Caribbean Beat — May/June 2017 (#145)
A calendar of events; music, film, and book reviews; travel features; people profiles, and much more.
A calendar of events; music, film, and book reviews; travel features; people profiles, and much more.
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Travels with a Husband, by Patricia Mohammed<br />
and Rex Dixon (Hansib Publications, 216 pp,<br />
ISBN 9781910553695)<br />
The difference between<br />
tourists and travellers is an<br />
emotional one: to travel<br />
consciously often means to<br />
eschew five-star comforts for<br />
deeper illuminations. Such<br />
is the case in this charmingly<br />
well-considered book of journeys<br />
from Trinidadian scholar<br />
Patricia Mohammed and her<br />
artist husband, London-born<br />
Rex Dixon. Whether they contemplate<br />
the sobering realities<br />
of quotidian life in Haiti, or<br />
offer letters and tributes to the figures who have touched<br />
their twinned lives (as in the moving “Letter to Vincent”,<br />
the master painter van Gogh), the views in Travels with a<br />
Husband embrace the unknown. Avoiding the prescriptive,<br />
this memoir in passport stamps circumnavigates stations of<br />
the globe through the ebb and flow of seasons, political<br />
affiliations, shifting languages, and personal passions.<br />
Allowing the reader in with humour-leavened humility,<br />
and the possibility of a new horizon peeking around each<br />
corner, here is a guide for all true sojourners of both vast<br />
regions and domestic plains.<br />
Aching to Be, by Andrew J. Fitt (Ponies and<br />
Horses Books, 60 pp, ISBN 9781910631492)<br />
St Lucia-born, Trinidad-based<br />
writer and visual artist Andrew<br />
J. Fitt was diagnosed with cerebral<br />
palsy at nine months old.<br />
Despite this pronouncement,<br />
which would directly impact<br />
the ambit of his childhood and<br />
adult life, Aching to Be is not a<br />
litany of woes. In clear, crisply<br />
self-aware prose, Fitt traces his<br />
life with CP using a winning<br />
blend of dispassionate observation<br />
and perfectly timed jokes<br />
at his own expense. Miniature in comparison to many<br />
other memoirs, Fitt’s account of his struggles and successes<br />
is a careful and shrewd paragraph-by-paragraph<br />
reckoning, where every word counts. There is a dearth<br />
of literature in the <strong>Caribbean</strong> written by people who live<br />
with neurological disorders; Aching to Be stands in that<br />
lacuna as a necessary installment from an undaunted,<br />
engaging voice.<br />
Reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan, Bookshelf editor<br />
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