean culture was established. If we were to choose a collective noun to describe Caribbean people, it would be “resilience.” A resilience of Caribbean people. The COVID-19 pandemic delivered an economic shock to the region — most islands depend on tourism — that further complicated historical issues with which we continue to contend. “We are now being inundated by the new, while still being overwhelmed by the old,” said St Lucia Prime Minister Philip Joseph Pierre in a recent address to United Nations. Among many things, COVID-19 lifted the kimono on mental health and isolation, revealing how many of us are struggling. Before borders closed at the behest of the pandemic, some Caribbean folk were able to return home. Those who missed the last flights waited (im)patiently. Finally, a few months later, some could decamp to homelands that reopened. Some would have to wait much longer. Immigration has allowed the Caribbean diaspora to become one of the largest in the world — the United States alone has over eight million Caribbean descendants. But living abroad can be debilitatingly isolating. After living in Toronto for over a decade, I moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Though it was beautiful, I never felt more alone in my life. Gone was the large Caribbean community that I could depend on for gossip from the region, musical accents, and ingredients to make “real” Sunday dinner.
The ability to have a taste of home is not just about ingredients, but also the ceremony and bonding that comes through cooking. Food is an integral part of who we are as Caribbean people. So when hotels throughout the region temporarily closed their doors, many donated foodstuffs to workers and nearby communities. Even when uncertainty plagues tomorrow, a home-cooked meal is a panacea. My first (and only) Christmas in Halifax saw me checking my airline app daily, counting down the days until I’d return home to Jamaica. It was tracking to be the worst Christmas I ever had, until I received a registered package. I couldn’t ignore how heavy the carefully wrapped item was. Under layers of paper lay a red tin, and inside it was an entire black cake. It was a gift from my Jamaican friend’s mother back in Toronto. When we spoke, she said, “You know for us, Christmas isn’t Christmas without cake.” It’s funny to think of the power that black cake has. In addition to connecting our people, reminding us who we are and where we came from, black cake is our Balm of Gilead. The British, influenced by a fruit cake recipe that dates back to Ancient Rome, created plum pudding and took the recipe to the colonised Caribbean islands. Enslaved cooks were expected to replicate the recipe despite not having the exact ingredients. Armed with natural African ingenuity, rum, spices, and dried fruit, they made something for the “Big House” table that was a far cry from the original. It was better. And this improved recipe spread throughout the Dutch-, French-, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Caribbean ingenuity is infinite. According to the World Bank, the Caribbean has the “most highly skilled” diaspora globally. And wherever they are, Caribbean people proudly represent their homelands and the region. They go abroad for education or to maximise earning potential, but they never forget who they are. And many count down to the day they can return. But the ability to return home is not without complications. A homecoming can, too, be metaphorical. After all, home is more than a place; it’s a feeling. And at Christmas time, seeing a black cake shimmering after being doused with rum can transport every Caribbean person home. It’s the forgiving family member ready to embrace us sweetly. As we enter another holiday season in this, the new normal, the things that keep us connected to home, now more than ever, have pride of place. Our accents and passports may differ, but we are united by our history, culture, and cuisine. Something as simple as black cake connects us to home. It connects us to our ancestors, and when hardships appear, it will offer a slice of hope to future generations.
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wish you were here
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Pigeon Point, Tobago If there’s one iconic landmark that immediately says you’re in Tobago, it’s the Pigeon Point jetty with its thatch-roofed hut, extending from a long curve of gently golden sand into water of an almost unbelievable turquoise hue. It’s the subject of a thousand postcards and ten thousand holiday snapshots, and the icon of the most famous beach in Trinidad’s sister isle, renowned for its warm, shallow, sheltered sea. Part of a 125-acre nature reserve near Tobago’s southwestern tip, Pigeon Point — with its endless groves of coconut trees and peerless sunset views — is also the gateway to the only slightly less famous Buccoo Reef and Nylon Pool.
Photography by Dieter Deventer/Alamy Stock Photo
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NEED TO KNOW
maria nunes
Essential info to help you make the most of November and December — even in the middle of a pandemic
Don’t Miss Parang season
In Trinidad, the sound of Christmas often comes with Spanish lyrics. The fun of going from house to house and waking people with the jovial sounds of parang music is the island’s traditional version of carolling. Before COVID-19, lively performances of the Spanish-style folk music — sometimes fused with soca and chutney — often serenaded passersby around the Arima, Lopinot, and Paramin districts in the weeks leading up to Christmas, with September designated Parang History Month — and the start of the annual parang season — by T&T’s National Parang Association. Live music performances may have taken a pause due to the ongoing pandemic, but the Drive-In Parang Theatre event planned for December 2021 will keep you safely in your bubble while you listen to some of the best paranderos. Visit facebook.com/npattofficialpage for the full line-up. Shelly-Ann Inniss
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Courtesy Barbados Tourism Marketing Inc
need to know
Must try Best Barbados rums For centuries, rum has been integral to Barbados’s heritage. The spirit’s unmatched legacy — from modest beginnings on the island to world acclaim — has led to countless international awards bestowed. At the new Barbados Rum Experience (running from 1 to 7 November), the island’s three main rum producers — Foursquare Distillery, St Nicholas Abbey, and Mount Gay Distilleries — offer exciting opportunities to sample the best fine aged liquors and learn about their cultural significance. Home-bound tipplers don’t have to feel left out — award-winning mixologist Shane McClean shares three special cocktail recipes for some coveted Barbados blends
Mount Gay Black Barrel
Matured in whisky casks, then further aged in charred bourbon barrels, Black Barrel features spicy notes like nutmeg, clove, and ginger, making you yearn for more after the first sip. It’s ideally paired with steak, lamb, pork, or fish, since the rum carries tannins, which assist in breaking down the proteins. 1703 Express 45 ml Mount Gay Black Barrel 1 dash of black pepper 30 ml pineapple juice 25 ml fresh lime juice 25 ml white sugar syrup Combine in a mixing glass with one scoop of ice. Shake and strain over fresh ice into a rock glass. Garnish with a pineapple chunk. 12
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Doorly’s 12
A rich heritage and unique notes full of character and complexity are wonderfully combined in this twelveyear old rum — exemplary for anyone’s introduction to the spirit. It’s perfectly smooth, with aromas of toffee apple, cinnamon, and caramel. After dinner, this mouth-watering sipper can complement — or replace — your dessert. Doorly’s Old Fashioned
St Nicholas Abbey White
Unlike most of the island’s other rums, the Abbey makes their white rum from sugarcane syrup instead of molasses or sugarcane juice. On the nose, it’s extremely earthy, with hints of citrus notes, almost like the varied fragrances of freshly cut sugarcane. The recommended cocktail is an aperitif, and can be paired with chicken, fish, or a fresh garden salad — or savoured on its own on a hot afternoon. Abbey Spritz 45 ml St Nicholas Abbey White 25 ml fresh grapefruit juice 1 tbsp granulated sugar 30 ml sparkling water Combine ingredients in a wine glass, fill with ice, and stir. Garnish with a grapefruit wedge.
45 ml Doorly’s 12 25 ml white sugar syrup 6 dashes Angostura bitters 1 dash cinnamon Combine ingredients in a rock glass, add a scoop of ice, and stir. Garnish with a cherry and orange segment.
For more information on the Barbados Rum Experience, go to visitbarbados.org
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need to know
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Rasmalai, a delicate cardamom-flavoured dessert popular in India
Kulfi
Best known as the Indian version of ice cream, kulfi has a luxuriously dense texture, not whipped soft. Traditionally, the recipe is laborious, but you can use full cream and cornstarch to knock off some hours. Evaporate the milk, add sugar, cardamom, saffron, and chopped nuts, then cool. Place the mixture in a popsicle mould and freeze for about twelve hours. When set, drizzle with pistachios and serve.
All About … Divali treats
Kalakand
Observed this year on 4 November, Divali — the Hindu festival of light and renewal — honours Mother Lakshmi, the deity of wealth and purity, and the triumph of light over darkness, good over evil. Celebrations in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, and other Caribbean territories usually include visiting the homes of relatives to share in scrumptious meals and distributing sweets to friends and neighbours. You probably know the most popular treats, like kurma, barfi, and gulab jamun. But the repertoire of traditional Indian sweets is much larger. Have you tried any of these?
Widely sold on the street in India but hardly made at home, kalakand has an ideal consistency somewhere between cake and fudge. It’s made via a reduction of milk and sugar, and can take hours of constant stirring. If you don’t have much time, condensed milk, homemade paneer, and cardamom will get you similar results in less than an hour. Top with pistachios.
Rasmalai
Lyangcha
This Bengali dessert immerses delicate cottage cheese balls in a creamy milky syrup. It’s one of the healthiest sweets served for Divali, due to its low sugar and low sodium content. To prepare it, curdle milk flavoured with cardamom to form the cottage cheese balls, then boil them in syrup made from sugar, cream, saffron, and more milk. The balls will soak up the syrup, then you can chill them and garnish with pistachios. The end result resembles a soft dumpling that melts in your mouth.
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Mysore Pak
This delicacy was first made in 1935 for the king of Mysuru (or Mysore) — a city in Karnataka state. Legend says the palace’s chief chef Kaksura Madappa prepared lunch for the king, but ran out of time while he brainstormed an unusual dessert. Madappa mixed generous amounts of ghee, sugar, and gram flour to a syrupy consistency and plated it. When the king was ready for his dessert, the syrup had partially solidified and resembled fudge — and the rest is history. Traditionally, mysore pak is served at weddings and special occasions in southern India.
You may have heard of gulab jamun, but do you know its cousin lyangcha, beloved in Bengal? Shaktigarh — the lyangcha capital — has thirty shops on both sides of Delhi Street, each claiming to serve the best variety. Prepared with paneer and cheese-like khowa, this cylindrical sweet is coated with sugar syrup and fried in ghee. SAI
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need to know Book talk
Ekaterina Bolovtsova courtesy Pexels
If you’ve got a literature lover on your list and can’t decide just what novel they’d like best, why not give them the gift of literary community? T&T’s Bocas Lit Fest — the largest literature festival in the Caribbean — recently launched a Friends of Bocas subscription programme, offering access to a rich archive of video and audio recordings featuring a decade’s worth of readings, discussions, and performances — plus access to a book network for discussing favourite titles, discounts on monthly Bocas workshops, and more. And your gift subscription will help the festival’s year-round programmes supporting Caribbean writers. Find out more at www.bocaslitfest.com/friends.
Art access
Shopping list Virtual Christmas gifts Getting presents is one of the most fun parts of Christmas — and buying them can be one of the most stressful. Imagine doing your Christmas shopping without spending time in crowded malls, long lines, traffic, or waiting for a parking space. With the tap of a finger, your Christmas cheer can be en route to happy recipients. And if you can’t be with them physically this season, a thoughtful present will surely lift spirits. Here are some virtual gift ideas to help spread the cheer
Relaxation time
Calm and serenity make a huge difference to our countenance and overall well-being — even if it’s a short reprieve. Gift certificates for spa experiences and yoga sessions are a great way to help restore physical and mental balance. And virtual classes that let you exercise at home with Caribbean instructors have grown in popularity over the past two years. You can’t go wrong with the gift of a calmer mind and a healthier body. 16
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A learning experience
Learning never gets old. And the range of online masterclasses available for almost every conceivable skill or discipline is breathtaking. What do your friends and loved ones enjoy the most? Cooking, gardening, interior design? Subjects like history or science? Or picking up a new language? They’ll be elated that you signed them up for something they’re extremely passionate about.
Do you know someone who’s excited about art, history, and culture? A gift membership at their favourite museum might include exclusive events, free entry into exhibitions, and even more benefits. Museum lovers in the Caribbean diaspora can explore the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, or the Tate in London, which all have membership programmes. You might get bumped up to best friend status, too.
Pass on the love
Charitable organisations welcome donations throughout the year — and especially at the end of a collectively challenging one. For your friend who has everything, the perfect gift that keeps on giving could be a donation to a good cause in their name. Make a difference this Christmas season by donating to reputable international non-profits like World Central Kitchen (which helps feed people affected by disasters around the world), or local charities like the Living Water Community in Trinidad and Tobago, Ocean Acres Animal Sanctuary in Barbados, or any other group helping make our communities and countries into better places. SAI
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bookshelf
This month’s reading picks from the Caribbean Reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan, Bookshelf editor
This One Sky Day by Leone Ross (Faber & Faber, 385 pp, ISBN 9780571358014) In Popisho, the fictional setting of Leone Ross’s lavish, sprawling novel, every citizen has a “cors,” a unique gift of magical, otherworldly ability: the power to heal, to prophesy, to intuit the pain or deception of others. Set in this Caribbean-esque archipelago over the course of twenty-four hours, This One Sky Day asks the reader questions steeped in coconut milk, saffron, and star anise, as nourishing and palate-pleasing as the best cook food. What do we do with our own “cors” during our time on earth? Are we bettered or bested by ungovernable love? It’s impossible to approach the kaleidoscopic orbit of the book with anything like stoicism: expect to be wooed by lyrical prose, spellbound by seemingly incalculable events, swept up into the exploits of elemental lovers striving to be their best, most unfettered selves. In a word, Ross’s fictional fare is an opus, demanding satiation.
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Can You Sign My Tentacle? by Brandon O’Brien (Interstellar Flight Press, 82 pp, ISBN 9781953736048) This debut poetry chapbook is tired of old tropes. Can You Sign My Tentacle? animates our anthropocene’s Black joy and resistance against the ghoulish spectres of racism: a slew of institutional evils is called to account, dragged into the light of confessional verse. In poems as suited to page interpretation as oral performance, Brandon O’Brien populates each realm of the work’s imagined or real multiverse with brave vulnerability: in “the lagahoo speaks for itself”, our title character angrily declaims, “I know the scent of every dead girl’s close male relatives / I could sense the sour of trigger fingers / in the alleys at the edges of hotspots.” As with the best speculative writing, the convergence of the worlds we imagine and the world we inhabit becomes preternaturally real, borders of certainty and illusion blending to create space: and this realm, the poems say, belongs to Blackness.
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Testimonies on the History of Jamaica, Volume 1 by Zakiya McKenzie (Rough Trade Books, 45 pp, ISBN 9781914236051) Zakiya McKenzie’s revisionist pamphlet is the very definition of “small axe chop down big tree.” In less than fifty spare pages, McKenzie contains the violent racism of slaveowner and lord of the plantocracy Edward Long’s 1774 polemic The History of Jamaica. Interweaving historical accounts with creative conjuring, the author-researcher presents us with three testimonies speaking to their own, particular Jamaican truths. In the voices of Izolo, Wande Sheba, and Tansy, we encounter Jamaican history through the minds and hearts of those whose immediate stories register most dimly and scantly in official archives: the Black enslaved and subjugated. Each telling indicts oppressors with scathing certainty, but perhaps even more majestically than this, makes room for the full expression of personhood denied the incarcerated African woman and man.
Dominoes at the Crossroads by Kaie Kellough (Véhicule Press, 180 pp, ISBN 9781550655315) As open to risk as it is to interrogation, Kaie Kellough’s collection of braided short stories summons an alternate Caribbean-Canadian present and future, one in which the lives and expectations of the Black Caribbean diaspora’s citizens gleam with further realised possibilities. The musicality of narrative winds and weaves through almost all these stories: gig-players, buskers, and traffic-consigned listeners each feel the pulse of melody, its historicity and specific yearning, pulling on their lives with insistence and fervour. “Kaie,” the author, is also a character presented in this assemblage. It’s a stylistic choice that might jar in other settings, but Dominoes at the Crossroads wields this experimentation well, scratching at the surface of what we consider to be origin stories, asking: how can we make more of the tales we’ve been told, the tales we wish to tell?
playlist
This month’s listening picks from the Caribbean Reviews by Nigel A. Campbell
Songbook, Vol. 1
B.A.L.A.N.C.E.
The Id
Michael Boothman (Poui Tree Records)
Kyle Noel (3230341 Records DK)
Trishes (Nash the Boy)
Nostalgia is making a comeback: the Rolling Stones and Genesis will tour stadiums next year, and Paul McCartney and ABBA have new albums in 2021. In the Caribbean, kysofusion pioneer Michael Boothman from Trinidad is back with a bang. Boothman is an elder statesman on the regional music scene, with international standing and a professional music career spanning six decades. The appearance of a new full-length album after a gap of some years is a happy revelation that signals his creative juices are still flowing. Songbook, Vol. 1 points to the idea that this is a first step on a new journey, a fresh awakening of the Boothman oeuvre with rearrangements of classics from the 1970s like “Saying It With Music” and “Mystic Sea”, and many new songs. This album is a showcase of fine songcraft, sophisticated musical ideas, and a kind of independent production value that understands that, as audiences mature, quality never dissipates.
On this new album, Kyle Noel has positioned the steelpan in a conversation with electronic drums and percussion to create a musical product that evokes elements of various Caribbean musics, alongside Afropop, jazz, hip hop, and Latin music. B.A.L.A.N.C.E. is not a busy album trying to be everything to all, but a showcase for smart songwriting that recognises the beauty of the timbre of the steelpan to lead listenable songs beyond the narrow restrictions of a Trinidad pan jam. Guest instrumental soloists and rappers add context, giving the songs a familiarity in a modern popular music world — standing out tellingly is Milliraps, who raps of her carnal desires on “Doing It Right” — and enlivening the idea that steelpan music innovation is not dead. Noel is marketing this album as a sonic frequency therapy targeting the seven chakras to balance the mind and body. It does more. It also effectively broadens the role of the steelpan in contemporary music.
Muriel’s Treasure: Volume 8
The Id is a follow-up to Trinidadian-American singer/ songwriter/musician Trishes’ 2019 album, Ego, and one can begin to see a pattern. Super-ego next, anyone? This new album features her trademarks: live looping synthesis layering harmonies to create original music that jibes with musician Prince’s theory that “there’s joy in repetition,” and to ably generate a sonic presence; astute lyrics that sincerely reflect Trishes’ activist bent, in this case, the need for examining personal inner turmoil, animus, and prejudices as an essential part of affecting social change globally; and a modern electronic vibe so cool among a new influential generation. Plus great pop songs, period. “Big Sunglasses” is a hit here. Science tells us that the id is “the impulsive and unconscious part of our psyche which responds directly and immediately to basic urges, needs, and desires.” Five monologues here thoughtfully address this. What The Id does is win. Gratification!
Various Artists (Cosmic Spy Music) The subtitle of this compilation is “Vintage Calypso of the 1950s and 1960s.” The compiler’s stated mission is “finding things on the scrapheap of history . . . and salvaging them.” When one notes that this is Volume 8, the idea that calypsos from the 1950s and 60s were consigned to the scrapheap of history comes as a shock to Caribbean sensibilities. That era, bracketing the calypso craze breakthrough in the US market offered by Belafonte’s Calypso album, was replete with satirical, socially conscious, and scandalous calypsos from all the islands. Twenty-five songs from the Bahamas, Jamaica, the US Virgin Islands, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago are collected on this album. Calypsos from icons like the Mighty Sparrow, Mighty Spoiler, and Lord Invader intermingle with ditties from Eloise Ross, the Ticklers, and Edmundo Ros. If Volume 8 is a starting point, going back to Volume 1 should be a must-do for calypso devotees.
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bucket list
? t x e n e r e h W
After almost two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, who doesn’t want a break? Here at Caribbean Beat, we feel just the same. As 2021 draws to a close, and we look forward to the year ahead, members of the magazine team tell us what place in the Caribbean they’d love to visit for the first time, and why 20
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oo n a k n u J s Bahama During hall initiation at the University of the West Indies Mona campus, I was renamed “Junkanoo.” This Bajan had never heard of the Bahamian festival, but my animated personality and dance performances at fresher competitions earned me the unique hall name. Some Bahamian hallmates excitedly explained that staunch revellers traditionally make their costumes from cardboard and colourful crêpe paper. They recalled stories about the playful rivalry among Junkanoo groups, and listed some must-do’s in the Bahamas. Throughout the entire conversation, I was grinning and calculating. Brass bands combined with whistles and cowbells push my activate button — and brass music dominates Junkanoo. When I discovered the dances for the street parades in Nassau on Boxing Day and New Year’s Day are choreographed, two costumes floated through my thoughts, and I was mentally “rushing” in the street. The fact that Junkanoo is one of the first and last Carnivals on the Caribbean’s calendar — in the coolness of night — is a bonus.
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Havana tour I’ve been working on Caribbean Beat for many years, and one of its unintentional but inevitable perks is becoming exposed to a lot of fascinating places. It’s very easy for me to briefly lose focus at my desk while working on a destination feature, and I think Havana accounts for most of my time spent daydreaming at work. With an atmosphere that feels like a living time capsule, from baroque-style buildings with their distinctive colourful façades to the magnificent Havana Cathedral and Capitol, the choice of places to explore in Havana seems endless. I certainly couldn’t be without a capable camera to capture the city’s characteristic architecture. Another Havana icon I would love to see up close are the well-preserved classic cars. A sightseeing tour from the backseat of one of these rumbling antiques would surely make it an authentic Havana experience, and not just a daydream. I should get back to work . . . Kevon Webster
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Florian Wehde courtesy Unsplash
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g n i h c t a w e l Whna Dominica i I’ve been wanting to explore Dominica for years, not least because it’s one of the best places in the world to go whale-watching. The island’s western coastline drops off steeply, creating deep, near-shore canyons in the bays of the Caribbean Sea where its resident population of nearly two hundred vulnerable sperm whales can safely breed, calve, and shelter year-round. These well-studied cetaceans even have their own unique culture and dialect. Whale-watching in most places is seasonal, because the whales are migratory — so the fact that you can spot Dominica’s residents all through the year, and that they’re so accessible, makes the Nature Isle truly unique. The best months for whale sightings are from November to March, when you might also be lucky enough to see mighty humpbacks breaching, too! With Caribbean Airlines now offering direct flights from Port of Spain, it’s something I can’t wait to experience.
WaterFrame/Alamy Stock Photo
Caroline Taylor
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The nBaGthosr,da Virgi The Baths in Virgin Gorda, one of the British Virgin Islands, are an impressive natural wonder and unlike anything else in the Caribbean. It is without a doubt the perfect place to relive my favourite childhood pastime of climbing any and everything. It’s a natural playground, characteristically volcanic, and with many attractions scattered between Devil’s Bay and Spring Bay. These gigantic granite boulders are a prime spot for bouldering, a style of free climbing without ropes. The unique and complex formations possess a variety of challenging and technical routes I would like to try. These routes are found in the hidden caverns, grottoes, tunnels, and overhanging arches, with more being discovered yearly. It’s always a plus when you’re surrounded by soft white sand and refreshing tide pools to gently catch you if you fall, and you can easily transition from tough climb to relaxing swim if you so please.
Sean Pavone/Shutterstock.com
Kristine De Abreu
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Nature Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo
Iwoukyraamnaa, G I’ve hiked through Tobago’s rainforest, dived with whale sharks and canoed through limestone caves in Belize, hiked the table-top mountains of Venezuela’s Gran Sabana, and fished the flats of Los Roques. Adventure travel is my favourite type of tourism — the more rural the better. Travel is the best aspect of my job, but it’s mostly business, with very little time for sightseeing. One place I’d love to return to is Guyana. I’m eager to visit Iwokrama, “the Green Heart of Guyana,” as an adventurer. I find myself daydreaming of exploring the untamed rainforest, populated by exotic wildlife, and traveling on the waters of the mighty Essequibo River with my family. We are all passionate about nature and fueled by adventure — an unbeaten path is calling. Evelyn Chung
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Prisma by Dukas Presseagentur GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo
l a n o i t a N a m i Canark, Venezuela Pa My fascination with Venezuela started years ago, when I made a last-minute decision to join a feisty tour group out of San Fernando, Trinidad. Our destination was Merida, high up in the Andes, and boasting the highest cable car ride in the world. The entire busride from the airport was a thing of wonder, too. The Venezuelan terrain was larger than life, with broad shallow rivers and giant boulders. I half-expected our bus to round a bend and to find Clint Eastwood perched on a horse, contemplatively chewing a twig. Venezuela is simply a land of superlatives, and that always makes for great travel stories. So my bucketlist fave is Canaima National Park, the home of the world’s tallest waterfall, Kerepakupai Merú — also known as Angel Falls. The park covers three million hectares and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. La Gran Sabana awaits me there, with its giant tepuis — table-top mountains which tower above the savannah. “Tepuis” will sound exotic, too, when I tell my stories. Tracy Farrag
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backstory
Devoted to the dance Photography by Nyla Singh, courtesy Alana Rajah
Alana Rajah studied Bharatanatyam at the renowned Kalakshetra school in Chennai
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Originating in south India almost two thousand years ago, Bharatanatyam, a major classical dance form, is little known in Trinidad, where most Indian cultural traditions are rooted in the north of the subcontinent. Alana Rajah has set out to change that. Trained at the Kalakshetra school in Chennai, her goal is to establish Bharatanatyam in her home country — adapting and improvising as needed. Sharda Patasar learns more
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e are meeting at noon. It’s because she begins teaching some days at 7 am, and finishes close to lunchtime. But even before that, she does her own training online with her teachers from India at 4.30 am. “It takes a toll, you know,” says Alana Rajah, when in our warmup conversation I mention that I am planning on taking a course that will begin at 4 am, five days a week. “That was how I got injured. At 4.30 in the morning, my body is still waking up here, while they [in India] are nine and a half hours ahead. Nowadays I am constantly tired.” Rajah’s fatigue is only natural. She has been on this schedule for the past year. 4.30 am daily online training — the COVID-19 pandemic has made travel to India impossible — 7 am departure for work, 5 pm return home to begin teaching her own dance students. “When I told my family that I was going to pursue dance, they very honestly told me that it would be a very difficult life,” she recalls. “My adulthood would be quite a strain, because dance does not have that safety net, that financial cushion . . . I valued their opinion, and they were very much correct,” she says, laughing, “but I didn’t feel bad about it. I always felt that I was strong enough to work as well as pursue my career as a teacher and performer. I prepared myself mentally to work a full-time job and come home to work another full-time job, because it isn’t something that we as artists can control. Even though we are born with a passion, or a talent, or the art within us, it’s a societal fact that it is an industry that does not afford you a luxurious lifestyle.” Rajah’s chosen artform is Bharatanatyam, one of the oldest classical dance forms of India, and perhaps one of the most physically demanding. “The physical body lends itself to the practical aspect,” she explains. “We have yoga and kalari. Those are two things you learn first to build leg strength to help your body become accustomed to the geometric lines or patterns that make up the style of Bharatanatyam.”
At the Adavallan Art Academy, which she established with the vision of creating her own dance school in Trinidad, Rajah does not sacrifice this aspect of her students’ dance training. Diet and fitness are essential disciplines, even for students as young as five years old. “I feel that discipline is something that does not hold true to Caribbean culture or Trinidadian culture,” she says. “It’s something we don’t have as a people. It’s something we don’t see even in the highest of positions, from government to public service to customer service. So, for me, it was my personal goal to inject that into the society.” And how does she contextualise herself as a Bharatanatyam performer in Trinidad, where up to today Indian arts are seen as rooted in India rather than Trinidad? “It’s unfortunate,” says Rajah. “All of us exist within the same space, and there are things that lend to the beauty of our culture, our cultural identity, and Indians make up a large portion of that population.” Perceptions of artforms like Bharatanatyam are slowly changing, at least in relation to the outside world. Social media has been instrumental in the growing awareness of the Caribbean Indian diaspora and its artists. In 2020, at the annual South African Indian Dance Alliance’s Global Dance Conference, participants from Guyana and Trinidad were invited for the first time, to work with other dancers and share experiences as artists of the Indian diaspora. “We are becoming more embraced and recognised,” says Rajah. “Because even for India, it took a long time for them to appreciate dancers of the diaspora outside of India . . . they didn’t understand the history of Indians being taken from India and settling across these various countries and islands. That is a concept that is now settling within their minds. And that appreciation is growing, which I am so grateful for.”
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n Trinidad and Tobago, before Rajah’s emergence, there had been only one practitioner of Bharatanatyam dance. Under the tutelage of Rajkumar Krishna Persad at the Trinidad School of Indian Dance, a basic foundation was enough to take Rajah on a quest to deepen her knowledge of an artform that dates back approximately two thousand years.
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Indian classical music in Trinidad has no younger, formally trained musicians and singers. Most are still students. Unlike Western musicians, who can attain formal qualifications by sitting the Trinity College or other internationally recognised examinations, Indian classical music studies have to be done in India, as there are no formal examination bodies in the West. Furthermore, job prospects as music teachers at formal institutions in Trinidad are near to absent for anyone trained in Indian classical music. The University of the West Indies is perhaps one of the few bodies that provides a small window of opportunity.
The Internet opened the world of Indian classical dance to her. Rajah’s research in Bharatanatyam brought up names like E. Krishna Iyer, Balasaraswati, and Rukmini Devi, a group of artists who were commonly known as the Revivalists. They were responsible for introducing Bharatanatyam to a public stage. In previous centuries, Bharatanatyam was practiced only by the Devadasis, women who lived within the inner sanctums of the temples of Tamil Nadu and were considered to be the brides of the gods. Among the Revivalists, Rukmini Devi Arundale,
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founder of the Kalakshetra Foundation in Chennai, was the one to whom Rajah was most attracted. “She was a Brahmin, so she went against all of her cultural conditionings and beliefs to learn this artform, and created this huge institute for Bharatanatyam,” Rajah explains. “There were flocks of students who went to specialise in the artform, and left Kalakshetra as budding artistes. That is something I wanted to do. Not only go to her institute, but do the exact same thing that she did for her country, because I felt when I was young I would have loved to have a Rukmini Devi as my mentor . . . I would have felt so much better existing with the passion that I had, because this was something that was not mainstream.” Rajah’s quest took her on scholarship to Kalakshetra, an institution that is “like military camp for dance,” as she describes it. There, after four years of intense study to earn her Diploma in Dance, it was back in Trinidad that her trials would begin. “After doing all of that, and coming back to Trinidad to try and share your knowledge or add that artform into the cultural community here, you are then labelled with, ‘You feel you know. You is it because you went away and study’ — which is so unfortunate. It really breaks down all of your spirit . . . So you really have to crawl into a hole and create magic again, just to escape the ole talk.” Additionally, Bharatanatyam is linguistically and musically different to most other Indian classical forms in Trinidad. The
Students of Rajah’s Adavallan Art Academy
[similar to a lute], flute, violin, nattuvangam [cymbals], and the vocalist. We do have drums, but those artistes improvise freely, they aren’t trained in the music. We do not have veenas or veena artists. We have the violin, we have the flute, but the entire genre is different. They aren’t at all trained in Carnatic music. I’ve now had to explore working with the tabla, because that is what is available here. And sitar, as well as not having a natuvanar or vocalist. Even if I have a vocalist, the music can’t be set to a particular rhythmic cycle, as we would in Carnatic music, because that concept isn’t practiced by them. And if I’m dancing, I’m not
Bharatanatyam is linguistically and musically different to most other Indian classical forms in Trinidad. The musical heritage of Indians in Trinidad is mostly rooted in northern Indian folk music and dance musical heritage of Indians in Trinidad is mostly rooted in northern Indian folk music and dance. Those who have studied classical Indian music are primarily educated in north Indian traditions. Bharatanatyam dance introduces a south Indian aesthetic, language, and rhythm.
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n a traditional Bharatanatyam recital, the dance is performed through facial expressions and hand gestures. Through these, the rasas are communicated. In the Indian classical tradition, the concept of rasa — roughly translated as essence or flavour — is critical to performance. The expression of the navrasas, or the nine emotions, is the responsibility of musicians and dancers alike. Communicating these effectively to audiences is one of the main goals of performance. As such, in the Indian classical tradition, music is defined as a trilogy: dance, instrumental music, and song. As Rajah explains, “When you learn any of the eight forms of Indian classical dance, there are many things that you have to learn simultaneously with it. Indian classical music, it’s like a sub-main to your dance. You have to learn percussion, which is the inherent rhythm of the universe. It’s that structure, the time cycle of how you would set your music to dance, so you have to be very knowledgeable about that.” In Trinidad, the challenge was adaptation of this knowledge. “In the Carnatic musicians’ setup, the instruments used for Bharatnatyam are the mridangam [a two-headed drum], veena
able to do the nattuvangam, which is like the most important part of the orchestra for Bharatnatyam. So I’ve had to try to find ways to work around it.” Na veena na ragam, na mridangam na talam — “Neither veena nor ragas, neither mridangam nor rhythm” — the phrase could very well be the beginning of another text, not the Natyashastra, the ancient Indian treatise on dance and performance, but a Caribbean one. Rajah sees this as lending to creativity and presentation. “It just takes a bit more out of both sides, the musicians and the dancers.” In addition, she’s started pre-recording a spoken introduction for the performance — “for the audience to understand what will be unfolding, what they are supposed to feel, what they will be seeing on the stage.” This feels like another coming of age story in the history of Bharatanatyam. It continues the narrative of resilience and imagination — of those who dared to cross boundaries, and of women, most importantly, who challenged the order of things. Transplanted in Trinidad, it is yet another transformation of the form, despite Rajah’s attempts to retain the purity of form. Improvisation, after all, is a feature of Bharatanatyam’s history, and Alana Rajah, with her relentless drive to perfect her art and establish her own version of Kalaskshetra in the Caribbean, is in fact a pioneering spirit, charting a course for a future generation. n
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portfolio Unknown. Jamaican Women, c. 1900. Gelatin silver print, overall: 17.5 × 23.5 cm. Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs Purchase, with funds from Dr Liza & Dr Frederick Murrell, Bruce Croxon & Debra Thier, Wes Hall & Kingsdale Advisors, Cindy & Shon Barnett, Donette Chin-Loy Chang, Kamala-Jean Gopie, Phil Lind & Ellen Roland, Martin Doc McKinney, Francilla Charles, Ray & Georgina Williams, Thaine & Bianca Carter, Charmaine Crooks, Nathaniel Crooks, Andrew Garrett & Dr Belinda Longe, Neil L. Le Grand, Michael Lewis, Dr Kenneth Montague & Sarah Aranha, Lenny & Julia Mortimore, and The Ferrotype Collective, 2019. © Art Gallery of Ontario 2019/2210
Assembling fragments Historical photographs and works by contemporary Caribbean artists come together in a new exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, to show how stories of ourselves have changed over time
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lmost thirty years after St Lucian poet Derek Walcott delivered his Nobel Prize lecture in Stockholm, one hopeful and especially quotable sentence continues to resonate in the imaginations of Caribbean thinkers. “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.” The Caribbean’s broken vase, Walcott suggested, is reassembled from the “shattered histories” and “shards of vocabulary” of our
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ancestral traditions — relics of five centuries of violence and oppression. “This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles,” Walcott wrote. “Antillean art is this restoration.” Fragments of Epic Memory, a new exhibition at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario — which opened in September 2021 and runs through 21 February, 2022 — borrows from Walcott’s Nobel lecture both its title and the summoning idea that the task and privilege of Caribbean artists is to create new stories and images from the disjecta membra of our troubling past and present. It also reminds us that those stories and images must evolve over time — that each generation must indeed reassemble the fragments and reimagine the forms of our individual and shared memories. Fragments of Epic Memory is the first exhibition organised by the AGO’s Department of Arts of Global Africa and the Diaspora, established in 2020 under the directorship of Julie Crooks. In her previous role as photography curator, Crooks managed the landmark acquisition of the Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs, thought to
Above Gomo George. Women’s Carnival Group, 1996. Watercolour on rag paper, 55.9 × 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist. © Gomo George Left Paul Anthony Smith. Untitled, 7 Women, 2019. Unique picotage on inkjet print, colored pencil, spray paint on museum board, 101.6 × 127 cm. The Hott Collection, New York. © Paul Anthony Smith, Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
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Left Duperly Brothers. Port Royal, Jamaica, c. 1890. Albumen print, overall: 25.6 × 36.2 cm. Gift of Patrick Montgomery, through the American Friends of the Art Gallery of Ontario Inc., 2019. © Art Gallery of Ontario 2019/3071 Below Kelly Sinnapah Mary, Notebook of No Return, 2017. Acrylic painting on paper, 43.2 x 50.8 cm. Private Collection © Kelly Sinnapah Mary
be the largest collection of historical images of the region outside the geographical Caribbean. Now Crooks has brought together selections from the Montgomery Collection with works by approximately thirty modern and contemporary Caribbean and diaspora artists, to “show how the region’s histories are constantly revisited and reimagined through artistic production over time.”
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“The story of the Caribbean and its artists isn’t one story,” says Crooks, “but a kaleidoscope of histories and voices and experiences, best understood through the interplay of them all.” She also notes that Toronto is a major centre of the global Caribbean diaspora, and works by Canada-based artists are prominent here. These include a newly commissioned work by Toronto-based Sandra Brewster, whose Feeding Trafalgar Square (2021) is based on an old photo of the artist’s mother on a holiday visit to London — “turning a joyful moment into a moving meditation on what it means to be displaced.” Among the other “fragments” assembled by Crooks are paintings by the Guyana-born modernists Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling, a large-scale video installation by Jamaican Ebony G. Patterson, and works by artists such as Christopher Cozier of Trinidad and Tobago, Firelei Báez of the Dominican Republic, Nadia Huggins of St Vincent, and Kelly Sinnapah Mary of Guadeloupe. In the AGO galleries, these works are interspersed among approximately two hundred photographs from the Montgomery Collection, manifesting both affinities and discordances across time. What to make of those affinities and discordances — how exactly to assemble the fragments, into what shapes, and why — is the question the exhibition poses to each visitor. n
Above left Unknown. Martinique Woman, c. 1890. Albumen print, overall: 14.6 × 10.2 cm. Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs Purchase, with funds from Dr Liza & Dr Frederick Murrell, Bruce Croxon & Debra Thier, Wes Hall & Kingsdale Advisors, Cindy & Shon Barnett, Donette Chin-Loy Chang, Kamala-Jean Gopie, Phil Lind & Ellen Roland, Martin Doc McKinney, Francilla Charles, Ray & Georgina Williams, Thaine & Bianca Carter, Charmaine Crooks, Nathaniel Crooks, Andrew Garrett & Dr Belinda Longe, Neil L. Le Grand, Michael Lewis, Dr Kenneth Montague & Sarah Aranha, Lenny & Julia Mortimore, and The Ferrotype Collective, 2019. © Art Gallery of Ontario 2019/2208 Above right Sandra Brewster. Feeding Trafalgar Square, 2021. Photo-transfer on wood. Art Gallery of Ontario. Commission, with funds from the Women's Art Initiative, 2021. © Sandra Brewster Left Ebony G. Patterson. ...three kings weep..., 2018. Three-channel digital colour video projection with sound, running time: 8 minutes, 34 seconds. Purchase, with funds from the Photography Curatorial Committee, 2020. © Ebony G. Patterson, courtesy Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. 2019/2469
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closeup
In the light of language Few Caribbean poets have enjoyed critical acclaim as sudden and early as St Luciaborn Canisia Lubrin. Her sophomore book The Dyzgraphxst has won a slew of awards, but, as Shivanee Ramlochan learns, Lubrin’s concern is not with the spotlight of fame, but with the luminous possibilities of language itself Photography courtesy Canisia Lubrin
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anisia Lubrin’s literary star isn’t merely on the rise. It’s embedded, twinkling, in the firmament. In the past few months, she’s won the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize, and a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry — you might imagine glittering achievements are now par for Lubrin’s poetic course. Yet accolades are the least of what we discuss in our Zoom interview: instead, Lubrin tells me about her earliest songs. “In St Lucia, as a child, the first stirrings of language came to me in my grandmother’s folktales, stories, and songs,” she says. “I look back and see the markings of poetry in my life, on that small island.” Nothing has ever been miniature about the imagination of St Lucia, Lubrin’s birthplace and physical home till she emigrated to Canada as a teenager for education. The countryside, where she grew up, was replete with culture: folk music, rural theatre troupes, her mother’s storied trip to Dominica for an acting gig. These were glowing hallmarks of Lubrin’s life in language, too. They resided in her spirit, she says, while she devoured the plays of Derek Walcott in high school — though, she reflects with an arch smile, she can’t recall ever learning a single Walcott poem in those classrooms. Instead, Ti-Jean and His Brothers straddled Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Sam Selvon’s A Brighter Sun. When Lubrin learned that English literature would be summarily struck from the academic offerings after form three, owing to a staffing deficit, she
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was disconsolate. Literature, she knew then, was something she needed to do. Writing, reading, feasting on language were her St Lucian rituals. She laughs as she summons a memory conjured by her sister during a pandemic chat: an image of five-year-old Canisia, lying on her stomach, legs kicked up behind her, utterly rapt in the pages of a massive set of newly bought encyclopaedias. “Was I reading every word?” she muses out loud, her eyes gleaming with the past vision of her younger self. “Perhaps not, but I was marvelling, in those encyclopaedias, at what a world we have.” Others, as the years progressed, would come to marvel at her: a form three teacher held Lubrin’s composition on “The Day After the Storm” aloft, running through the hallways effervescing with joy at what she had written. “My goodness. You wrote this? You did this? You have to keep writing. You did
this.” Continue she did. She remembers the animating spark fuelling her application letter to York University in Toronto, which she’d go on to attend, and the clear sense that she was on her way to a future that not only involved writing, but centred it. A future, indeed, where such a thing as “being a writer” was not amorphous, speculative, otherworldly — but as real as flesh, blood, and bone.
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migration challenged Lubrin physically — “I felt as though I’d walked into a freezer,” she says, wincing, conjuring thoughts of her first frigid autumn and winter — and philosophically. Immersing herself in Toronto, she learned, meant being confronted by a place where “I knew I’d met a lot of closeted issues about race and the way power functions, what it means to be othered.” Finding community in this city was initially rough going, coupled with the aggressions, micro and major, thrown into her path: she remembers being followed in shops with suspicion, and having the ubiquitous anti-Black slur thrown at her during the course of her stints at nannying and factory work. It was a sharp insight into how daily-paid labourers, those assigned to allegedly menial tasks, are nonetheless reduced within their Black and brown bodies in one of Canada’s richest cities.
“In St Lucia, as a child, the first stirrings of language came to me in my grandmother’s folktales, stories, and songs,” Canisia Lubrin says
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Yet, as much as Lubrin maintains Toronto is still a hard locale, she unsurprisingly loves the woven pattern of its many languages. She delights in telling me that, here, “You can walk through Portuguese, then streets away you’re in Spanish, in Hindi, in Cantonese. There’s something magical about a place where this is the ordinary.” From the streets to the library stacks, Lubrin actively sought language, finding a revelation in the poetry and prose of Trinidad-born writer Dionne Brand. Up to that point in her undergraduate career, there was but one Derek Walcott poem on the syllabus, “Forest of Europe”, and Brand had not been explicitly taught. It was only following an urgent recommendation from her teaching assistant on a satire course, Stephanie Hart, that Lubrin “ran, not walked” to the library, seizing No Language is Neutral and Land to Light On, reading the former in one fell swoop. She laughs at the recollected miracle of it, saying how “utterly pissed” she was that Brand had not been formally introduced into her academic learning, alongside the feeling of sheer, unalloyed gratitude for the fact of Brand’s writing in the world. Not many years after this, Lubrin would be sitting in Brand’s graduate poetry seminar, another vital thread in the making of an intimate professional and creative bond between them.
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Entering publication’s lettered halls, however, proved daunting. Four solid years of journal rejections lined Lubrin’s path, so much so that a solicitation from an editor at publisher Wolsak and Wynn for what would become her first book, Voodoo Hypothesis (2017), shook her. The first twelve poems she’d written during Brand’s course were included in that manuscript, but it was spilt blood that gave the work its form and voice. In 2016, Lubrin, alongside countless others, reeled at the murder of Philando Castile, slain in front of his partner Diamond Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter near Minneapolis, Minnesota. That summer, Canisia grimly nods, was a horrific sequence of violence against Black bodies and minds. The killings piled up, and Lubrin took to her pages, reworking ninety-five per cent of Voodoo Hypothesis to reflect the conditions of the world as she saw them, “through my place as a diaspora woman writer, with my queer lens.” The result was a debut book committed to “raising up language like a shield against European histories and sciences,” as poet Sonnet L’Abbé described it. But while Voodoo Hypothesis was astonishing in its power, it was only Lubrin’s beginning. The Dyzgraphxst (2020), her second collection, took its first pulse from interrogation. Dionne Brand, in whose conversations “books are made,” says Lubrin fondly, asked the younger writer about the absence of the “I” voice in her poems. This prompted soul-and-verse searching, and when the first draft of the manuscript arrived, Brand asked “Who is this Jejune? We need more of this voice.” Thus, what had been intended as a peripheral figure became the animating force of The Dyzgraphxst, a narrator not restrictive in vision, but invitational: “I absolutely found that I was reflected in the concerns of the language, and could make that space horizontal rather than vertical, so you can enter it, so I can sit with you, so the next person can enter and sit
Lubrin is modestly conscious — not to mention grateful — for the space and time that literary prizes create for her writing. Fame, however, has never been her ambition with us.” Critical responses to Lubrin’s sophomore offering might be said to speak for themselves, and the poet is modestly conscious — not to mention grateful — for the space and time that literary prizes create for her writing. Fame, however, has never been her ambition. She pursues something far less glittering, but perhaps no less inwardly luminous. “I had to break the language open, reconfigure it so something different could come to the world — jagged, not making apology for its breakages, that simply exists and shows what it shows,” Lubrin says of her labours. In her roles as educator and poetry editor at publishing house McClelland & Stewart, her work is as originary, as border-resistant. “In every sphere, I try always not to make it about me, to enter into a kind of appreciation for what is possible,” she concludes, already envisioning multiple worlds where language — Canisia Lubrin’s guiding light — reveals what has always been. n
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did you even know
Let’s dance In this issue of Caribbean Beat, you’ll find a profile of Trinidadian dancer Alana Rajah. How much do you know about other Caribbean dance traditions? Test yourself with our quiz — and check your score in the answers below!
6. What is the name of the small ankle bells worn by dancers in many classical Indian styles practised today in Trinidad, Guyana, and elsewhere in the Caribbean?
1. What celebrated Trinidadian dancer and choreographer, based in New York City in the 1940s, performed under the name “La Belle Rosette”?
7. The most popular traditional dance in the Bahamas shares a name with a style of music and the large goatskin drum that is the main instrument — what are they called?
2. What is the name of the acclaimed dance group cofounded at Jamaica’s Independence in 1962 by cultural luminary Rex Nettleford?
8. What agricultural product is dried after harvesting, and
3. The style of sensuous dance known to Trinis as wining has a different name in Barbados — what is it?
9. Masquerade dancers in St Kitts — who perform in colourful costumes and masks, to the music of drums, fiddle, and fife — have a repertoire of six main dances. How many of them can you name?
5. What Cuban prima ballerina founded the company that
8 Cocoa beans 9 Quadrille, fine, wild mas, jig, waltz, and boillola 10 Bomba
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4 Compas (sometimes spelled konpa) 5 Alicia Alonso 6 Ghungroos (sometimes spelled gungurus) 7 Goombay
would become the country’s Ballet Nacional?
10. What is the name of the traditional Puerto Rican dance in which the dancer sets the rhythm and the lead drummer attempts to follow?
Answers: 1 Beryl McBurnie 2 The National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica 3 Wuk up
4. What is the name of the popular Haitian two-step dance style, similar to merengue, that evolved in the 1950s?
traditionally turned over in the sun by “dancing” it with the workers’ feet?
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