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Contents<br />
No. 150 <strong>March</strong>/<strong>April</strong> <strong>2018</strong><br />
54<br />
24<br />
EMBARK<br />
17 Datebook<br />
Events around the <strong>Caribbean</strong> in<br />
<strong>March</strong> and <strong>April</strong>, from Guyana’s<br />
Easter Regatta to Carnival in Jamaica<br />
and St Patrick’s Day in Montserrat<br />
24 Word of Mouth<br />
The bright colours of Guyana’s<br />
Phagwah celebrations mingle into a<br />
shade of unity, and Sint Maarten’s<br />
annual Carnival defies the ravages of<br />
Hurricane Irma<br />
28 the game<br />
A gold repeat?<br />
As the Commonwealth Games open<br />
in Australia’s Gold Coast, can T&T’s<br />
4x400 relay team, the reigning world<br />
champions, repeat their victory?<br />
Kwame Laurence reports<br />
30 Bookshelf, playlist, and<br />
screenshots<br />
This month’s reading, listening, and<br />
film-watching picks<br />
36 Cookup<br />
“That right there, that’s<br />
Africa”<br />
When US chef Ben Dennis arrived in<br />
Tobago, he was astonished to find<br />
traditional recipes that recall those of<br />
his Gullah ancestors. He talks history<br />
and heritage with Franka Philip<br />
IMMERSE<br />
40 closeup<br />
The puzzle of “home”<br />
Born in Trinidad, brought up<br />
in Canada, writer André Alexis<br />
is a “Nowherian” <strong>—</strong> and that<br />
complicated identity, along with his<br />
passion for exploring big ideas, drives<br />
his philosophical and deeply literary<br />
novels. A recent string of awards has<br />
raised his international profile, but<br />
as Donna Yawching learns, it was no<br />
overnight success for one of the most<br />
original writers in both <strong>Caribbean</strong><br />
and Canadian literature<br />
46 own words<br />
“I’m not trying to fill his<br />
shoes”<br />
Twenty-one-year-old Skip Marley,<br />
grandson of the legendary Bob, on<br />
growing up in Jamaica’s musical royal<br />
family, his hopes for stardom, and<br />
the message of his songs, for his own<br />
and every other generation <strong>—</strong> as told<br />
to Nazma Muller<br />
48 showcase<br />
Miriam<br />
“Every Saturday is the same story.”<br />
A tale of a woman and her four<br />
persistent suitors <strong>—</strong> fiction by<br />
Michelene Adams<br />
ARRIVE<br />
54 Destination<br />
Havana hello<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines’ newest<br />
destination is one of the region’s <strong>—</strong><br />
and the world’s <strong>—</strong> most iconic cities.<br />
From music to revolutionary history,<br />
baroque architecture to pastel-hued<br />
classic cars, from the Malecón to the<br />
bar where mojitos were (supposedly)<br />
invented <strong>—</strong> welcome to Havana, now<br />
serviced by two direct flights from<br />
Port of Spain each week<br />
62 Travellers’ tales<br />
Reggae city<br />
Founded in 1612 on Brazil’s Atlantic<br />
coast, the city of São Luís do<br />
Maranhão is a treasurehouse of<br />
historic achitecture, encrusted with<br />
ornate blue tiles, and has a long<br />
tradition of avant-garde poets. It’s<br />
also <strong>—</strong> as unlikely as it sounds <strong>—</strong> a<br />
hotbed of reggae music. David Katz<br />
pays a visit, to investigate how this<br />
city more than two thousand miles<br />
from Kingston has adopted reggae<br />
as its very own, with a new museum<br />
celebrating the cultural link<br />
8 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
<strong>Caribbean</strong><strong>Beat</strong><br />
An MEP publication<br />
Editor Nicholas Laughlin<br />
General manager Halcyon Salazar<br />
Design artists Kevon Webster & Bridget van Dongen<br />
Web editor Caroline Taylor<br />
Editorial assistant Shelly-Ann Inniss<br />
62<br />
Business Development Manager,<br />
Tobago and International<br />
Evelyn Chung<br />
T: (868) 684 4409<br />
E: evelyn@meppublishers.com<br />
Business Development<br />
Representative, Trinidad<br />
Mark-Jason Ramesar<br />
T: (868) 775 6110<br />
E: mark@meppublishers.com<br />
ENGAGE<br />
68 discover<br />
Next stop: space<br />
As more and more entrepreneurs look<br />
towards space exploration, it’s still<br />
almost unknown outside the industry<br />
that one of the world’s busiest<br />
launch sites is on the doorstep of the<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong>. Erline Andrews learns<br />
how French Guiana’s half-century-old<br />
spaceport is essential to our future<br />
exploring the galaxy<br />
Barbados Sales Representative<br />
Shelly-Ann Inniss<br />
T: (246) 232 5517<br />
E: shelly@meppublishers.com<br />
Media & Editorial Projects Ltd.<br />
6 Prospect Avenue, Maraval, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago<br />
T: (868) 622 3821/5813/6138 • F: (868) 628 0639<br />
E: caribbean-beat@meppublishers.com<br />
Website: www.meppublishers.com<br />
70on this day<br />
Over the line<br />
A century ago, as the First World War<br />
drew to a close, a Barbadian-British<br />
man named Walter Tull was killed on<br />
the battlefield. He was one of many<br />
thousands dead in the “Flanders clay,”<br />
but also unique: as James Ferguson<br />
writes, Lieutenant Tull was the first<br />
officer of colour ever appointed in<br />
the British Army, in defiance of race<br />
prejudice<br />
72 puzzles<br />
Enjoy our crossword, sudoku, and<br />
other brain-teasers!<br />
Read and save issues of <strong>Caribbean</strong> <strong>Beat</strong> on your smartphone,<br />
tablet, computer, and favourite digital devices!<br />
Printed by Solo Printing Inc., Miami, Florida<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong> <strong>Beat</strong> is published six times a year for <strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines by Media & Editorial Projects Ltd. It is also available on<br />
subscription. Copyright © <strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines <strong>2018</strong>. All rights reserved. ISSN 1680–6158. No part of this magazine may be<br />
reproduced in any form whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher. MEP accepts no responsibility for<br />
content supplied by our advertisers. The views of the advertisers are theirs and do not represent MEP in any way.<br />
Website: www.caribbean-airlines.com<br />
80 parting shot<br />
On Mexico’s Mayan Riviera, the<br />
ruined city of Tulum keeps watch<br />
over the <strong>Caribbean</strong> Sea, centuries<br />
after it was abandoned<br />
The <strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines logo shows a hummingbird in flight. Native to the <strong>Caribbean</strong>, the hummingbird represents<br />
flight, travel, vibrancy, and colour. It encompasses the spirit of both the region and <strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines.<br />
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 9
ADVERTORIAL<br />
Beauty needs to be more<br />
than skin deep. What<br />
counts is being able to<br />
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An overwhelming presence generated<br />
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It’s a bold evolution of the Swift’s DNA.<br />
Completely new styling, a performanceenhancing<br />
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Engineer Masao Kobori says: “We set<br />
out to create a car that makes people<br />
go ‘WOW!’ the instant they see it, the<br />
instant they get inside, and the instant<br />
they step on the accelerator.” Top Gear<br />
summed it up as “Another great product<br />
from Suzuki, the Swift is a cracking<br />
and likeable supermini” <strong>—</strong> introducing<br />
the new Suzuki Swift!<br />
The new Swift comes equipped with<br />
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IntroducIng the all new<br />
Contact your local Suzuki dealer<br />
today to arrange a test drive!<br />
More information on the allnew<br />
Suzuki Swift can be found<br />
at www.suzukicaribbean.com<br />
Sit inside, and the bold evolution of the<br />
Swift’s DNA continues. Once seated,<br />
the impulse to take off immediately begins<br />
to well up, thanks to a meticulously<br />
implemented “driver first” design. The<br />
racecar-like, D-shaped steering wheel,<br />
front seats that firmly hold, and a centre<br />
console angled towards the driver<br />
help form a more sporty, higher quality<br />
environment that unifies car and driver.<br />
The new Swift is meant to drive the<br />
heart. Sporty, high quality, advanced,<br />
and just simply easy to own, the love<br />
affair <strong>Caribbean</strong> people have had with<br />
the Suzuki Swift looks set to continue<br />
with the introduction of this latest<br />
model.
Cover Two classics of Old<br />
Havana: a vintage car<br />
parked beside a baroque<br />
colonial-era building<br />
Photo Delpixart/iStock.com<br />
This issue’s contributors include:<br />
Michelene Adams (“Miriam”, page 48) returned<br />
to Trinidad in 2010 after slowly travelling steadily<br />
south from Canada to the Bahamas to Grenada over<br />
a period of twenty-seven years. She teaches English<br />
at the Centre for Education Programmes, University<br />
of Trinidad and Tobago.<br />
Erline Andrews (“Next stop: space”, page 68) is<br />
an award-winning Trinidadian journalist. She is<br />
a regular contributor to <strong>Caribbean</strong> <strong>Beat</strong> and her<br />
work has also appeared in other publications in T&T<br />
and the US, including the Chicago Tribune and the<br />
Christian Science Monitor.<br />
Born in San Francisco, resident in London, and<br />
a frequent visitor to the <strong>Caribbean</strong>, David Katz<br />
(“Reggae city”, page 62) is the author of three<br />
books exploring Jamaican music and culture.<br />
Nazma Muller (“I’m not trying to fill his shoes”,<br />
page 46) is a Trinidad-born, Jamaica-obsessed writer<br />
who has worked in newsrooms in both countries, as<br />
well as in the UK.<br />
Subraj Singh (“A unity of colour”, page 24) is a<br />
writer from Guyana. In 2015, he won the Guyana<br />
Prize for Literature for his manuscript Rebelle and<br />
Other Stories. He was a writer-in-residence at the<br />
University of Iowa as part of the 2017 International<br />
Writing Programme. His writings have appeared in<br />
the Guyana Arts Journal, A World of Prose for CSEC,<br />
and the Guyana Chronicle.<br />
Donna Yawching (“The puzzle of ‘home’”, page<br />
40) is a journalist and longtime contributor to<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong> <strong>Beat</strong>. Born in Trinidad, she is based in<br />
Toronto, and has lived on several continents and<br />
travelled widely.<br />
Crown Point, Tobago<br />
Casino/Bar: 868 631-0044/0500<br />
Jade Cafe: 868 6398361<br />
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 11
A MESSAGE From OUR CEO<br />
Dear <strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines passengers,<br />
My earliest memories of Carnival go back to<br />
my childhood, when my mother would take<br />
me to Port of Spain to watch the parade<br />
of the bands. The colours and design of<br />
the costumes, and the sheer delight of the<br />
masqueraders as they immersed themselves<br />
in the festival have stayed ingrained in my mind. I also<br />
recall the happiness I felt when the masqueraders would part<br />
with their headpieces and standards. I would hold on to those<br />
keepsakes and reflect on them for weeks after Carnival, as<br />
tangible reminders of the ingenuity and magnificence of the<br />
festival, and I looked forward with joyful anticipation to seeing<br />
it all again the next year.<br />
For more than a decade, <strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines has flown<br />
people to Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago and throughout the<br />
region. Masqueraders return year after year, bringing friends<br />
to share their nostalgic experience of one of the world’s best<br />
known events. This year, Trinidad and Tobago Carnival took<br />
place on 12 and 13 February, and through our partnership<br />
with the country’s National Carnival Commission, <strong>Caribbean</strong><br />
Airlines was the official airline of Carnival <strong>2018</strong>, the proud<br />
sponsor of the world’s biggest street party, which everyone<br />
looks forward to a year in advance.<br />
In addition to being the official airline of Carnival <strong>2018</strong>, the<br />
company also supported Pan Trinbago and focused on the<br />
next generation by partnering with the Red Cross Children’s<br />
Carnival, where young citizens participated in the national<br />
festival.<br />
Another major highlight in the lead-up to T&T Carnival<br />
<strong>2018</strong> was the announcement of our new partnership with the<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines Skiffle Bunch Steel Orchestra. Skiffle Bunch<br />
is one of San Fernando’s most renowned steel orchestras,<br />
and <strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines applauds their accomplishments and<br />
the contribution they have made to the cultural landscape over<br />
the last forty years. <strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines was proud to sponsor<br />
the band for the <strong>2018</strong> National Panorama competition.<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines is in the business of connecting people<br />
to festivals, and to friends and family. Now, we are connecting<br />
the eastern <strong>Caribbean</strong> to North America, as we have finalised<br />
the regulatory requirements to introduce non-stop service<br />
between New York City and St Vincent and the Grenadines,<br />
effective 14 <strong>March</strong>, <strong>2018</strong>, subject to approval by the Trinidad<br />
and Tobago Civil Aviation Authority. <strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines was<br />
one of the first airlines to offer non-stop flights to St Vincent’s<br />
Argyle International Airport when it opened in 2017. This<br />
service between John F. Kennedy International Airport in New<br />
York and St Vincent will serve as an international gateway to<br />
the beautiful Grenadine islands.<br />
As an airline, we remain committed to supporting culture<br />
across the region and beyond. <strong>Caribbean</strong><br />
Airlines is the official airline of Jamaica<br />
Carnival <strong>2018</strong>, which takes place from 4 to<br />
8 <strong>April</strong>. We encourage you to join us there,<br />
and fly with us to the many events taking<br />
place across the <strong>Caribbean</strong> in the coming<br />
months, such as:<br />
• Guyana’s Bartica Easter Regatta: 31 <strong>March</strong> to 2 <strong>April</strong><br />
• <strong>April</strong> is jazz month in Tobago, with top international<br />
artistes scheduled to perform at the Tobago Jazz<br />
Experience: 16 to 24 <strong>April</strong><br />
• Antigua will host its annual sailing week from 28 <strong>April</strong>.<br />
This event is one of the region’s main yachting regattas,<br />
attracting boats from around the world<br />
Beyond the <strong>Caribbean</strong> region, our destinations in North<br />
America are bustling. In New York, the Tribeca Film Festival,<br />
carded for 18 to 29 <strong>April</strong>, continues to bring together creators,<br />
diverse audiences, and the film industry. Last year’s festival<br />
saw record-setting attendance numbers, a trend which is<br />
expected to be maintained this year.<br />
Meanwhile, in Miami, the Carnaval on the Mile takes place<br />
from 3 to 4 <strong>March</strong>. This cultural experience will feature a wide<br />
array of artists. And the Calle Ocho Festival on 11 <strong>March</strong> is the<br />
largest street festival in Miami, featuring the sounds of merengue,<br />
reggaeton, bachata, balada, hip-hop, rap, and jazz.<br />
Let your taste buds lead the way as you sip, savour, and<br />
sample your way through the Toronto Food and Drink Market<br />
from 31 <strong>March</strong> to 2 <strong>April</strong>, where it’s all about eating, drinking,<br />
shopping, and learning.<br />
Follow <strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines from festival to festival, bring<br />
your friends and your families, to create life-long memories<br />
and enjoy the fun!<br />
At <strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines, it is our privilege to serve you. Please<br />
visit our website at www.caribbean-airlines.com; become a<br />
fan by liking us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/caribbeanairlines;<br />
and follow us on Twitter @iflycaribbean.<br />
Thank you for choosing <strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines <strong>—</strong> we value<br />
your business and look forward to serving you throughout our<br />
network.<br />
Garvin Medera<br />
Chief Executive Officer<br />
12 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
Destination:<br />
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ADVERTORIAL<br />
Hyatt Regency<br />
Trinidad<br />
Celebrating<br />
ten years operating<br />
with exCellenCe<br />
This year, Hyatt Regency Trinidad is celebrating<br />
its tenth anniversary, having opened on<br />
29 January, 2008. Its construction contributed to the<br />
revitalisation of Port of Spain’s waterfront area, spurring<br />
additional business and employment opportunities<br />
and growth. With an extensive upgrade in 2017, Hyatt<br />
Regency Trinidad now has 423 sleeping rooms with fifteen suites,<br />
including the Presidential and Diplomat Suites. Guest rooms,<br />
event spaces, dining areas, the lobby, spa, and all common areas<br />
were enhanced to fit the continually changing needs of today’s<br />
traveller.<br />
Placing an emphasis on Hyatt’s mission of “caring for people so they<br />
can be their best,” the renovation’s main focus was on guest rooms.<br />
Introducing a light and airy design, the reenergised guest rooms now<br />
feature white oak flooring, modern vanities and light fixtures, sixty-five-inch flatscreen<br />
televisions, sleek credenzas, sofas, and overall smart furnishing. Space was<br />
used strategically to include useful work spaces and multifunctional areas around<br />
the room for relaxing or getting ready.<br />
Hard to imagine the hotel is already ten years old, but Hyatt Regency Trinidad<br />
has undoubtedly made its mark on the hospitality sector and business and social<br />
landscape over the last decade. Considered the benchmark for hotels and service<br />
in Trinidad and Tobago, the hotel is well known for its superior service and high<br />
quality offerings. True to the Regency Brand, Hyatt Regency Trinidad is a place<br />
“designed around the power of meaningful connections and delightful surprises<br />
<strong>—</strong> where guests come together to share, socialise, collaborate, and exchange ideas<br />
with colleagues, friends, family, and reconnect in the course of their busy lives.”<br />
The hotel is passionate about enriching the guest experience. You feel it in the<br />
welcoming atmosphere, from the moment you walk in to the moment you leave.<br />
The location, beauty, and service far exceed expectations <strong>—</strong> but the most important<br />
and exciting aspect of Hyatt Regency Trinidad is its associates. The hotel is<br />
blessed to have found ladies and gentlemen who define the culture and make<br />
for the heart and soul of Hyatt Regency Trinidad. Every day, they welcome guests<br />
and create energising experiences by connecting them to who and what matters<br />
to them most.<br />
Trinidad.regency.hyatt.com
datebook<br />
Your guide to <strong>Caribbean</strong> events in <strong>March</strong> and <strong>April</strong>, from<br />
Guyana’s Easter Regatta to Carnival in Jamaica<br />
brendan Delzin/shutterstock.com<br />
Don’t miss . . .<br />
Turtle-watching season<br />
<strong>March</strong> to September (dates vary by location)<br />
Across the <strong>Caribbean</strong><br />
Moonlight illuminates the path for female sea-turtles coming ashore. Soft<br />
carpets of sand greet the endangered hawksbills, loggerheads, greens,<br />
olive ridleys, and leatherbacks ready to lay their eggs. A few months later,<br />
hatchlings will dig their way out of the sand, and dash adorably towards the<br />
sea. Trinidad’s Grande Rivière, the west coast of Barbados, Golden Sea Beach in<br />
Jamaica, and Park Beach in Bequia are just some of the best spots to experience<br />
this encounter with nature. Following local precautions and booking a tour<br />
guide are highly encouraged.<br />
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 17
datebook<br />
If you’re in . . .<br />
MIAMI<br />
GUYANA<br />
TRINIDAD<br />
kiwanis club of little havana<br />
Carnaval Miami<br />
Venues around Miami<br />
10 February to 11 <strong>March</strong><br />
carnavalmiami.com<br />
Every year, Miami’s Latin community<br />
celebrate their roots at month-long<br />
Carnaval Miami <strong>—</strong> one of the city’s<br />
largest festivals of Latin culture, and<br />
a community project fundraiser by<br />
the Kiwanis Club of Little Havana.<br />
<strong>March</strong> kicks off with Carnaval on the<br />
Mile, a street festival stretching the<br />
full length of Coral Gables’ “Miracle<br />
Mile.” With food stalls, live bands,<br />
and exhibits by over 150 artists,<br />
downtown Coral Gables becomes a<br />
hotspot for art-lovers. Foodies unite at<br />
Cork & Fork, the Cooking Showdown,<br />
and the Cuban Sandwich Smackdown.<br />
In Miami, <strong>March</strong> has even been<br />
proclaimed Cuban sandwich month.<br />
But you’re guaranteed to work<br />
off the calories at Calle Ocho Miami.<br />
Traversing the twenty blocks of this<br />
street festival will make you dance the<br />
entire day, as you enjoy music stages,<br />
international food stations, and other<br />
entertainment. Havana, Cuba, may<br />
be renowned for its ballet, vintage<br />
cars, and cigars, but the Calle Ocho<br />
festival in Miami’s own Little Havana<br />
is notorious for the party <strong>—</strong> and for<br />
breaking records. In 1988, the festival<br />
set a world record for the longest<br />
conga line, with 119,986 people, and<br />
in 2000 it served up the world’s longest<br />
cigar. Maybe this year they’ll serve up<br />
the world’s largest Cuban sandwich!<br />
ChuckSchugPhotography/istock.com<br />
Bartica Easter Regatta<br />
31 <strong>March</strong> to 2 <strong>April</strong><br />
Bartica, Essequibo<br />
Guyana’s “many waters” meet at<br />
the confluence of the Mazaruni,<br />
Cuyuni and Essequibo Rivers, where<br />
the mining town of Bartica hosts a<br />
magnificent array of entertaining<br />
activities over the long Easter<br />
weekend. And it all began because of<br />
a challenge from a competitive local<br />
to a thrill-seeking foreigner. In 1947,<br />
a visiting yachtsman sped across<br />
the Essequibo in his twenty-twohorsepower-engine<br />
yacht, displaying<br />
“adventurous river navigation skills.”<br />
Locals were intrigued. Not to be<br />
outdone, Charles Guthrie, manager<br />
of a Bartica electrical company,<br />
pulled out his own arsenal <strong>—</strong> an<br />
aluminium utility boat with the same<br />
engine. Needless to say, the entire<br />
town of Bartica and environs came<br />
out to witness the contest, and the<br />
rest is history.<br />
The Easter Regatta begins with<br />
a Street Jam on Easter Saturday,<br />
followed by the Miss Regatta Pageant.<br />
Easter Sunday and Monday bring the<br />
main event: F1 Power Boat Racing,<br />
where dozens of vessels compete in<br />
an expanse of river broad as a bay.<br />
Other activities include a gymkhana<br />
presentation, a gospel concert, and<br />
various sporting competitions.<br />
NGC Bocas Lit Fest<br />
National Library and other venues<br />
around Port of Spain<br />
25 to 29 <strong>April</strong><br />
bocaslitfest.com<br />
A passion for bringing words alive<br />
is palpable at the Anglophone<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong>’s largest literary festival.<br />
Your biggest problem might be<br />
deciding which events to attend,<br />
from the selection of over a<br />
hundred workshops, readings, lively<br />
discussions, and film screenings.<br />
This year’s headline writers include<br />
Jamaica’s first female poet laureate,<br />
Lorna Goodison, alongside Trinidadborn<br />
Canadian novelist André Alexis<br />
and star poets Kei Miller and Vahni<br />
Capildeo. <strong>Caribbean</strong> writers are<br />
the heart of the festival, joined this<br />
year by authors from Sri Lanka, New<br />
Zealand, and Fiji <strong>—</strong> part of a special<br />
focus on global island literature.<br />
Intellectual heft is expected in<br />
discussions on the future of islands,<br />
with special emphasis on economics,<br />
development, and the environment.<br />
And if you can’t attend the main<br />
festival, there’s a month-long prefestival<br />
programme of performances,<br />
book launches, and films.<br />
Event previews by Shelly-Ann Inniss<br />
georgia popplewell<br />
18 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
@eldoradorums<br />
eldorado_rum<br />
@eldoradorums
datebook<br />
Mambo into <strong>March</strong><br />
Andres Garcia Martin/shutterstock.com<br />
Wildlife Photographer of the Year<br />
Exhibition<br />
Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto<br />
rom.on.ca<br />
2017 South African Wildlife Photographer of the Year<br />
Brent Stirton’s Memorial to a Species will be among<br />
the one hundred images selected for their originality<br />
and technical excellence<br />
[16 December – 18 <strong>March</strong>]<br />
courtesy of The New York Botanical Garden<br />
New York Botanical Garden Orchid Show<br />
Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, NYBG<br />
nybg.org<br />
View a series of installations crafted by one of the world’s<br />
leading floral designers, Daniel Ost<br />
[3 <strong>March</strong> – 22 <strong>April</strong>]<br />
Started 16 December<br />
30<br />
01<br />
30 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15<br />
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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31<br />
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20 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
St Patrick’s Festival<br />
Venues around Montserrat<br />
discovermni.com<br />
Go back in time with African and<br />
Irish music performances, a heritage<br />
feast, a freedom run, and more<br />
[9-19 <strong>March</strong>]<br />
New Fire Music Festival<br />
Ortinola Estate, St Joseph, Trinidad<br />
newfireworld.com<br />
More than a music festival: a new way of life, with camping<br />
under the stars, engaging workshops, and more<br />
[23-25 <strong>March</strong>]<br />
Fiesta del Tambor<br />
Mella Theatre, Havana, Cuba<br />
Cuba’s popular dance companies<br />
and music orchestras compete in<br />
percussion competitions and rumba<br />
dancing contests<br />
[5-11 <strong>March</strong>]<br />
courtesy new fire music festival<br />
30 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15<br />
Ends 22 <strong>April</strong><br />
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 30 01 02 0<br />
16 17 18 19<br />
Escape the<br />
ordinary.<br />
Work.<br />
Discover<br />
Play.<br />
Hyatt Do Regency both.<br />
It’s Trinidad. good not<br />
to be home.<br />
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Development, business guests have immediate access to our world-class<br />
business facilities and expansive conference centre <strong>—</strong> one of the largest in<br />
the English-speaking <strong>Caribbean</strong>. Guests will relax at Spa Esencia, our rooftop<br />
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For reservations, visit<br />
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©2017 Hyatt Corporation. All rights reserved.<br />
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 21
datebook<br />
Awesome <strong>April</strong><br />
Lethem Easter Rodeo<br />
Lethem, Guyana<br />
Bronco- and bull-riding, a wild-cow milking competition and<br />
best-dressed vaqueiro contest: Rupununi communities mark<br />
Easter weekend with high adrenaline thrills<br />
[31 <strong>March</strong>-2 <strong>April</strong>]<br />
Jamaica Carnival<br />
Venues around Kingston and Ocho Rios<br />
visitjamaica.com<br />
From pulsating beach parties to breakfast<br />
fetes, mas camp sessions to J’Ouvert and<br />
a high-energy street parade, Kingston<br />
and Ocho Rios keep pumping<br />
[31 <strong>March</strong>-8 <strong>April</strong>]<br />
amanda richards<br />
3 14 15<br />
30 31 30 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15<br />
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31<br />
22 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
SVG Gospel Fest<br />
Venues around St Vincent<br />
Gospel expressions in music,<br />
song, dance, and drama lift<br />
audiences up high<br />
[1-30 <strong>April</strong>]<br />
grenada tourism authority<br />
Goat- and Crab-Racing<br />
Venues around Tobago<br />
Jockeys as fit as their goats gallop<br />
alongside them for this Tobago Easter<br />
tradition, while crab competitors move<br />
at a more sideways pace<br />
[31 <strong>March</strong>-3 <strong>April</strong>]<br />
Pure Grenada Music Fest<br />
Port Louis, Grenada<br />
grenadamusicfestival.com<br />
It’s all about the music, with dynamic performances<br />
from top artistes including soca queen Alison Hinds,<br />
Grammy-winning soul singer Chrisette Michele, and<br />
reggae legends Morgan Heritage<br />
[13-15 <strong>April</strong>]<br />
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WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 23
word of mouth<br />
Dispatches from our correspondents around the <strong>Caribbean</strong> and further afield<br />
A unity of<br />
colour<br />
At Guyana’s Phagwah<br />
celebrations, Subraj Singh<br />
notes how the festival’s<br />
many colours blend into a<br />
single, unifying shade<br />
amanda richards<br />
Providence Stadium, orginally built for<br />
cricket, has long been acclimatised to<br />
parties, concerts, and other non-sporting<br />
events. Today it is the host for the biggest Phagwah<br />
celebration in Guyana. Phagwah (or Holi), the Hindu<br />
festival of colours, came to Guyana from India in the<br />
nineteenth century, when immigrants were shipped<br />
to Britain’s West Indian colonies to replace newly<br />
freed Africans as plantation labour. This history is<br />
immediate in my mind as I join the squeeze of people<br />
entering the wet, colourful, powder-clouded space,<br />
which holds an overpowering, invisible thing in the<br />
air <strong>—</strong> I get a strong whiff of unity from it, but that<br />
can’t be right <strong>—</strong> binding everyone to everyone else.<br />
It begins at the gate. In the multi-hued world<br />
that Phagwah brings, colour-blindness <strong>—</strong> the good<br />
kind <strong>—</strong> can be seen in all its kaleidoscopic glory.<br />
I see a small black boy with a yellow water-gun<br />
playfully squirting “stainer” at a troop of smiling,<br />
fair-skinned Indian girls in front of me, their white<br />
pants and white tops purpling from the liquid.<br />
I see groups of friends from a variety of racial<br />
backgrounds, wrapping each other in hugs and<br />
cascading piles of powder <strong>—</strong> green, red, white,<br />
yellow <strong>—</strong> the colours of the Guyanese flag. Some<br />
white tourists with bra straps showing through wet<br />
t-shirts grin as strangers daub crimson and pink<br />
powder on their faces, granting them acceptance in<br />
the form of iridescent pigment. I see a mixed-race<br />
friend and her black boyfriend <strong>—</strong> “Happy Holi, you<br />
guys!” <strong>—</strong> and they both powder my dark skin, my<br />
cheeks, my beard, my hair, with a green that now,<br />
in retrospect, I regard as the exact shade of envy. I<br />
watch them walk away, pressed to each other.<br />
I watch the people, dancing to Bollywood<br />
music, throwing powder on their family and<br />
friends and others they do not know, with blue and<br />
orange and scarlet pluming from their hair, with<br />
pink-stained teeth, with drops of water flying from<br />
writhing bodies, with all of their faces covered in<br />
the same multitude of colours <strong>—</strong> blending to create<br />
the same shade of black. I marvel at how they all<br />
look like each other in the shade of Phagwah.<br />
I wait inside the stadium. I finally see him enter<br />
the gate. His shirt is clean, bright white. “I want<br />
you to be the first to colour me,” he says, and<br />
when he is close enough I pull him into a hug. I<br />
can smell the scent of him under the musky, holy<br />
smell of Phagwah powder. My hands linger on his<br />
hips for longer than usual, because the hundreds of<br />
people flocking the stadium on this one day only<br />
have eyes for their loved ones <strong>—</strong> eyes for joy and<br />
happiness and togetherness, or eyes blinded with<br />
colour that they hurriedly rush to the waterpipes<br />
to wash out. After I paint his face pink, we walk<br />
around, happily pushed against each other by the<br />
crowd of colourful people who help to paint us in<br />
their shade of black.<br />
24 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
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word of mouth<br />
Anya Kazantseva/shutterstock.com<br />
Carnival come<br />
back again<br />
When Hurricane Irma devastated<br />
St Martin six months ago, few residents<br />
had Carnival in mind. But this year’s<br />
festival has become a symbol of rebirth<br />
for the island, Laura Dowrich reports<br />
When Hurricane Irma completed<br />
her devastation of St Martin<br />
in September 2017, Austin<br />
Helliger was among hundreds left without<br />
a home. He couldn’t even find refuge in his<br />
parents’ house, as that too was destroyed.<br />
The businessman, who was on the verge<br />
of launching his own Carnival band, had<br />
second thoughts.<br />
Post-Irma revealed apocalyptic scenes<br />
on the island, in which Dutch Sint<br />
Maarten shares a border with French<br />
Saint-Martin. Trees were uprooted, buildings<br />
destroyed, and leisure craft used by<br />
families and visitors on sunny weekend<br />
sailings were turned topsy-turvy, sometimes<br />
miles away from their original<br />
berth. Chaos erupted, as desperate<br />
residents began looting before the Dutch<br />
military were sent to enforce law and<br />
order. Carnival was one of the furthest<br />
things from most residents’ minds.<br />
“The first couple of weeks, I was like,<br />
I don’t want to do this,” says Helliger of<br />
his Carnival band. “But I did a boat ride<br />
after the hurricane and it was amazing to<br />
see that four hundred people came and<br />
gave me their money. It was an emotional<br />
experience, and everyone was asking<br />
what the next event is.”<br />
So come <strong>April</strong>, Helliger will make<br />
his debut in Sint Maarten’s forty-ninth<br />
Carnival. His will be one of the eight<br />
bands registered for the festival.<br />
Helliger’s determination to do his band<br />
reflects the bigger determination of the<br />
country to show the world they are open<br />
for business. This Carnival is being seen<br />
as a symbol of resilience and hope following<br />
the ravages of Irma.<br />
“We have so many people literally telling<br />
us every day that Carnival will happen, Carnival<br />
must happen. It’s an important and<br />
vital part of our culture and mental recovery.<br />
And though we may lose our material<br />
things, you cannot take away our spirit of<br />
enjoyment and togetherness,” said Alston<br />
Lourens, president of the Sint Maarten<br />
Carnival Development Foundation, after<br />
the board met to discuss the annual event a<br />
few weeks after Irma’s passage.<br />
Carnival in Sint Maarten began on<br />
11 November, 1970, Sint Maarten’s Day,<br />
to replicate the annual Carnival held in<br />
neighbouring St Thomas. When French<br />
Saint-Martin also started celebrating the<br />
holiday, the Dutch side moved its Carnival<br />
to 30 <strong>April</strong>, the Queen’s Birthday, with a<br />
Grand Carnival Parade.<br />
Today the parade is still held on the<br />
Queen’s Birthday, but the festivities begin<br />
a month earlier <strong>—</strong> this year, from 12 <strong>April</strong><br />
to 3 May. Most events take place in one<br />
central location, the Carnival Village,<br />
a stadium-like facility with shops and<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong> cuisine, described as the only<br />
venue of its kind in the region.<br />
Carnival ends with the burning of<br />
King Momo, a large effigy made of straw,<br />
wood, and plaster. Momo is a derivation<br />
of the Ancient Greek Momus, god of satire<br />
and mockery. King Momo represents the<br />
excess and wildness of Carnival, and<br />
gives people permission to break loose<br />
during the season.<br />
And in <strong>2018</strong>, the return of King Momo<br />
has a special significance: it means things<br />
are getting back to normal. n<br />
26 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
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The game<br />
A gold<br />
repeat?<br />
Photo by Alexander Hassenstein / Getty Images Sport<br />
Back in 1966, Trinidad and<br />
Tobago’s 4x4 relay team took<br />
gold and set a world record at the<br />
Commonwealth Games. Now T&T,<br />
the reigning world champions,<br />
are looking to repeat their<br />
Commonwealth Games victory,<br />
more than five decades later. But<br />
the competition will be stiff, as<br />
Kwame Laurence reports<br />
28 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
Jarrin Solomon, Lalonde<br />
Gordon, Machel Cedenio,<br />
and Jereem Richards of<br />
Trinidad and Tobago’s<br />
men’s 4x400 metres relay<br />
team celebrate after winning<br />
gold at the 2017 IAAF<br />
World Athletics<br />
Championships<br />
Trinidad and Tobago’s best-ever<br />
Commonwealth Games outing<br />
came in 1966 in Kingston,<br />
Jamaica. Lennox Yearwood, Kent<br />
Bernard, Edwin Roberts, and 440-<br />
yard champion Wendell Mottley<br />
capped off an excellent showing with victory in<br />
the final track event, the men’s 4x440 yards relay.<br />
There was the huge bonus, too, of establishing a<br />
world record in the race: the run of three minutes,<br />
2.8 seconds put an exclamation mark on T&T’s<br />
terrific overall performance of five gold, two silver,<br />
and two bronze medals.<br />
For the Jamaican athletes back in 1966, the mile<br />
relay was the last chance to earn Commonwealth<br />
Games gold at home. “Jamaicans were there to<br />
see Jamaicans win,” recalls Mottley, “and we<br />
were there to disappoint them. We did so on such<br />
a regular basis that by the end of the games they<br />
were looking for salvation.<br />
“With George Kerr running in the Jamaican<br />
team, there were high expectations, especially<br />
since Edwin Skinner was injured and we had Yearwood<br />
as a substitute,” Mottley explains. “They<br />
felt they would end the<br />
games on a high note,<br />
with a gold for Jamaica.<br />
We had other plans. We<br />
had trained and worked<br />
out that baton pass to a<br />
finesse.”<br />
Yearwood ran the<br />
leadoff leg for T&T,<br />
handing off to Bernard.<br />
“And then we started to drive the pressure,”<br />
Mottley recalls. “Kent caught up, and then Ed<br />
Roberts ran the third leg, overhauling the field.<br />
When he gave me that baton, there was no jumble.<br />
I had a dream handover from Ed, and Trinidad and<br />
Tobago had already gone clear.<br />
“My job was to secure that victory, and I ran<br />
the leg of a lifetime. I remember coming down<br />
that stretch, and the crowd was virtually silent<br />
except for the few Trinis who had made it there.<br />
My colleagues joined me for a victory lap around<br />
the Kingston Stadium. And then, flashing up on the<br />
lights, ‘World Record’!”<br />
At that point the pro-Jamaican sentiment<br />
in the stadium transformed into regional pride.<br />
“The whole crowd warmed to the reality of the<br />
moment,” Mottley says, “that Trinidad and Tobago<br />
had broken a world record. Their <strong>Caribbean</strong> enthusiasm<br />
overflowed. It was one of the most joyous<br />
“My job was to secure that<br />
victory, and I ran the leg of<br />
a lifetime,” recalls Wendell<br />
Mottley of the 1966 race<br />
occasions of my life. I cannot tell you how often<br />
I relive that moment. The individual event brings<br />
you success, but there’s nothing like teamwork and<br />
winning a relay.”<br />
Fifty-one years after Mottley anchored his team<br />
to that famous victory in the Jamaican capital,<br />
another T&T quartet enjoyed the sweet taste<br />
of team success. This time, the triumph came in<br />
London, as Jarrin Solomon, Jereem “The Dream”<br />
Richards, Machel Cedenio, and Lalonde Gordon<br />
struck 2017 IAAF World Championship 4x400<br />
metres gold in a national record time of 2 minutes,<br />
58.12 seconds. Renny Quow also shared in the win,<br />
running the first leg for T&T in the qualifying round.<br />
This same quintet could feature at the <strong>2018</strong><br />
Commonwealth Games, running from 4 to 15<br />
<strong>April</strong> in Australia’s Gold Coast region. With such a<br />
formidable group to choose from, the Red, White,<br />
and Black will be tough to beat Down Under. Add<br />
to the mix a fit Deon Lendore, and the chances of<br />
T&T leaving Australia with 4x4 gold are greatly<br />
enhanced.<br />
Jamaica, however, may want to return<br />
the 1966 compliment,<br />
and spoil the party for<br />
Team T&T. The northern<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong> nation<br />
certainly has the firepower<br />
to challenge<br />
the world champions.<br />
Nathon Allen was the<br />
sixth-fastest quartermiler<br />
in the world last<br />
year, at 44.19 seconds. And two other Jamaicans<br />
were in the top twenty as well: Demish Gaye at<br />
fourteenth, with a 44.55 run, while Akeem Bloomfield<br />
clocked 44.74 for the seventeenth spot.<br />
Meanwhile, reigning Commonwealth Games<br />
champions England are keen to return to the top<br />
of the podium. Botswana, with Isaac Makwala in<br />
their lineup, will also be a threat. Makwala was<br />
ranked third in the world in 2017 at 43.84 seconds,<br />
while his countryman Baboloki Thebe produced a<br />
44.02 run to end the year fifth. The Bahamas have<br />
hopes too, which will largely depend on 2017 world<br />
number-four Steven Gardiner (43.89).<br />
No individual Trinidad and Tobago quartermiler<br />
made the 2017 top twenty. As a team, though,<br />
T&T proved to be the best, and will bid to underline<br />
that status on 13 <strong>April</strong> in the Gold Coast <strong>2018</strong> men’s<br />
4x400m championship race.<br />
On your mark! n<br />
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 29
Bookshelf<br />
The Tower of the Antilles, by Achy Obejas (Akashic Books, 150 pp, ISBN 9781617755392)<br />
For every Cuban passport stamped,<br />
every long-desired visa claimed that<br />
takes Cubans away from their tierra<br />
natal, how many Cubas exist in the<br />
imagination, in the psychogeography<br />
of limbo? The short stories in Achy<br />
Obejas’s newest collection thread a<br />
clear and bittersweet needlework of<br />
longing, exile, erotic need, and chaos<br />
between Cubans living at home and<br />
those who strike out, with desperation<br />
and pragmatism, to America.<br />
Many of these stories are<br />
navigated by the needs of the<br />
human body: shelter, food, sex. In<br />
“Kimberle”, two women steer the<br />
tense, desire-laced uncertainty<br />
between them by sharing a series of<br />
lovers, each more improbable and<br />
exciting than the next. “The Cola of<br />
Oblivion” marks the sharp difference<br />
between those who have fled Cuba,<br />
and those who have remained; a “visitor” is reminded that<br />
her mother “never sent a single vitamin . . . not a single can<br />
of meat or iPod, not a single anything.”<br />
Obejas reveals with equal intensity<br />
the desires of the human spirit,<br />
cataloguing the results that spiral<br />
from losing security, sanctuary,<br />
and sight of oneself. “The Sound<br />
Catalogue” witnesses an immigrant’s<br />
gradual, terrifying loss of hearing,<br />
set against the fading ricochet of<br />
her life’s most valuable sounds: gunshots,<br />
the roar of frenzied mobs in<br />
revolt, the Cuban national anthem.<br />
Cuba exists in these pages as a<br />
living, organic entity: vibrant and<br />
sinewy even in the memories of the<br />
citizens who have left it. Obejas<br />
reminds her readers that Cuba is<br />
no single destination, and that<br />
the Cuban imagination is a dense,<br />
intricately networked map unto<br />
itself. These stories come to life in<br />
explorations of sleepy-eyed boys<br />
with concupiscent superpowers, of<br />
large brown women building towers of boats in the Antilles.<br />
“Is there any real chance you can leave a place?” these<br />
stories ask. The answers are multiple and mysterious.<br />
The Dear Remote Nearness of You, by<br />
Danielle Legros Georges (Barrow Street Press, 62<br />
pp, ISBN 9780989329699)<br />
In her second collection of<br />
poems, Haiti-born, US-based<br />
Danielle Legros Georges gives<br />
us access to worlds that are<br />
both submerged and emerging.<br />
Whether her poems’ speakers<br />
contemplate centenarian eels,<br />
or seek to shift the rubble left<br />
by Haiti’s devastating 2010<br />
earthquake, The Dear Remote<br />
Nearness of You takes careful<br />
account of the cost of survival.<br />
The atmospheric quality of<br />
these poems is dense with attention to the sounds of<br />
an inhabitable life: the shock of a shouted racial slur,<br />
the high-pitched screech of children, the very sound of<br />
the earth splitting. The unsettling intimacies Georges<br />
reveals encompass our human relationships with animals,<br />
alongside our human understanding of ourselves. Haiti’s<br />
own mirrored conversations with itself, through generations<br />
of privation and exquisite natural beauty, are the<br />
centrepiece of this book’s success.<br />
Kingston Buttercup, by Ann-Margaret Lim<br />
(Peepal Tree Press, 72 pp, ISBN 9781845233303)<br />
“I remember a barrel / with<br />
the biggest doll I’d ever seen.<br />
/ I remember nights without<br />
a mother.” Ann-Margaret<br />
Lim’s second collection of<br />
poems teems with the typically<br />
unsaid, releasing domestic,<br />
maternal, and historic memory<br />
from the unlatched suitcases<br />
of generational secrecy and<br />
shame. In her narrator’s eyes,<br />
Jamaica is a crossroads of<br />
extreme violence and ecstatic<br />
joys, which she offers to her readers in images of<br />
doppelgänger girls lining the obituaries, big-bottom<br />
Julie mangoes, men who lavish kicks and kisses on their<br />
firstborns, and poet Mervyn Morris “bringing life from<br />
the depths of souls / to his class, which was never /<br />
contained on the Mona campus.” Kingston Buttercup is<br />
a worthy successor to Lim’s debut collection, The Festival<br />
of Wild Orchid: flowers intertwine their symbolisms at<br />
the heart of both books, wafting multiple meanings of<br />
strength, deadliness, and comfort.<br />
30 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
Writing on Water, by Maggie Harris (Seren<br />
Press, 136 pp, ISBN 9781781723708)<br />
Wooden stilt-houses<br />
perched on riverbanks;<br />
rafts disintegrating beneath<br />
the tempestuous sea; terraces<br />
teeming with secrets<br />
and too many mouths to<br />
feed: home, in Maggie<br />
Harris’s stories, is a complex<br />
endeavour. Guyana-born,<br />
Wales-based Harris steers<br />
her protagonists in and out<br />
of peril and pleasure, creating<br />
short fiction that sweeps<br />
us into riptides and rough waters of human emotion.<br />
In these stories, mothers wrestle with the demands of<br />
their children and the creeping tendrils of their other<br />
suppressed desires; myths and monotonies stir in<br />
the same cauldron of everyday living; the <strong>Caribbean</strong><br />
and the United Kingdom cradle journeys of hope,<br />
horror, and the grey space in between. As the central<br />
character from Writing on Water’s title story convinces<br />
us, “Who was she to think the word ‘home’ meant a<br />
place? This . . . in-between-ness, this was it.”<br />
Pocomania and London Calling, by Una<br />
Marson (Blouse & Skirt Books, 154 pp, ISBN<br />
9789768267030)<br />
Una Marson’s Pocomania,<br />
first staged in Jamaica in<br />
1938, remains one of the<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong>’s most important<br />
works of theatre. Marson<br />
was a dramatist, poet,<br />
and activist, the first black<br />
woman broadcaster to<br />
be employed by the BBC.<br />
This necessary publication<br />
engages new generations<br />
on the plays’ cultural significance,<br />
their trailblazing<br />
political engagement, and their feminist agency. Pocomania<br />
directly and bravely confronts colonial attitudes<br />
towards Jamaican folk religion, while London Calling<br />
exposes the racist, classist weaknesses of the British<br />
empire with satirically crafted humour. “I think it is<br />
terrible how most of us live under the delusion that we<br />
are free,” one of the central figures in London Calling<br />
says: these are plays that speak as potently of systemic<br />
oppression, of the long and heavy arm of institutional<br />
racism and misogyny, as they did in the 1930s.<br />
Reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan, Bookshelf editor<br />
In his new book In the<br />
Forests of Freedom:<br />
The Fighting Maroons<br />
of Dominica (Papillote<br />
Press, 231 pp, ISBN<br />
9780993108662), Dominica’s<br />
preeminent historian<br />
Lennox Honychurch tackles<br />
an aspect of his country’s<br />
history little known to<br />
outsiders. In this Q&A, he<br />
explains why it matters.<br />
In the Forests of Freedom focuses on the Dominican<br />
Maroons, but also carries the reader through the growth<br />
of an entire island’s consciousness. Tell us about this<br />
important parallel.<br />
I have always been interested in the neglected corners of<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong> history. I seek to include the enslaved, indentured,<br />
or indigenous groups who have left few, if any, written records<br />
of their own, but who played a significant role in our region’s<br />
history. How does one go about locating their position in the<br />
mosaic of <strong>Caribbean</strong> heritage from their point of view, when<br />
the records at your disposal are written by the coloniser? I had<br />
to search beyond the focus of the coloniser’s lens.<br />
How do you hope your work amplifies our <strong>Caribbean</strong><br />
understanding of slavery, revolt, and rebellion?<br />
When one hears about Maroons in the Anglophone <strong>Caribbean</strong>,<br />
the immediate reaction is to think of Jamaica, because<br />
for decades academia and popular literature have been<br />
dominated by the Jamaican experience. In terms of slave rebellions,<br />
Haiti has been represented as the prime example. I wish<br />
to show that the reaction to enslavement across the region was<br />
widespread and deeply engrained, even in the so-called “small<br />
islands” where populations were more tightly confined. There<br />
were social diversification and hierarchies, multi-faith patterns<br />
and cultural tensions, diverse skills and a vast bank of acquired<br />
knowledge that came together in the <strong>Caribbean</strong>. The way that<br />
their leaders absorbed and acted upon what was happening in<br />
the colonial and metropolitan centres of power during the age<br />
of revolution is also important.<br />
How has the spirit of Maroon resistance survived in<br />
contemporary Dominica?<br />
As Dominica moved to self-government, along with the<br />
nationalist symbols of flag, anthem, and coat of arms, there<br />
came the legends of nationhood. Among the most vocal were<br />
the Rastafarians. In their advocacy of healthy living, vegetarianism,<br />
and respect for the natural environment, as well as the<br />
encouragement of creativity in dance, music, and art, they<br />
were seen as heirs of the Maroon experience. Dominicans are<br />
increasingly conscious of this inheritance and it provides a<br />
significant motivation to face the challenges ahead.<br />
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 31
playlist<br />
Palmyra and Other Places David Bertrand<br />
(Blujazz Productions)<br />
The flute, in jazz music, has a<br />
less prominent place than the<br />
saxophone or trumpet, but<br />
in this new album New Yorkbased<br />
Trinidadian flautist David<br />
Bertrand makes a sincere<br />
attempt to expand the repertoire<br />
of the instrument. Seven<br />
of the eight tracks of sublime<br />
quartet playing are new compositions by Bertrand: the<br />
listener is given an opportunity also to revel in the studied<br />
application of jazz language to the inherent native<br />
vernacular of Trinidadian rhythm and tone. The titles of<br />
the tunes also suggest the idea that this is a subliminal<br />
musical autobiography: “Palmyra”, “Claude’s Nariva”<br />
and “Wood Slave” recalling Bertrand’s home island’s<br />
habitat and fauna; “Lexington and 63rd” and “245<br />
South 1st” offering a survey of his New York present.<br />
The result is testament to the continued strides made<br />
by musical émigrés from the <strong>Caribbean</strong> to an American<br />
diaspora, inspiring art that takes no prisoners.<br />
Vacation Jimmy October (OverDose Music<br />
Group)<br />
Young <strong>Caribbean</strong> musicians are<br />
taking the lead in placing their<br />
innovative native rhythms and<br />
the cadence of their accented<br />
voices at the centre of the new<br />
pop music, rather than just<br />
being mimic men. With this new<br />
five-track EP, Trinidad’s Jimmy<br />
October articulates over the<br />
myriad rhythms of the modern <strong>Caribbean</strong> to identify his<br />
brand of pop in a world hearing island beats as the new<br />
normal. These songs <strong>—</strong> four of them collaborations of<br />
unselfish musical partnership <strong>—</strong> also point to the trend<br />
of locating subjects as maudlin as love at first sight and<br />
titillating them to excess as paeans of what will happen<br />
when two get together. “Girl, you got the waist, like a<br />
merry-go-round / Looking at your face make the time<br />
slow down / Girl, I can’t wait, I need to know now / If you<br />
gonna let me be with you.” It works! Hip, singable hooks<br />
and mid-tempo dance beats with a <strong>Caribbean</strong> DNA make<br />
for a short set of easy listening <strong>—</strong> and an urgent wish for<br />
more of this kind of sly island pop.<br />
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32 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
Major Lazer Presents: Give Me Future Various<br />
artists (Mad Decent)<br />
EDM trio Major Lazer’s frontman<br />
Diplo has been described as<br />
the “coloniser du jour” for his<br />
perceived cultural appropriation<br />
of black music, including <strong>Caribbean</strong><br />
music; his fellow members,<br />
Trinidadian Jillionaire and Jamaican<br />
Walshy Fire, may laugh at<br />
that characterisation. An unsettling<br />
indictment, since in this soundtrack to the behind-thescenes<br />
documentary about the group’s groundbreaking<br />
2016 Cuban mega-concert for 400,000 people, half of the<br />
twenty-three performers are <strong>Caribbean</strong>s from Trinidad,<br />
Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. There’s no denying the<br />
impact Major Lazer has had in taking tropical rhythms and<br />
voices to areas of commercial music importance hitherto<br />
uncharted. On this album, new Latin rhythms and digital<br />
reggae vibes mix with Lazer’s trademark dance music,<br />
replete with its distorted electronic squeaks and island<br />
beats, via a number of collaborations that explore the<br />
nexus of Afrobeat, soca, dancehall, and other diaspora<br />
music, to suggest that one person’s colonisation could be<br />
another’s diffusion of global pop.<br />
Single Spotlight<br />
My Kinda Girl Beres Hammond (VPAL Music)<br />
Jamaican reggae icon Beres<br />
Hammond is the king of lovers<br />
rock, and this new single embodies<br />
the kind of romantic longings<br />
that typify the sub-genre: “I see<br />
the look in all the brothers’ eyes<br />
/ As if they are waiting for you<br />
to despise / But when you hug<br />
me in front of everyone / I know<br />
you are stating this is where you belong / You’re my kinda<br />
girl.” Hammond is steeped in the American R&B tradition,<br />
and the husky timbre of his voice has the smooth crooner<br />
stamping a “kinda” elder statesman vibe on the sexiness.<br />
This groovy rocker has a charm that can make couples smile<br />
when dancing close. This is grown folks’ music, without<br />
any snub of a younger audience in search of templates for<br />
a great song that can carry beyond the fleeting attention<br />
span of modern pop or dancehall. The young producer of<br />
the single, Kury Riley, says it was a privilege working with<br />
the “musical vocal god of decades.” It is our privilege to<br />
continue listening to Beres Hammond.<br />
Reviews by Nigel A. Campbell<br />
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 33
SCREENSHOTS<br />
Cocote<br />
Directed by Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, 2017,<br />
106 minutes<br />
In Cocote, the hybridity that is the essence of the <strong>Caribbean</strong><br />
condition is made manifest with unflinching formal daring<br />
and piercing thematic reach.<br />
At its simplest a narrative of<br />
revenge, Cocote opens out<br />
further into an often abstract<br />
reckoning not only with violence<br />
but also with religion,<br />
class and, corruption, told in<br />
a cinematic language that is a<br />
bracing attempt to create an<br />
Antillean aesthetic.<br />
At the centre of Cocote<br />
<strong>—</strong> the word, ominously, is<br />
Dominican Spanish for neck,<br />
specifically the neck as a body part that can be broken or<br />
severed <strong>—</strong> is Alberto, who, as played by Vicente Santos,<br />
is a beguiling mix of the muscular and the melancholic. A<br />
gardener to a wealthy family in Santo Domingo, Alberto<br />
returns to his own family’s village when a well-connected<br />
(thus officially untouchable) policeman murders his father<br />
over an unpaid debt. As an evangelical Christian, Alberto<br />
balks at the expectation of him participating in the death<br />
rituals, a syncretism of Roman Catholicism and West<br />
African belief practices. Spiritual conflict will not prove his<br />
greatest challenge, however: Alberto is bluntly told that,<br />
as the eldest son, he is also expected to avenge his father’s<br />
brutal killing.<br />
Nelson de los Santos Arias’s stylistic proclivities were<br />
previously on display in his<br />
first feature, Santa Teresa<br />
and Other Stories, a muscleflexing<br />
gloss on Chilean writer<br />
Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666.<br />
In Cocote he gives these tendencies<br />
full freedom <strong>—</strong> documentary-style<br />
ethnographic<br />
observation blends with<br />
conventional drama, colour<br />
with monochrome 35-mm cinematography,<br />
expansive fixedcamera<br />
takes with energetic<br />
hand-held ones, and a spectacularly climactic 360-degree<br />
shot, the visuals wrapped in an immersive and inventive<br />
sound design.<br />
Admittedly this isn’t all seamless (and it isn’t meant to be)<br />
<strong>—</strong> but it works, brilliantly. Cocote is deliriously innovative,<br />
palpably <strong>Caribbean</strong> cinema, by a filmmaker who has put us<br />
on notice of his considerable talents.<br />
For more information, visit luxbox.com/cocote<br />
34 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
Sergio & Sergei<br />
Ernesto Daranas Serrano, 2017, 93 minutes<br />
Playing loose and fast<br />
with actual events,<br />
the veteran Cuban<br />
filmmaker Ernesto<br />
Daranas Serrano<br />
comes up trumps<br />
with Sergio & Sergei,<br />
a humanist, magicalrealist<br />
political satire containing echoes of Gravity.<br />
Set in 1991, the film follows Sergio (Tomás Cao), a<br />
Moscow-trained Marxist philosopher at the University<br />
of Havana and amateur radio enthusiast. He becomes<br />
unlikely comrades over the frequencies with Sergei<br />
(Héctor Noas), the lone cosmonaut aboard the Mir space<br />
station <strong>—</strong> who, with the USSR in free fall, is in danger of<br />
being forgotten by his minders. Sergio decides to enlist<br />
the aid of another radio buddy, Peter (Ron Perlman), a US<br />
journalist with a love of conspiracy theories and alcohol,<br />
to bring the stranded space traveller home.<br />
There is much genial humour in this sprightly, solidly<br />
made comedy. Yet it is a single, stark image that proves<br />
most moving: a Soviet flag forlornly adrift in the cosmos.<br />
For more information, visit sergioandsergeifilm.com<br />
The Silence of the Wind<br />
Álvaro Aponte-Centeno, 2017, 93 minutes<br />
The Silence of the Wind<br />
opens with an arresting<br />
image: a close-up of<br />
an eye staring through<br />
a hole in a tarpaulin.<br />
The eye belongs to an<br />
undocumented migrant<br />
aboard a boat off the<br />
Puerto Rican coast. Also aboard the boat is Rafito (Israel<br />
Lugo), whose business it is to bring such migrants into<br />
Puerto Rico.<br />
The understated and sympathetic debut feature by<br />
Álvaro Aponte-Centeno, The Silence of the Wind joins<br />
a number of <strong>Caribbean</strong> films taking undocumented<br />
migration as its subject. Yet the film is less concerned with<br />
the dynamics of the issue <strong>—</strong> no fingers are pointed <strong>—</strong> and<br />
more interested in painting a realist portrait of people<br />
like Rafito who, for whatever reasons, find themselves<br />
facilitating a system that is now part of regional life. Yet<br />
that system is far from benign, as the film’s harrowing<br />
final moments, set again on the implacable sea, remind us.<br />
For more information, visit cercamon.biz<br />
Reviews by Jonathan Ali<br />
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 35
cookup<br />
“That<br />
right<br />
there,<br />
that’s<br />
Africa”<br />
When US chef Ben Dennis first<br />
visited the <strong>Caribbean</strong>, it set him<br />
thinking about food as a form<br />
of African diaspora heritage.<br />
Then he arrived in Tobago and<br />
discovered traditional candies<br />
identical to ones made by his<br />
own Gullah ancestors in South<br />
Carolina. He tells Franka Philip<br />
why this culinary link matters<br />
Isn’t it cool when you visit another country and see familiar How did you make a connection to Trinidad and Tobago?<br />
ingredients being used in ways you’re used to? This was the<br />
big thrill for US chef Ben Dennis, when he visited Trinidad One of the more renowned herbalists in your country,<br />
and Tobago and discovered that local candies like toolum and Francis Morean, he was in Charleston and met an elder<br />
nutcake were similar to those once made by his ancestors, who might have told him about me. But he knew the connection<br />
with the Merikins. I never knew the story in my<br />
the Gullah Geechees of South Carolina. The Gullah are<br />
descendants of formerly enslaved people from various Central and life. They don’t teach us our history. But there’s something<br />
West African ethnic groups settled in South Carolina and Georgia. here [in Trinidad] called hill rice, and it was grown in<br />
They developed a distinct Creole culture that has preserved their the Low Country in South Carolina. I don’t know if the<br />
African heritage.<br />
Merikins brought the hill rice here or if it was already here,<br />
Dennis has visited T&T twice, and explored possible links but the Merikins came from my area and the low country<br />
between the Gullah people and Trinidad’s Merikins <strong>—</strong> descendants of Georgia, Virginia, and I think as far as Louisana. They<br />
of African-American soldiers who were given land in south Trinidad settled in Moruga.<br />
as a reward for fighting for the British in the War of 1812. Dennis Francis hit me on Facebook, he wanted to do this rice<br />
is one of a group of contemporary culinarians shedding light on symposium. We connected, and he’s like family to me<br />
historic foodways in the American South and across the African now. So we did the rice symposium and we were up in the<br />
diaspora. When he was in Trinidad in November 2017, we spoke mountains with this rice. Before I came to Trinidad, Slow<br />
about his blossoming relationship with the <strong>Caribbean</strong>.<br />
Food [an international organisation devoted to food heritage]<br />
had this top ten list of foods that were missing, and<br />
number one was this rice. I get into the fields in Moruga<br />
and I’m looking at this rice <strong>—</strong> African glaberrima, the scientific name <strong>—</strong> and I’m thinking,<br />
this is it, still growing here.<br />
I just came back from Haiti, where I connected with a farmer who I gave some seeds<br />
from back home, and he told me he hadn’t seen it since he was a kid. So that means it<br />
was in Haiti too! I also saw it in a Puerto Rican cookbook, so it might have been there<br />
as well. What we know for sure is that it’s still growing in Trinidad.<br />
I read that you found our bene (sesame seed) balls and that was a revelation for you.<br />
That was a huge connection! I got off the plane in Tobago and saw what you all call<br />
toolum, which is the coconut and molasses. A professor, Dr David Shields, he always<br />
sends out stuff about old things that are missing. The Gullah street candy used to be<br />
done by old Gullah ladies <strong>—</strong> they were the bene seed balls and the coconut molasses<br />
36 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 37<br />
jonathan boncek
candy, which we call monkey meat. So I<br />
look at this candy, the coconut and molasses,<br />
and I had a picture of an old Gullah<br />
lady with a tray of candies. One of them<br />
was the peanut candy [nutcake] and the<br />
other was the coconut molasses candy. I<br />
was like, wow, this is amazing! That made<br />
my heart sing. We still see the bene candies<br />
<strong>—</strong> we call them bene cookies <strong>—</strong> but<br />
the other old candies, we don’t see them.<br />
Did you get the recipes from here to take<br />
back?<br />
Yes, I learned the basics of how to make it<br />
from Trinidad. I heard they do it in West<br />
Africa, too. This is a candy that is traditional,<br />
you know, New World traditional.<br />
To see the similarities of how we do those<br />
candies was fascinating.<br />
Toolum, also known as monkey meat<br />
Ben Dennis writes: “There was a street candy called monkey meat here in<br />
Charleston, sold by Gullah Geechee ladies during the colonial period and up until<br />
the early 1960s. It’s not seen much anymore, unlike in T&T, where toolum is still<br />
common. The addition of lemon peel is the only difference I’ve noticed in the recipes,<br />
but I’m sure each cook adds different small different touches to their recipe.”<br />
1 cup finely grated coconut<br />
4 tbs molasses<br />
2 tsp grated or finely chopped ginger<br />
¼ tsp dried orange peel, chopped or grated<br />
¼ tsp dried lemon peel<br />
²⁄ ³ cup brown sugar<br />
Place sugar in a small pot and let it liquefy over low heat. Then add grated<br />
coconut and molasses. Mix thoroughly, then add the ginger and orange peel. Stir<br />
over a low fire until the mixture leaves the side of the pot <strong>—</strong> make sure it doesn’t<br />
burn. Drop spoonsful of the mixture onto a greased dish or pan. Let it cool just a<br />
little, and form into balls. Let it harden and chill just a bit.<br />
Were you always this passionate about<br />
your roots, or is this something that came up as you got older?<br />
I had the roots set into me, but it wasn’t something that was<br />
really talked about. I was always into history, and particularly<br />
black history. You’re born into it, but it took people from<br />
the outside to make me realise what we had. When I got to<br />
St Thomas in 2004, that was when it really hit me. St Thomas<br />
is full of people from Haiti, Jamaica, and St Kitts, and I realised<br />
that a lot of people there knew about our culture.<br />
What are some of the similarities between <strong>Caribbean</strong> food and<br />
what you are used to in South Carolina?<br />
The one-pot cooking, the slow cooking of meats, the barbecuing<br />
and smoking of meats, the seafood, the love for fish, the greens<br />
and the okra <strong>—</strong> that right there, that’s Africa.<br />
It seems that okra is the common thread among black people,<br />
isn’t it?<br />
I would say that’s our mother plant. We love okra, its part of<br />
our heritage and part of our culture. To me, that’s one of the<br />
connectors.<br />
I once saw on television where Andrew Zimmern on his programme<br />
Bizarre Foods went into a Gullah community and they<br />
were eating squirrels. Is that something that happens still?<br />
Back home, sometimes you see them skinning a big deer, you<br />
go to what we call the Sea Islands and you will still see the deer<br />
being skinned and squirrels being prepared. Even in the city, in<br />
some of the old black communities, you see it. It’s still part of the<br />
culture, but it’s dying. The younger generation doesn’t want that,<br />
they want it easy.<br />
What about your media side? Are you going to be doing shows<br />
on the food channels?<br />
I have appeared on Top Chef [on cable channel Bravo], but as a<br />
guest talking about the culture of food. TV is not my big thing,<br />
unless I can spread the word of culture, unless I can share with<br />
other black chefs who are passionate about the diaspora. TV can<br />
sometimes put you in a bad light <strong>—</strong> sometimes the way they edit<br />
you can show you in a light that makes you look ignorant. I would<br />
do TV again, but it has to be about culture and food.<br />
“People have been doing ‘soul<br />
food’ <strong>—</strong> I don’t like that term. We<br />
have to do African diaspora food,<br />
‘culture food’”<br />
Is it important for more black chefs to come forward throughout<br />
the diaspora and tell these stories?<br />
Coming up as chefs, we only saw one side. People have been<br />
doing “soul food” <strong>—</strong> I don’t like that term. We have to do African<br />
diaspora food, “culture food.” When you learn about the culture<br />
ways and get these old recipes and old ingredients, it inspires<br />
you. It would be great to see more chefs dig into this culture <strong>—</strong><br />
don’t be ashamed!<br />
We call it brown food, because it’s brown stews and gravies,<br />
but you can sexy it up . . . We have to get out of this mindset of<br />
what white chefs are doing. You know what they’re going to do?<br />
They’re going to take our food and make it seem like they discovered<br />
something. We have to reclaim our foodways, reclaim<br />
our culture. n<br />
38 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
Immerse<br />
Zoe Davidson<br />
40 Closeup<br />
The puzzle of “home”<br />
46<br />
Own Words<br />
“I’m not trying to fill<br />
his shoes”<br />
48 Showcase<br />
Miriam<br />
André Alexis, Trinidadian-Canadian author of Fifteen Dogs
CLOSEUP<br />
The puzzle of<br />
“home”<br />
For writer André Alexis <strong>—</strong> born in Trinidad, bred in Canada <strong>—</strong><br />
home is “not any one thing.” In his elegant, inventive novels,<br />
he explores the intricacies of the human mind through the<br />
play of complex ideas. Along the way, as Donna Yawching<br />
learns, Alexis has reinvigorated both Canadian and<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong> writing <strong>—</strong> and a string of recent awards shows<br />
how his literary ambitions have impressed the critics<br />
Photogrpahy by Zoe Davidson<br />
It is fair to say that André Alexis is a writer like no other.<br />
Of course, one might argue that’s true of any writer worth<br />
his salt <strong>—</strong> but, with Alexis, there’s enough salt to flavour<br />
an ocean.<br />
Name one other writer who has won a country’s highest<br />
literary prize with a book (ostensibly) about a pack<br />
of dogs, or one whose version of God appears to be a talking<br />
sheep. His short story about a young man’s obsessive desire for<br />
a soucouyant predates the Twilight series by at least a decade,<br />
and another in which all the characters have versions of his own<br />
name is just flat-out weird.<br />
And yet Alexis is not a “novelty” writer, seeking out the outrageous<br />
in order to make a splash. On the contrary, he is a deeply<br />
philosophical, unfailingly literary author, whose passionate<br />
interest is the exploration of ideas. Big ideas: love, power, divinity,<br />
the concept of home <strong>—</strong> all of which show up in his works,<br />
twisting and turning into different forms, different visions. “I<br />
have a very small set of concerns,” he quips. “But I work them<br />
like crazy.”<br />
Born in Trinidad in 1957, Alexis moved to Canada when he<br />
was three and a half. He grew up largely in Ottawa, the nation’s<br />
capital, with stints in small-town Ontario, before ending up<br />
in Toronto thirty years ago. Home, for him, is a conundrum, a<br />
constant search. “It’s one of the explorations of my lifetime,”<br />
he says. “I keep thinking about it and wondering about it and<br />
questioning what it is. Having lost it as a child, it’s very difficult<br />
to find it again.”<br />
This is a theme that recurs in virtually all of his work. It runs<br />
like an undercurrent throughout his first novel, Childhood (1998)<br />
<strong>—</strong> a fictional autobiography that has very little to do with his<br />
actual life <strong>—</strong> and closes the narrative in several other works. In<br />
Asylum, the author, musing on his self-exile, writes: “I now think<br />
the hardest part of leaving home has been the loss of coherence.”<br />
A character at the end of Hidden Keys “wondered if home were<br />
people or a place. It was, of course, both and neither.”<br />
And in Fifteen Dogs (winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Giller<br />
Prize, Canada’s most coveted literary award), the last nanosecond<br />
of consciousness of the last dog alive <strong>—</strong> not coincidentally,<br />
the bard, the poet, the troubadour <strong>—</strong> is a flashback to “home,”<br />
and an awareness of love, which are perhaps the same thing.<br />
With so many tantalising <strong>—</strong> and often contradictory <strong>—</strong> hints,<br />
it is impossible not to wonder where André Alexis considers to<br />
be home. Is he Trinidadian? Is he Canadian? Both? Neither? His<br />
answer, of course, is enigmatic: home, he declares, “is multiform;<br />
it’s not any one thing. It’s the sound of the chickens in the<br />
backyard, the sound of the sea; but also, it’s snow, pine trees, the<br />
silence that comes in winter.” (A conversation with Alexis is like<br />
this: ideas, images, walking on a cloud.)<br />
40 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 41
His earliest experiences of separation and loss, dislocation<br />
not just physical but also emotional, may be responsible for his<br />
Nowherian identity (a term coined by St Lucia’s Nobel laureate<br />
Derek Walcott). When he was barely one year old, Alexis’s<br />
Trinidadian parents decided to migrate to Canada: his father<br />
to study medicine, his mother law. They left their two children<br />
<strong>—</strong> André and his baby sister Thecla <strong>—</strong> with separate sets of<br />
relatives. His mother Ena Borde now says, “André felt we should<br />
not have separated them. I think that affected him a lot when he<br />
was young.” Alexis lived with an uncle for two and a half years,<br />
until <strong>—</strong> pregnant with her third child <strong>—</strong> Ena reunited her family,<br />
bringing the children to Canada.<br />
Alexis views this period of his life as “two breaches: there was<br />
the loss of my parents, and (subsequently) the loss of my home.<br />
It makes you re-examine what the world is, at a very basic level.<br />
And doing it at three or four, you don’t have the equipment; you<br />
have to invent the equipment to understand the world. And so<br />
Canada was the country to learn home in, not to be at home.”<br />
His books reflect this split: both cultural realities are overt<br />
in the narratives; neither is denied, neither is idealised.<br />
His description of a wedding or a wake is instantly<br />
recognisable by any West Indian, anywhere in the world. A<br />
costume parade in small-town Ontario is Trinidad’s Carnival in<br />
miniature. Alexis writes in pristine English, but the occasional<br />
Trini phrase slides slyly into the prose (“Oh lors!” wails one<br />
character, with not even a hint of explanation to the nonplussed<br />
non-<strong>Caribbean</strong> reader, who probably dismisses it as a typo). Alexis<br />
loves it when a fellow-Trinidadian catches these little winks, like<br />
a secret code.<br />
“My work is the work of an immigrant,” he says, “and couldn’t<br />
not be. If you take a mango seedling and put it in Canada, what<br />
is it? It’s still a tropical plant, and always will be. I’m a tropical<br />
plant.”<br />
Which would make perfect sense, if his works were overtly<br />
about transplant: the hackneyed immigrant story (stranger in<br />
a strange land, obstacles/triumphs/heartbreaks/redemption).<br />
But they’re not <strong>—</strong> his dislocations are more often mental<br />
than geographical. This mango seedling has been thoroughly<br />
naturalised: writing about Ottawa and Toronto, or the Ontario<br />
countryside, Alexis achieves a sense of place that is more vivid,<br />
more real, than the born-and-bred Canadian novelists, most of<br />
whom are still searching plaintively for “identity” (“We are nice,<br />
we are polite, we are not American”).<br />
In an early interview with Canadian literature professor<br />
Branko Gorjup (published in Books in Canada, <strong>April</strong> 1998), Alexis<br />
declared: “I don’t feel myself particularly part of any branch of<br />
the Canadian literary tradition, but I don’t feel myself disconnected<br />
from it either. As to the West Indian heritage . . . yes, I<br />
am very much West Indian in the way I grew up . . . Trinidad is<br />
and always will be the first environment that I was exposed to.<br />
However, that doesn’t mean that I consider myself a West Indian<br />
writer. I couldn’t write as I write now had I stayed in Trinidad . . .<br />
It may be that alienation was necessary for my creativity.”<br />
Alexis was drawn to writing early in life. “I wanted to be<br />
either a musician, or something artistic,” he recalls. He started<br />
playing guitar around age fourteen, and picked up writing<br />
shortly afterwards. He still plays the guitar, but clearly writing<br />
won the creativity derby. (Though not completely: at the time of<br />
our interview, he was working on the libretto for an opera.)<br />
He studied English at Carlton University, but after a year “I<br />
realised I didn’t really want to do English,” he explains, with<br />
no apparent irony. Next he took a shot at Russian, lasting half<br />
a year. “That was the last time I was in university. I don’t have<br />
any degrees,” he reveals, almost proudly. His high-achieving<br />
parents were less than thrilled. Says Ena Borde: “As a parent<br />
you think, he has a good mind, why doesn’t he get a degree<br />
that would take him through life?” But she knew better than<br />
to press her shy, bookish son: “I always gave my children the<br />
freedom to make their own decisions.”<br />
Abandoning academia, Alexis found a job in a bookshop <strong>—</strong> a<br />
way to be surrounded by books without having to fit them into<br />
the “completist” framework of formal education. He read widely<br />
and esoterically, but denies being erudite: “I just like ideas.<br />
Ideas are my natural subject, because I think the human mind<br />
is my natural subject.” Nevertheless, his books are studded with<br />
names and theories that the average reader would struggle to<br />
recognise.<br />
At thirty, Alexis moved to Toronto, where destiny patiently<br />
awaited him. His daughter Nicola was born a few years later<br />
<strong>—</strong> shortly before Alexis was fired from his job at Book City for<br />
refusing to work overtime at an event. (“Insubordination?” I<br />
suggest helpfully. “Yes, insubordination,” he exclaims. “I like<br />
that word, it makes me look like a rebel!”).<br />
42 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
He was unemployed, with an infant daughter to support.<br />
“The proper thing,” he muses, “would have been to get a<br />
proper job. But I knew if I did, I would never be a writer.”<br />
Instead, he applied for unemployment insurance, and wrote.<br />
“It could have gone either way,” he shrugs.<br />
Alexis’s work attracted notice right from the start: his<br />
first book of short stories, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa<br />
(1994) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize,<br />
and his first novel, Childhood (1998), took two Canadian<br />
awards. Pastoral (2014) was on another prestigious shortlist,<br />
and finally with Fifteen Dogs (2015) Alexis hit the jackpot, winning<br />
the C$100,000 Giller Prize as well as Canada’s Writers’<br />
Trust Fiction Prize.<br />
But it was a long, slow road, and rags were a very real<br />
possibility before riches finally appeared. “I would get up at<br />
5 am and write,” he recalls. “I earned $50 here doing a book<br />
review, $50 there. I mean, you worked like a beast. It’s a life.<br />
It’s not a rich life.”<br />
“The main thing that stands out with André is his stick-toitiveness,”<br />
says his mother. “He was writing for almost forty years<br />
before getting recognition. There were some pretty dry years.”<br />
The dry years are (probably) behind him. In <strong>March</strong><br />
2017, Alexis was shocked to receive the Windham<br />
Campbell Prize, administered by the Beinecke Rare<br />
Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Candidates<br />
are nominated secretly <strong>—</strong> they know about it only if they win.<br />
Awarded in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work, it is,<br />
at US$165,000, one of the richest literary prizes in the world.<br />
“If you take a mango seedling<br />
and put it in Canada, what is<br />
it? It’s still a tropical plant, and<br />
always will be. I’m a tropical<br />
plant”<br />
Alexis’s closest friend, the poet Roo Borson, thinks the<br />
recognition is well deserved and long overdue. “He lived a very<br />
impoverished life for a long time,” she says. “Now he can live by<br />
his art. That’s incredibly important, that makes an enormous<br />
difference in a person’s life. He has more freedom <strong>—</strong> he’s just<br />
generally happier.”<br />
Asked if he’s surprised at all this fame and fortune, Alexis<br />
doesn’t hesitate: “Yes. I never expect to do well. It’s not<br />
that I don’t think I’m a good writer, or that I’m relentlessly<br />
self-deprecating; it’s that you don’t think about that.” He fully<br />
expects (he says) to sooner or later find himself back at his<br />
old $50-a-review life (“I think I’m going to go back to it. I’m<br />
sure”). But this seems unlikely. If nothing else, he is in high<br />
demand for literary juries and university writing residencies.<br />
And for good reason. Alexis is an extraordinarily skilled<br />
writer, as well as an unusually thoughtful one. “André’s<br />
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 43
writing is gorgeous,” exclaims Borson. “It’s playful, the sentences<br />
are beautiful, I love reading them. It has an ingenuous<br />
charm. He’s one of the best writers out there today. He’s devoted<br />
to the aesthetics of writing.” His mother, less effusive but still his<br />
biggest fan, comments: “He can write a sentence <strong>—</strong> there’s no<br />
doubt about that.”<br />
His writing “reflects the world, in a skewed way,” says Borson.<br />
“There is a philosophical basis, but his work is not academic.<br />
He’s not scholarly. He takes in a huge amount of information,<br />
then re-combines it in a way that is deeply thoughtful and yet<br />
playful at the same time.”<br />
The best example of this might be his prizewinning novel<br />
Fifteen Dogs, Alexis’s most accessible work. As it opens, two<br />
ancient Greek gods, Apollo and Hermes, are drinking in a<br />
Toronto pub. (This is treated as a mundane event.) A drunken bet<br />
leads them to grant the gift of human consciousness to a group<br />
of dogs, in order to see if they end up any happier than humans.<br />
The implications are tremendous:<br />
the book is an extended rumination<br />
on power, violence, religion,<br />
love, language, and poetry <strong>—</strong> all<br />
while presenting the world from<br />
a canine point of view (sensuality,<br />
savagery, smells, food).<br />
“I’ve displaced the humans,”<br />
Alexis says. “So when you look at<br />
the dogs you’re not seeing them<br />
as humans, but you’re not seeing them as dogs either. It’s a trick<br />
of the light.” (Why dogs? Alexis’s stint babysitting a friend’s<br />
dogsledding operation in rural Ontario may have had something<br />
to do with that. As Borson says: real life, skewed.)<br />
His books may be onion-like in their numerous layers, but in<br />
person, Alexis is straightforward and easy to talk to, with not<br />
a hint of pretentiousness. “I’m a very boring human being,” he<br />
insists. “I basically just sit around and write.” In Toronto, his<br />
sitting-around happens in a neighbourhood Starbucks café: “I<br />
take a corner and I stay there for five hours. I usually have my<br />
headphones in. I have a coffee, I have a sprouted grain bagel with<br />
cream cheese, and then I write. That’s it.”<br />
When he can, though, he prefers to go far away and<br />
sequester himself: the book that gave him the most pleasure<br />
was Pastoral, which was written “every single day” for three<br />
“I just like ideas. Ideas are<br />
my natural subject, because I<br />
think the human mind is my<br />
natural subject”<br />
months, in London, England. “It’s a city I love, a city that I’m<br />
a stranger in,” he explains. He also has fond memories of a<br />
three-month stint in Buccoo Village, Tobago: “It’s my kind<br />
of place because, think about it, nothing’s happening! It’s a<br />
writer’s paradise. I was five minutes from the sea and I never<br />
saw the sea! I’m a writer.”<br />
And an ambitious one, at that. While most novelists are<br />
grateful to get one book done and (if they’re lucky) move<br />
on to the next, Alexis is currently working on a construct<br />
of five. He calls it a “quincunx,” which is technically the geometric<br />
pattern of five found on dice, playing cards, and dominoes: four<br />
points arranged in a square, with a fifth in the middle. Interpreting<br />
this as a kind of divine ordering, Alexis has written the first three<br />
books of the structure, and is working on the fourth <strong>—</strong> but, to<br />
complicate matters, the final book will actually be number three<br />
of the series, the dot in the middle, connecting and illuminating<br />
all the others. (“André needs to<br />
challenge himself continuously,”<br />
Borson muses.)<br />
This massive project is not a<br />
series in the conventional sense:<br />
the first three books do not follow<br />
each other in chronology, storyline<br />
or form. Pastoral is structured<br />
to reflect Beethoven’s “Pastorale”<br />
Symphony; Fifteen Dogs is a Greek<br />
apologue (a moral tale); Hidden Keys is a giant and pointless<br />
riddle, inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.<br />
The overlap is in the ideas being explored, the rocks being<br />
turned over.<br />
Alexis says he had the entire structure in mind before starting<br />
on the first book: “They all came to me at once <strong>—</strong> so I know<br />
what the last one is. It’s convenient. But it’s also why I feel like<br />
I’ve been doing the same work for the last ten years.” When all<br />
five are written, he hopes to publish an omnibus edition, in the<br />
proper order, which, he says, “will reveal the ideas in different<br />
lights, and different depths.”<br />
“The quincunx is probably the biggest project that André will<br />
write in his life,” says Borson. Maybe she’s right. But <strong>—</strong> Alexis<br />
being who he is <strong>—</strong> who knows? Maybe a sextet is percolating<br />
behind those owlish glasses, even as we speak. n<br />
44 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
Own words<br />
“I’m not<br />
trying to<br />
fill his<br />
shoes”<br />
Skip Marley, grandson of<br />
the legendary Bob and<br />
the latest member of the<br />
Marley clan to strike out<br />
for musical stardom, on the<br />
importance of family and<br />
the message of his music <strong>—</strong><br />
as told to Nazma Muller<br />
Photography courtesy Meredith Truax<br />
46 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
I<br />
think I always knew who my grandfather<br />
was, because my momma told me. But the<br />
first time I realised the significance of the<br />
impact he had, I was twelve. I realised that<br />
I wanted to be a musician about a year after<br />
that <strong>—</strong> when I was around thirteen years old.<br />
I have always loved music, but I was shy about<br />
my singing voice. But one night, while on tour with<br />
my uncle Stephen, he pushed me on stage during<br />
a concert and prompted me to sing “One Love” to<br />
a crowd of hundreds. He gave me the microphone,<br />
and from that moment on, I felt music. I remember<br />
coming off the stage and seeing everyone crying.<br />
They said they never knew that I sang songs.<br />
Finally, they had the next one.<br />
Am I claiming Bob’s throne? Maybe. He’s living<br />
through us, in all the choices we make every day.<br />
But I’m not trying to fill his shoes. I just want to be<br />
the voice of the next generation.<br />
new artist would be happy for the chance to learn and soak up some of that. I’ve<br />
always been Cedella Marley’s son, so I don’t really have anything to compare it<br />
to. But, having her for a mom definitely influences me to work hard, have love<br />
and respect for people and the planet. Music is art, and it sends a message. So I<br />
want people to enjoy the art in the music, but also get the message.<br />
“It’s different times, but it’s the same fight<br />
as my grandfather’s. But it’s not a physical<br />
fight <strong>—</strong> it’s a mental battle”<br />
On “Chained to the Rhythm”, for example, I<br />
sing about walls, truth, and greed. We’re about<br />
to riot / they woke up the lions. And on my single<br />
“Lions” I send the message that my generation will<br />
not have their rights taken away or be told how to<br />
pray, and will instead start a movement.<br />
It’s different times, but it’s the same fight as my<br />
grandfather’s. But it’s not a physical fight <strong>—</strong> it’s a<br />
mental battle. When I say “my generation” or “this<br />
generation,” it’s to reassure people that when we<br />
come together and stand strong, we’re people, and<br />
we’ll outnumber those who wrong.<br />
I enjoy working with and being around all my<br />
family <strong>—</strong> they are some of the best in this business.<br />
Last year I toured with my uncles, Damian and<br />
Stephen, and this year we were all on Kayafest<br />
together in Miami. I’ve also performed with my<br />
great-aunt, Marcia Griffiths. There is so much<br />
experience and wisdom among everyone <strong>—</strong> any<br />
I<br />
was born in Kingston, and I love being there with my family as much as we<br />
get the chance. I am blessed to travel to many places in the world <strong>—</strong> Sweden,<br />
Ethiopia, and other islands in the <strong>Caribbean</strong>. Jamaica has a unique energy<br />
that people won’t feel anywhere else, which is one of the reasons I love it. The<br />
best thing about living in Miami is my family and the sunshine.<br />
Right now I am in the studio working on my EP, and so what’s next is <strong>—</strong><br />
more music. Who would I like to collaborate with? Some of the best collabs<br />
can be unplanned and unexpected, so I don’t really keep a list. One of my first<br />
collaborations was with [Riddim Twins] Sly & Robbie and Spicy Chocolate for<br />
their Reggae Power 2 album. This year I worked with some great artists and<br />
producers <strong>—</strong> from Katy Perry to Supadups. Right now I am featured on this<br />
cool track by SEEB called “Cruel World”. Collaborating with each one came<br />
with its own vibe, and we created something unique. Based on the experiences<br />
of the last couple of years, I would like to keep an open mind and just<br />
see what opportunities come.<br />
I don’t get stressed out. The one time I got a little bit stressed was when I<br />
was on the [2017] Grammy stage with Katy Perry. It was surreal. You always<br />
see these people [on TV], and being in the same room with them, that’s huge<br />
for me. Katy gave me free range to do whatever I wanted. And we really<br />
meshed well. I’m so thankful for the opportunity, you know, to reach so many<br />
people. It’s impactful. Katy’s message is powerful, we all need to listen. She is<br />
a creative person. I’ll remember her and the experience forever.<br />
I like a lot of different music and artists. Lately we’ve been focused on<br />
finishing up my project, so mainly I listen back to the tracks that I’m working<br />
on. Besides that, I have been listening to Burning Spear and Steel Pulse. I also<br />
listen to the Melody Makers’ albums.<br />
My songs are expressions of thoughts and reactions to life, and what I<br />
observe happening in the world. I wrote songs all through my teens. The same<br />
way that you see events in the news or around you that make you think and feel<br />
a certain way, that’s how it is for me too <strong>—</strong> I just put it into music and lyrics.<br />
The message for my generation is one of love, equality, and the unification<br />
of mankind, you know. I think that it’s something for every generation, not<br />
just my own. We all need to live with more respect and freedom for people<br />
and our planet.<br />
I wouldn’t get involved in politics. My grandfather once said, “Never let a<br />
politician grant you a favour. They will always want to control you forever.” I<br />
don’t need to be a politician to help bring about change. We have the power <strong>—</strong><br />
not the other way around, so we need to be doing things differently.<br />
People can live in love and harmony, and come to an understanding, so we<br />
all grow together. But it has to come from within. n<br />
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SHOWCASE<br />
Saturday is Desmond day, and every Saturday is the same story. She could hear<br />
him calling by the gate just as she put the soup in a bowl to cool, and she ain’t even<br />
have to catch a glimpse of the long, narrow head through the curtain to know is<br />
him. And sometimes he reach while she still turning the split peas on the fire.<br />
Those days he sit down in the kitchen and tell her at least three times how<br />
good the pot smelling. As if he ain’t know she going to invite him to have<br />
a bowl with her, as if he ain’t see the pattern yet after all this time. And when it ready,<br />
Desmond sit down in the chair opposite hers, and after nearly every spoonful, he wipe his<br />
moustache with two fingers. And he compliment the dumplings, and the salt meat, and the<br />
thickness of the soup, and he can’t help but notice how orange the pumpkin is, and sweet,<br />
and he had swear he never would have taste a split peas soup like his mother could have<br />
make, but this one just as more-ish as hers (Desmond always take two bowls).<br />
Then after lunch, when the table clear, he sit down in the Morris chair in the drawing<br />
room till she finish wash the wares, and when she done, he stay and talk to her for about an<br />
hour while she sew. Miriam was a<br />
seamstress, and though readymade<br />
clothes more and more available,<br />
people in the neighbourhood still<br />
coming by her regular.<br />
Wasn’t till about the third time<br />
he visit that Desmond start bringing<br />
his clothes that want a needle.<br />
First it was only two buttons on<br />
one shirt that he ask her to sew on.<br />
Miriam<br />
One woman, four gentleman<br />
Illustration by Shalini Seereeram<br />
Say he “hopeless with needle and<br />
thread,” and he “know is a lot to<br />
ask but . . .” Miriam figure it must<br />
be because she sympathise a little<br />
too much that he come to take her<br />
for granted. She remember clear<br />
clear what she tell him the first time<br />
when he watch her sheepish. How is<br />
not everything a body could do, and<br />
what it take out of her to sew on two<br />
buttons?, and if he feel he can’t ask<br />
her a favour, that’s a bad sign.<br />
Of course, the first few Saturdays<br />
she was still wondering how he come to visit her in the first place. The first few<br />
Saturdays, Miriam change her dress before he reach, tie her hair with a brighter scarf than<br />
the one she’s usually wear in the house, and take the apron from around her waist (though<br />
she say a little prayer that nothing would have fall on her clothes). When Desmond come in<br />
the kitchen and stand up close, watching over her shoulder while she stir the pot, she find<br />
her face getting hot. She tell herself it can’t just be food that bring him.<br />
But now she ain’t so sure. When Desmond leave, he have a thick slice of sweetbread in<br />
greaseproof, and his three pairs of workpants darn, wrap in brown paper, and the parcel<br />
tie with twine. He wave to her from by the gate, a grin splitting his narrow head in two.<br />
“Saturday!” he shout like a promise as he stride off.<br />
“He come for a pair of able hands,” she say to herself as she watch him go.<br />
callers . . . A short story by<br />
Michelene Adams<br />
Sunday after John Rawlins wake up from a weekend of carousing with woman, he walk<br />
over by Miriam. He come in wearing dungarees, no string tie, no grease in his hair.<br />
Sometimes Friday and Saturday evening, she see him passing with one woman or<br />
another in the old Zephyr he buy third-hand from somebody living on the hill, but he don’t<br />
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At least four woman in the village<br />
claim their child is John Rawlins<br />
own, but he careful to pick the kind<br />
of woman who, for one reason or<br />
another, wouldn’t try and prove it<br />
even nod at her then. She know he see her, but his eye anywhere<br />
else <strong>—</strong> out the other window, on the road, or he turn to look at<br />
the woman who always hook up under the arm he have stretch<br />
out across the top of the seat. At least four woman in the village<br />
claim their child is John Rawlins own, but he careful to pick the<br />
kind of woman who, for one reason or another, wouldn’t try and<br />
prove it. So he home free.<br />
Nobody besides his mother know<br />
the side of him Miriam is see every<br />
Sunday. As he reach, he head for<br />
Bally is a tailor, a widower. He have a shop that start out as a<br />
hole in the wall, but after his wife dead, Bally throw himself<br />
into his work so hard that he spitting out clothes fast as a<br />
factory. Some people say that’s why Bally children so lawless, that<br />
is their father guiding hand they missing. Bally sister come to take<br />
care of the children, but is best she didn’t bother, because she used<br />
to drink, and by two o’clock in the afternoon, she sleeping on the<br />
gallery with a set of Stag bottles on the floor by her foot. Bally<br />
send her home after seven months or so.<br />
Bally have a plague of children: Rupert, who driving taxi;<br />
Angie <strong>—</strong> she living with a police constable; and Bobby, the one<br />
who win a scholarship to the university, but he selling snow cone<br />
from a bicycle cart and wearing his hair in a ponytail, because<br />
like he and books vex. And all the younger ones wild, especially<br />
the boys, running through the streets like a pack of goats. All<br />
name after Indian gods, like Bally and his wife find religion<br />
late <strong>—</strong> Vishnu, Indra, Sita, Shiva, Krishna . . . Miriam ain’t even<br />
sure how many.<br />
Sometimes on a evening during the week, Bally<br />
come “for a little breeze” by her. They sit<br />
in the gallery and he shake his head<br />
more than he talk. Sometimes when<br />
the scrubbing brush. While she in the back picking tomato<br />
and green fig, Rawlins nearby cleaning out the chicken coop.<br />
“You can’t manage everything by yourself,” he say, as he fill<br />
a pail of water to wash down the run. He turn off the tap and<br />
look straight in Miriam eye. “You ain’t go believe this,” he say,<br />
“but every Sunday I tell myself, ‘This the last weekend of your<br />
slackness, John Rawlins. Time to stop your womanising.’ But<br />
when Marilyn Harvey walk past me with that roll of she hipline,<br />
or Joan Darlington sitting in the window upstairs and give me a<br />
smile. If any of them woman pass any kind of invitation (because<br />
even when they ain’t realise it, they’s be passing invitation), I<br />
there with them.”<br />
Miriam take the figs and tomato inside, and through the<br />
window, she see Rawlins on his hands and knees scrubbing the<br />
concrete.<br />
“Is absolution he here for,” she say.<br />
the night damp and the scent of jasmine reach her from the little<br />
piece of garden she have in the front of the house, she look at<br />
Bally. She watch the curve of his eyebrow, and his jawline, and<br />
his hands <strong>—</strong> neat fingers clasp in his lap <strong>—</strong> and she think to<br />
herself she might be able to calm down those children <strong>—</strong> maybe<br />
is a woman they need. Maybe all Angie need is a woman in the<br />
house again, and she might come back home and settle down.<br />
So she get up and bring some tea with a mint leaf. “To soothe<br />
your nerves,” she tell him, and he hold the cup in one hand and<br />
rub his temple with the other one. But when he done drinking<br />
he get to his feet and tell her he have to wake up early to finish a<br />
waistcoat. When she open the gate for him to pass, he stand up<br />
watching down the road.<br />
“You see Angie lately?” he finally ask. “She scrawny and her<br />
skin like it grey. She used to be a nice-looking girl. I tired talk,<br />
though. I wash my hand of all of them.”<br />
50 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
As he pass through the gate, Miriam watch how he’s stoop a<br />
little when he walk and how his hands making two fists.<br />
“He want somebody to pass his children on to,” she say.<br />
But Nathaniel Mendoza have her confuse. First time she see<br />
him was the day her neighbour son had help her cut down<br />
the zaboca tree that was sick. She come out to wet the<br />
heliconia when the sun start to go down, and find this tall brownskin<br />
man leaning on the gate watching at the trunk and branches pile on<br />
the pavement for the City Council truck to pick up.<br />
“You will miss your zabocas,” he say, as if they accustom talking<br />
over the wall just so. “Eh heh,” she say, softly, expecting him<br />
to say something more, but he just walk away. She remember<br />
she stand up on the gallery wiping her wet hands on her dress<br />
watching him go. He was whistling.<br />
But a couple weeks later, he show up at the gate carrying a<br />
paper bag with two perfect Pollock pears. She thank him and<br />
offer him a glass of lime juice, so he pass through the gate after<br />
her and follow her into the gallery. Nathaniel from Paramin,<br />
that little village nestled in the Maraval hills. You could see it<br />
in the distance on your left on the way to Blanchisseuse. “Not<br />
everybody could make it up there,” he say. “Is only four-wheel<br />
drive could climb them hills.”<br />
He tell her he have five brothers and sisters, and all of them<br />
still in that village. When she say all she know about Paramin<br />
is they look Spanish, they’s grow chive, they always bring out<br />
a blue devil band at Carnival, and they play parang, he laugh<br />
and say his parents is sell seasoning in the market, two brothers<br />
involve in blue devil mas since they in their teens, and he is the<br />
mandolin man in a parang band. “Maybe is true, and all we good<br />
for in Paramin is growing chive, spitting fire, and making music<br />
for Christmas.”<br />
His face break open in a smile, and Miriam find he remind her<br />
of something from when she was small, but she ain’t sure what.<br />
She smile, too, though.<br />
“Parang ain’t parang without the mandolin,” she say.<br />
When Nathaniel talk, he’s use his hands plenty, as if the words<br />
not enough to tell the story. Miriam sit and listen and watch at<br />
the shapes his hands making. He not handsome, but he have a<br />
kind face, and eyes like he always studying something more.<br />
He working on the wharf, and he tell Miriam about some of the<br />
things he see: Filipino sailors, small like boys; Koreans <strong>—</strong> big<br />
hard-back men <strong>—</strong> walking along the docks holding hands. He<br />
always find that odd, but everybody have their own way, he say.<br />
Once he watch a Norweigan officer standing on the deck of a<br />
cruise ship, throwing down coins for a local woman below. Her<br />
husband was there, but the captain like he didn’t care.<br />
But a lot of the time he cross one long leg over the next one<br />
and listen to her. It look like the stories he’s tell make her want<br />
to talk, too. Sometimes she surprise at what she remember. All<br />
kind of thing from when she was small <strong>—</strong> how she used to play<br />
in the dry river bed with twin sisters who live in a house where<br />
everything paint pink. Or the time they were staying in Las<br />
Piedras and she sleepwalk out to the sea and nearly drown. She<br />
find she want him to listen. When Nathaniel say he going, she try<br />
to think of things she could talk about that might get him to lean<br />
back in the chair and cross his legs again. She look in his face<br />
and her heart flutter <strong>—</strong> almost like a bird that frighten <strong>—</strong> but she<br />
don’t have anything to keep him. He wave from by the gate and<br />
walk brisk towards the junction.<br />
Around five o’clock most Saturdays after that he come, and<br />
he tell his tales leaning back in the chair, his long legs stretch out,<br />
but he always leave once the neighbours start to turn on their<br />
lights. She invite him to stay for a little roast bake and smoke<br />
herring one evening, but he thank her and say, “Is time to head<br />
up. I have a good way to go to get home.” Miriam find that after<br />
Nathaniel gone on those Saturdays, she sit down in the gallery<br />
thinking about her parents, about her brother and sister who in<br />
America years now, about school days. Sometimes she ain’t even<br />
remember to watch the news on the little TV she have in the<br />
drawing room, and instead she just stay on the gallery with the<br />
lights of houses twinkling in the hills.<br />
“What this Paramin man come down here for?” she hear herself<br />
ask softly, but she can’t see that he really come for anything<br />
in particular.<br />
The strangest dream she ever have is come back in a<br />
different form every so often. In one dream, she on the<br />
gallery, and a man pass and tip his hat and tell her she have<br />
a beautiful garden, and he especially fond of the lovely red plant,<br />
and gone on his way. In another one, she come out of the service<br />
with all the congregation and in the courtyard the men turning<br />
from their wife and smiling at her, and one of them whisper,<br />
After his wife dead, Bally throw<br />
himself into his work so hard that<br />
he spitting out clothes fast as a<br />
factory<br />
“That’s a wonderful red plant growing wild in your garden,” and<br />
before she have time to answer, he disappear in the crowd. Is have<br />
her uncomfortable when she wake up; she never like the idea of<br />
getting praise or compliment when she ain’t deserve it, and in the<br />
dream she don’t have chance to say they must be mix hers up with<br />
some other garden, because she ain’t have no such plant. But by<br />
the time she get out of the bed and gone to the kitchen to make<br />
tea, she forget till the next time.<br />
The following Saturday morning she went to the market<br />
and bring back the usual ingredients for the soup. She<br />
peel the dasheen and cassava and sweet potato and put it<br />
to boil. She cut up the chive and onion and crush the garlic. She<br />
burst the split peas in the pressure cooker, and as she take it off<br />
the fire, she hear Desmond call out. He early today. She walk out<br />
to the gallery, and he beam at her from the gate. He was carrying<br />
a shopping bag with some piece of clothes or the other in it. She<br />
take a deep breath.<br />
“Desmond,” she hear herself say, “I can’t invite you in today,<br />
nuh.”<br />
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His eyebrows raise. “Oho,” he say. “You busy?”<br />
“I going South as soon as I finish cook. My cousin been asking<br />
me to come down by her in Siparia long time now and I decide I<br />
go take the bus and go for the weekend.”<br />
Miriam cousin had really ask her a few times to visit, but is<br />
only when she see Desmond long head at the gate that she decide<br />
to go. She had always wonder what it would be like to travel in<br />
one of them new buses. “Luxury ride.” She had seen those words<br />
somewhere <strong>—</strong> must be in the papers.<br />
Desmond look down at the bag in his hand and open his<br />
mouth, but he close it again. “Alright, Miriam,” he say. “We go<br />
pick up.”<br />
She gone back in the kitchen after he walk up towards Main<br />
Street, and she rest her hands on the kitchen counter and look<br />
at them.<br />
When John Rawlins show up as usual the next Sunday<br />
morning, Miriam was reading the Express in the<br />
drawing room. She part the curtain and wave at him.<br />
He say “Morning” as he close the gate behind him, and almost in<br />
the same breath, he ask her if she want him to start with the fowl<br />
run or if she need anything special do.<br />
“Why we don’t just sit down for a change and have a cup a<br />
coffee,” she say.<br />
When Nathaniel talk, he’s use his<br />
hands plenty, as if the words not<br />
enough to tell the story. Miriam sit<br />
and listen and watch at the shapes<br />
his hands making<br />
Rawlins eye fly open.<br />
“Dew still on the plants, John. Watch.”<br />
“Sit down?” he say, excited. “But I ain’t come to sit down,<br />
Miriam. I come to give you a hand. I sure something round here<br />
need doing.”<br />
Miriam shake her head. “I not feeling for busyness round me.<br />
Maybe you should stop for a while and just . . . well, just breathe.<br />
Is Sunday, after all, you know.”<br />
John sigh hard. He look round the yard.<br />
“Best I go by my mother. I’s usually go there after I leave by<br />
you. She’s be glad for the pull out,” he say.<br />
The Anglican church bell ring seven o’clock. Rawlins start to<br />
tap his thigh.<br />
Miriam watch him and smile slow. “Alright, John,” she say.<br />
He sigh again and get to his feet then he lift the latch on the<br />
little wooden gallery gate.<br />
She was sitting outside listening to the radio after dinner one<br />
night the next week when Bally call out.<br />
“Miriam,” he say with a sad smile, “Good evening.”<br />
“Bally,” Miriam greet him, “I glad you pass. Come and sit<br />
down a while. I had wanted to ask you something.”<br />
He push the gate, come up the steps, and get in the old rocking<br />
chair.<br />
“I was thinking about Mayaro,” she say.<br />
Bally furrow his brow. “Mayaro?”<br />
“Yes, boy.” She clasp her hands in her lap. “When I was on the<br />
bus coming from South the other day, I realise how good it is for<br />
a body to see something different sometimes. That road to South<br />
ain’t playing it pretty. The rolling hills . . . When last you and your<br />
children went somewhere for a little breeze?”<br />
Bally look at her, puzzled. Then he give a dry kind of laugh<br />
and lean back in the chair. “I ain’t go nowhere with my children<br />
since my wife die.” He frown and look off down the street<br />
towards his house.<br />
“That’s a long time,” Miriam say softly.<br />
“Four years,” Bally say. “We used to drive in the van to<br />
Rampanalgas when some of them was still small. Sita was a<br />
baby, and Krishna wasn’t even born. We used to play cricket on<br />
the beach <strong>—</strong> take bat and ball and thing.”<br />
“That sounding real nice,” Miriam smile.<br />
Bally nod, and Miriam find like his eyes damp.<br />
“Maybe you could take the van and go one Sunday? Maybe<br />
you could ask Angie to go to help you with the younger ones?”<br />
“Maybe,” Bally murmur. “Angie love the sea.” He look up at<br />
Miriam. “The salt might be good for all of us,” he say.<br />
Saturday evening about fiveish and Miriam watering the<br />
croton she have in a pot in the gallery.<br />
“I had come last week,” she hear a deep voice say.<br />
It startle her, but she look up to find Nathaniel, wearing a<br />
yellow All Stars jersey, standing with his arm on the metal gate.<br />
“But like you had gone out.”<br />
“Yes, yes,” Miriam still watering the croton, “I went South.<br />
You not coming in?” she ask. The water spill over the brim of the<br />
plate under the pot.<br />
“South? Eh eh! Nice, man. You have family there?” He come<br />
up the stairs and lean up in the entryway.<br />
“Yes, yes,” she say, “And long time I promise I would visit. We<br />
had a real nice time catching up. In fact,” she chuckle, “I have<br />
stories to tell you. My cousin tell me plenty things I never knew<br />
about my family.”<br />
“Stories? Nice,” Nathaniel say, then like he remember he carrying<br />
something. He take out a container from the bag.<br />
“I bring some smoke herring,” he tell her. “I season it with<br />
lime, and I put pimento and chive from my garden. Tomato, too,<br />
of course” He pause, then, “I was hoping you might make some<br />
roast bake again.”<br />
Miriam catch her breath. “I will roast the bake to go with the<br />
herring,” she say, gazing at the watering can. “Come in the kitchen,<br />
nuh, and I will tell you one or two of the stories while I prepare.”<br />
She look up now and watch him good, and she find he just<br />
there, like all he doing is waiting to listen. She hold out her<br />
arm and step aside for Nathaniel to pass through the narrow<br />
doorway, but he pause, then bend down, untie his shoes and<br />
leave them on the gallery.<br />
When he raise up again he give a slight bow, and gesture to<br />
her to lead him into the house. n<br />
52 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
ARRIVE<br />
Bernardo Galmarini / Alamy Stock Photo<br />
54 Destination<br />
Havana hello<br />
62<br />
Travellers’ Tales<br />
Reggae city<br />
Hard at work in Havana, <strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines’ newest destination
Destination<br />
Equal parts esplanade, seawall, and highway, Havana’s<br />
famous Malecón stretches for five miles, from the<br />
harbour of Old Havana to the Vedado neighbourhood,<br />
lined with monuments and landmark buildings. Built at<br />
the start of the twentieth century, it remains the city’s<br />
most popular spot for seeing and being seen<br />
54 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
Havana<br />
hello<br />
The newest destination in <strong>Caribbean</strong><br />
Airlines’ network is also one of<br />
the <strong>Caribbean</strong>’s most iconic cities.<br />
Welcome to Havana!<br />
bim/istock.com<br />
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 55
What could be more Cuban than a mojito,<br />
the refreshing cocktail of white rum, lime<br />
juice, and mint? La Bodeguita del Medio<br />
claims to be the mojito’s birthplace. Scholars<br />
of mixology don’t all agree, but the<br />
traditional bar was certainly a favourite of<br />
writer Ernest Hemingway, one of Havana’s<br />
most famous resident expats<br />
Milosz Maslanka/shutterstock.com<br />
56 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
Bernardo Galmarini / Alamy Stock Photo<br />
The Gran Teatro, which opened in<br />
1915, is home to the world-famous<br />
Cuban National Ballet<br />
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Havana is one of the world’s great cities<br />
of music <strong>—</strong> not just salsa, rhumba, and<br />
son, but jazz, reggae, hip-hop, and<br />
classical, spilling out into the streets in<br />
every neighbourhood<br />
B&M Noskowski/istock.com<br />
58 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
Lazyllama / Alamy Stock Photo<br />
Its Moorish façade makes the Palacio<br />
de las Ursulinas one of Old Havana’s<br />
most distinctive buildings<br />
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Who needs a beach when you<br />
have the Malecón <strong>—</strong> a favourite<br />
swimming spot for generations of<br />
Havana youngsters<br />
Vova Pomortzeff / Alamy Stock Photo<br />
Havana fact file<br />
VEDADO<br />
Population: 2.1 million<br />
Area: 280 square miles<br />
Founded in 1515 by a Spanish conquistador, Havana is<br />
believed to be a Taíno name, derived from the original<br />
inhabitants of Cuba<br />
Malecón<br />
CENTRO<br />
El Morro<br />
Planning a visit? Here’s some key information for travellers:<br />
Foreign tourists require travel cards to enter Cuba, as well<br />
as travel insurance. Contact the nearest Cuban embassy for<br />
further information.<br />
Cuba has two official currencies: the peso, for small everyday<br />
purchases, and the convertible peso (also called CUC, or<br />
“dollar” in local slang), used in most shops and businesses.<br />
Credit cards are not widely accepted, but ATMs accept some<br />
foreign debit cards. US dollars are not officially accepted<br />
(though some vendors will accept or convert them) but euros<br />
are in widespread use.<br />
O L D H AVA N A<br />
Parque Central<br />
Plaza de la Revolución<br />
El Capitolio<br />
La Bodeguita<br />
del Medio<br />
Internet access can be limited and irregular, so it’s a good idea<br />
to make hard copies of any documents you’ll need during<br />
your trip, including plane tickets, itineraries, and health or<br />
insurance information.<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines flies direct to Havana from Port<br />
of Spain twice each week, with convenient connections<br />
to other regional destinations<br />
60 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
travellers’ tales<br />
Reggae city<br />
On Brazil’s Atlantic coast, the city of São Luís do<br />
Maranhão has a complicated colonial past, ample<br />
historic architecture, a tradition of avant-garde poets<br />
<strong>—</strong> and it’s also a hotbed of reggae music. David Katz<br />
heads there to learn more about an unlikely outpost<br />
of Jamaican music, and the new reggae museum that<br />
celebrates this cultural link<br />
Marco Paulo Bahia Diniz/shutterstock.com<br />
62 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
In an anonymous meeting hall on a São Luís backstreet, the<br />
sweat is dripping off the walls. Several generations of one<br />
family are partying together at the front of the dance floor,<br />
and the divisive demarcations of race and class that often<br />
dominate contemporary Brazil seem absent. Although<br />
English is not widely spoken, dancers mime the choruses<br />
of obscure roots classics by Eric Donaldson, the Maytones, and<br />
Larry Marshall, all Jamaican countryside singers of a bygone<br />
age <strong>—</strong> you could be forgiven for thinking that dancehall never<br />
happened, let alone soca, grime, or dubstep.<br />
A handwoven tapestry of the Maranhão State Vinyl Association<br />
hangs proudly from the ceiling, and when DJ Jorge Black drops<br />
the needle onto Tradition’s “Gambling Man”, a languid slice of<br />
British lovers rock from 1978, waltzing couples push to the fore,<br />
anxious to demonstrate their command of ritmo agarradinho, an<br />
intricate, ecstasy-inducing move for clinching close-dancers that<br />
roughly translates as the “rhythm grab.” It is the dance of choice<br />
for all discerning Maranhese, who shun prospective partners that<br />
cannot master it.<br />
São Luís do Maranhão is one of the most intriguing and<br />
atypical cities of Brazil’s far northeast. Located midway<br />
between the beach bum’s utopian expanse of Fortaleza and<br />
the ornate Amazonian metropolis of Belém, it was built on<br />
an island flanked by two broad rivers that feed an Atlantic<br />
bay, the picturesque yet dilapidated town centre attesting<br />
to its former opulence. São Luís’s complicated history and<br />
peculiar geographical location have rendered it one of the most<br />
ethnically diverse of all Brazilian cities, its relative isolation<br />
yielding a strikingly unique culture. The town’s long locus as a<br />
Waltzing couples push to the fore, anxious<br />
to demonstrate their command of ritmo<br />
agarradinho, an intricate, ecstasy-inducing<br />
move for clinching close-dancers<br />
Opposite page Festival time in São Luís<br />
Above Even the city’s traffic lights are<br />
decorated with azulejos<br />
ostill/shutterstock.com<br />
slave port and its proximity to the Amazon basin have resulted in substantial<br />
black and Amerindian communities, and many of European descent reached<br />
the city from the barren hinterlands known as the sertão, all of which is<br />
reflected in local cultural practices.<br />
For instance, the annual festival of Bumba-meu-Boi centres on the myth<br />
of a slaughtered bull resurrected by an Amerindian shaman with the help of<br />
St John the Baptist. The local variant of Candomblé, known as Tambor de Mine,<br />
mixes West African spiritual traditions with Amerindian elements, while the<br />
Tambor de Crioula and Cacuriá dance traditions have their roots in West Africa,<br />
augmented by European and Amerindian influences.<br />
São Luís also has deep associations with romantic and Parnassian poetry,<br />
and reggae, not samba, is the music of choice, being so deeply engrained in the<br />
local psyche that the state government has just established a Reggae Museum<br />
in the heart of the old colonial centre <strong>—</strong> the only such institution outside of<br />
reggae’s Jamaican homeland. It is another of the many unexpected aspects<br />
of this vibrant and colourful city, known variously as the “Brazilian Athens,”<br />
“Love Island,” and the “Brazilian Jamaica,” which forms a very rewarding<br />
destination for travellers who make the effort to reach here.<br />
“<br />
São Luís is a distant place that’s not easy<br />
to get to, even by plane,” says Otávio<br />
Rodrigues, a journalist and broadcaster<br />
who presented the popular Bumba <strong>Beat</strong> radio<br />
show in São Luís during the 1990s. “The nearest<br />
metropolitan capitals are about 1,000 kilometres<br />
away, and historically the city was more connected<br />
to Europe than to the rest of the country, which<br />
resulted in a well-educated elite with a remarkable<br />
list of writers, poets, and journalists, but also a<br />
poor mass, mainly of African descent, or of mixed<br />
Amerindian, African, and European. Aside from<br />
the beautiful buildings of the historic centre and<br />
a kind of bucolic poetry in certain circles, the city<br />
has none of Europe’s glamour. Instead, popular<br />
traditions like Bumba-meu-Boi and Cacuriá stand<br />
as some of the best examples we can find of<br />
Brazil’s rich folkloric universe.”<br />
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This was once the site of a village of the indigenous Tupinambá tribe,<br />
known as Upuon Açu. When French settlers arrived in 1612, they named<br />
the town St Louis de Maragnan, after Louis XIII, but the Portuguese soon<br />
ousted them, renaming the city São Luís in 1615. Dutch invaders occupied the<br />
settlement from 1641 to 1645, and when they left the Portuguese made São<br />
Luís one of the most noteworthy outposts of their South American empire,<br />
designating it part of an independent state in the eighteenth century and a<br />
subsequent commercial metropolis.<br />
Its industries were based on plantation economies of sugar cane, cocoa,<br />
and tobacco. The city’s fortunes peaked during the US Civil War, when<br />
São Luís began exporting cotton to Britain, making it the third largest city<br />
in Brazil, but the end of the war initiated a long decline. During the 1950s,<br />
citizens of São Luís had the lowest life expectancy in the entire country, but<br />
the lack of ready finance ironically helped preserve the city’s colonial centre,<br />
sparing it the fate of more prosperous neighbours whose ancient structures<br />
were bulldozed in the 60s and 70s.<br />
São Luís’s complicated history and peculiar<br />
geographical location have rendered it<br />
one of the most ethnically diverse of all<br />
Brazilian cities<br />
An amble around the city’s historic centre today makes it abundantly clear<br />
why São Luís was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. The<br />
heart and soul is the area known as Praia Grande, due to its proximity to the<br />
largest in-town beach, which is also sometimes referred to as the reviver, since<br />
the district is undergoing extensive renovation. It is home to dozens of houses<br />
flanked by ornate azulejos, the distinctive blue tiles brought as ships’ ballast<br />
from Portugal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A smaller<br />
number of mustard- or rust-coloured tiles were brought from France and<br />
the Netherlands, and sloping tiled roofs, elaborate shuttered windows, and<br />
wrought iron balconies are equally evocative portals of the past.<br />
With so much of historic and architectural importance, UNESCO has<br />
begun the long, slow process of reviving this area of cultural significance, and<br />
although there is much still to be achieved, even the roofless structures of Praia<br />
Grande retain uncommon beauty, such is the dramatic effect the large number<br />
Brazil<br />
Belém<br />
São Luís<br />
Salvador<br />
A distinctive blue-tiled façade in<br />
the historic quarter<br />
of azulejos inevitably have on the eye. Particularly<br />
striking examples can be found on Rua Portugal,<br />
where the Museu de Artes Visuais (or Museum of<br />
Visual Arts) has a whole floor devoted to them.<br />
Surrounding streets such as the narrow Rua Dialma<br />
Dutra and Rua Nazareth have plenty more.<br />
Nearby, the Domingos Vieira Filho Cultural<br />
Centre on Travessa do Giz and Casa do Maranhão<br />
on Rua do Trapiche are both great places to<br />
learn about Bumba meu Boi, Tambor de Mine,<br />
and other local cultural traditions, while Casa<br />
de Nozinho on Avenida Portugal displays local<br />
folk art in handcrafted wood. These venues often<br />
have informal tours in English, offered by local<br />
volunteer guides, with those at Casa do Maranhão<br />
being especially motivated to share their insights<br />
on aspects of the prevailing culture.<br />
The Museu Historico e Artistico (or Historical<br />
and Artistic Museum) of Maranhão on Rua do Sol<br />
is another place to get a sense of the city’s glory<br />
64 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
lazyllama/shutterstock.com<br />
days. It’s the preserved home of a wealthy family of the nineteenth century.<br />
In addition to many artefacts of the period, there is an original copy of Aluísio<br />
Azevedo’s abolitionist novel O Mulato, which is considered the first work of<br />
Naturalism in Brazilian literature, though Azevedo was primarily associated<br />
with a set of Romantic poets then based in São Luís. Their ranks included<br />
Antônio Gonçalves Dias, regarded as the National Poet of Brazil for his 1843<br />
opus “Canção do Exílio”, or “Song of Exile,” and Joaquim de Sousa Andrade,<br />
an abolitionist poet known professionally as Sousandrade, who wrote a Pan-<br />
American epic, “Guesa”, published in 1871. Andrade subsequently became the<br />
city’s first mayor after Brazil was declared a republic in 1889.<br />
That poetic tradition continues to the present, with important instances<br />
surfacing in the bitter years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, most notably in<br />
Ferreira Gullar’s “Poema Sujo” or “Dirty Poem”, an homage to resistance in<br />
São Luís, written in exile in 1975.<br />
My days in São Luís were typically spread among the cultural delights<br />
of the Praia Grande, exploring its azulejos, Art Deco palaces, and baroque<br />
churches, as well as the small crafts and food market, Casa Das Tulas<br />
(where you can find local dishes such as the caldeirada maranhense seafood<br />
stew, and an enigmatic soft drink labelled Guarana Jesus). Or I would<br />
nip across the Jose Sarney Bridge to the beaches of Calhau and Araçagy,<br />
passing through the administrative centre of<br />
the rapidly expanding “Cidade Nova” in the<br />
process. As Otávio Rodrigues explains, “The<br />
centro histórico is located in front of Baía de São<br />
Marcos (or Saint Mark’s Bay), where the Anil and<br />
Bacanga rivers meet; a bridge was constructed<br />
in 1970 to connect the city to the coastline, and<br />
what was a wild area of sparse, rustic houses<br />
became the ‘New City,’ where tall buildings and<br />
shopping malls pretend to exalt some modernity.<br />
Around all of that we have the residential<br />
neighbourhoods, where part of the city’s history<br />
was also written, and where we still can find<br />
traditional fishing and farming procedures,<br />
besides portions of original forests.”<br />
Catching an inevitably spectacular sunset on<br />
the beach or at a hilltop plaza overlooking the bay<br />
from the reviver is a marvellous way to end the<br />
day’s explorations. And once the sun goes down in<br />
São Luís, reggae time has certainly arrived.<br />
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 65
The São Luís skyline: old tiled roofs<br />
and skyscrapers in the distance<br />
Marco Paulo Bahia Diniz/shutterstock.com<br />
The story of reggae in São Luís is a long and complex one, spawned by<br />
the efforts of a few early record collectors during the 1970s, including<br />
Ademar Danilo, whose pioneering radio show helped to introduce reggae<br />
culture to the city <strong>—</strong> so much so that Danilo has been appointed the Reggae<br />
Museum’s first director. Merchant seamen and the operators of radiolas <strong>—</strong> as<br />
sound systems are locally known <strong>—</strong> also played important roles, with a range of<br />
resident characters all aiding the music’s dissemination and local identification.<br />
The city clearly retains one of the most unique reggae scenes in the world<br />
<strong>—</strong> hence the motivation behind the museum, which aims to “materialise the<br />
memories of a song that conveys messages of equality, peace, freedom, and<br />
love,” looking at the “yesterday, today, and tomorrow of reggae in Maranhão,<br />
Brazil, and the world,” according to the official opening statement.<br />
“Reggae is important in São Luís for a lot of different reasons,” Rodrigues<br />
says. “The reggae scene emerged here in the late 70s among some of Brazil’s<br />
poorest people, similar to how it developed in Jamaica: through competing<br />
sound systems, open-air dances, and specialist radio programmes. And<br />
although the music’s religious subject wasn’t absorbed, the social message and<br />
especially the romantic mood found a friendly territory in which to spread.<br />
“The scene got bigger and bigger throughout the 80s and 90s, building a<br />
cultural bridge between the two countries which more recently fed the rise<br />
of local studio production and superstars, pushing reggae music in different<br />
directions. So it’s easy to imagine what reggae did, and continues to do, for the<br />
people of São Luís’s self-esteem.”<br />
“In São Luís, one soon understands that reggae plays a profound role in the<br />
local economy,” adds Kavin D’Palraj, a musician from Chennai who wrote his<br />
doctoral dissertation on São Luís reggae. “It has affected political practices<br />
and outcomes, defines relationships between neighbourhoods and different<br />
socio-economic strata, and continues to stir passionate debate on the destiny<br />
of the city and its people.”<br />
Ultimately, Rodrigues feels that São Luís’s<br />
Reggae Museum is primarily concerned with<br />
local validation and the potential to increase the<br />
number of overseas visitors. “We’re talking about<br />
forty years in the timeline, which includes big<br />
and colourful sound systems, rare records, radio<br />
diffusion, dance crews, pioneers, DJs, and others<br />
that worked to get it going. So from this point of<br />
view, the museum will help maintain the history,<br />
honour a lot of local people, and evoke reggae’s<br />
relevance in the local culture.<br />
“On the other hand,” he adds, “São Luís is a<br />
touristic city with colonial architecture, beaches,<br />
and folkloric festivals, and reggae became an<br />
appeal for visitors here too. But the local scene<br />
is still authentic, with radiolas playing far in the<br />
outskirts or other places where tourists prefer not<br />
to go. For most of them, the so-called ‘Brazilian<br />
Jamaica’ is visible only on t-shirts and some<br />
red-gold-and-green things at the souvenir shops<br />
in the old town. So in this sense, a museum will<br />
contribute to keeping the reggae spirit alive and to<br />
broadening its appeal.” n<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines operates daily flights<br />
from destinations across the <strong>Caribbean</strong> to<br />
Miami and Paramaribo, with connections<br />
on other airlines to São Luís<br />
66 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
ENGAGE<br />
ESA/Stephane Corvaja<br />
68 Discover<br />
Next stop: space<br />
70<br />
On This Day<br />
Over the line<br />
3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . liftoff at Kourou’s Centre Spatial Guyanais
DISCOVER<br />
Next stop:<br />
space<br />
As space exploration grabs the attention of<br />
today’s entrepreneurs, few people know that<br />
one of the world’s key launch sites is located<br />
on the doorstep of the <strong>Caribbean</strong>, in French<br />
Guiana. The Centre Spatial Guyanais is essential<br />
to our future in space, writes Erline Andrews<br />
<strong>—</strong> but does it benefit ordinary Guianese?<br />
Photography by NASA/D Stover<br />
The James Webb Space<br />
Telescope, due to be sent into<br />
orbit next year, promises to<br />
help us learn more about the<br />
universe than we ever have<br />
before. A successor to the famed Hubble<br />
telescope, the JWST is one hundred times<br />
more powerful, and will be the biggest of<br />
its kind. Named after the influential former<br />
head of NASA, the JWST took decades to<br />
design, almost US$9 billion, and the effort<br />
of a multinational team of scientists. It is<br />
hoped the telescope’s sensitive infrared<br />
cameras will be able to detect and<br />
photograph galaxies, planets, and stars in<br />
the farthest reaches of the universe.<br />
And this extraordinary telescope <strong>—</strong><br />
plus other examples of the most cuttingedge<br />
space campaigns of coming years<br />
<strong>—</strong> will launch from what most people<br />
might find an unlikely place: the jungle<br />
of a sparsely populated and little known<br />
territory of the <strong>Caribbean</strong>.<br />
French Guiana, sandwiched between<br />
Suriname and Brazil, is not known for<br />
tourism <strong>—</strong> its shark-infested waters mean<br />
beaches aren’t a draw. It’s not known for<br />
any particular export, like bauxite from<br />
nearby Guyana. It’s not internationally<br />
known for any particular festival or event,<br />
like Carnival in its neighbour Trinidad and<br />
Tobago to the northwest.<br />
But the French overseas department<br />
<strong>—</strong> geographically in South America<br />
but culturally linked to France’s other<br />
<strong>Caribbean</strong> territories <strong>—</strong> is home to one of<br />
the world’s most significant launch sites<br />
for space missions.<br />
The Centre Spatial Guyanais (CSG)<br />
<strong>—</strong> known in English as the Guiana Space<br />
Centre <strong>—</strong> began operations in 1968 on the<br />
outskirts of the town of Kourou. It turns<br />
out a location still under the administration<br />
of France, with more area covered<br />
by forest than by cities or towns, was<br />
ideal to develop Europe’s extraterrestrial<br />
ambitions.<br />
French Guiana’s position near the<br />
equator means the earth’s rotation gives<br />
an extra boost to rockets, saving money<br />
because less fuel is needed. Proximity<br />
to the ocean and large swaths of uninhabited<br />
land remove the concern that<br />
falling equipment could land on people or<br />
buildings below. The area is not prone to<br />
earthquakes or hurricanes.<br />
The CSG’s first launch took place on<br />
the night of 24 December, 1968, four years<br />
after the French government decided<br />
to establish it, explains director Didier<br />
Faivre. “It was a very small launcher,”<br />
he says. “But you have to imagine that<br />
nothing existed at this time. No roads, no<br />
harbour . . .<br />
“To decide at the highest level in<br />
France to put here in a remote country an<br />
important strategic asset of French policy<br />
was a really bold decision,” Faivre adds.<br />
Over the past five decades, Kourou<br />
has grown from a coastal outpost<br />
to a thriving commercial centre,<br />
home to the CSG’s employees. British<br />
author Alain de Botton, writing for the<br />
UK Independent, gave a sense of the stark<br />
difference between the space centre and its<br />
surroundings after he visited in 2009:<br />
“There were three control centres, a<br />
generating plant, barracks for a division<br />
of the Foreign Legion, two swimming<br />
pools, and a restaurant specialising in<br />
the cuisine of the Languedoc,” he wrote.<br />
“These were scattered across hectares of<br />
marsh and jungle, generating bewildering<br />
contrasts for visitors who might walk out<br />
of a rocket-nozzle-actuator building and a<br />
moment later find themselves in a section<br />
of rainforest sheltering round-eared bats<br />
and white-eyed parakeets, before arriving<br />
at a propulsion facility whose corridors<br />
were lined with Evian dispensers and<br />
portraits of senior managers.”<br />
The CSG is administered and funded<br />
by the ESA, Europe’s NASA equivalent,<br />
in partnership with the French space<br />
agency CNES and private company<br />
Arianespace. Its average eleven launches<br />
each year are used mainly to send satellites<br />
into space for commercial and governmental<br />
purposes, like communication<br />
and national defence. The centre has<br />
launched more than half of the world’s<br />
commercial satellites.<br />
But it has also been responsible for<br />
missions investigating what could help us<br />
or harm us beyond earth’s atmosphere. All<br />
five automated transfer vehicles or cargo<br />
ships that were sent to the International<br />
Space Station between 2008 and 2014<br />
launched from French Guiana. Not only<br />
did the ships take supplies to the station,<br />
which has a crew that conducts a variety<br />
68 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
of research <strong>—</strong> they were also monitored<br />
to help improve spacecraft design.<br />
The Gaia, which cost 740 million<br />
euros and has been called “the most<br />
sophisticated space telescope ever built<br />
by Europe,” was launched from Kourou in<br />
2013. Its purpose is to map the Milky Way,<br />
locating a billion stars, one per cent of the<br />
number in the galaxy <strong>—</strong> more than have<br />
been attempted before.<br />
Over the next few years, the CSG will<br />
be used to execute missions important<br />
not only for Europe but for the rest of the<br />
world. The JWST launch, the most highly<br />
anticipated, is set for 2019. Before that, in<br />
October, Kourou should see off Europe’s<br />
first attempt to orbit Mercury. It’s the<br />
planet closest to the sun, which makes<br />
this a technologically challenging mission,<br />
costing 1.65 billion euros. It’s taken<br />
almost two decades to develop the two<br />
spacecraft, called orbiters, that will take<br />
seven years to get to their destination.<br />
And a new launch site is being built<br />
for a new rocket, the Ariane 6, which has<br />
been designed with efficiency in mind,<br />
to help combat competition from Elon<br />
Musk’s Space X <strong>—</strong> which has shaken up<br />
the space exploration industry by being<br />
the first to reuse a rocket.<br />
For all its importance to Europe’s<br />
space ambitions, the centre has not<br />
Decades in the making,<br />
the James Webb Space<br />
Telescope, due to be<br />
launched from Kourou, will<br />
change the way scientists<br />
understand our galaxy<br />
been doing nearly as much for French<br />
Guiana. Space technology is developed<br />
and constructed in Europe and North<br />
America, then shipped to Guiana, so it’s<br />
not adding to the skills development of<br />
average Guianese.<br />
French Guiana made international<br />
headlines early last year, when a fiveweek<br />
labour strike <strong>—</strong> which saw protesters<br />
blocking roadways <strong>—</strong> forced the<br />
delay of three space missions, costing<br />
private companies and countries across<br />
the world millions of dollars. Part of the<br />
motivation for the strike was the feeling<br />
that not enough labour union members<br />
were being hired for the construction of<br />
the new launch site.<br />
In contrast to the value of the CSG,<br />
French Guiana is the second poorest of<br />
France’s overseas departments. About<br />
twenty per cent of the residents are<br />
unemployed, and close to forty per cent<br />
live in poverty. The crime rate and cost<br />
of living are high, and many households<br />
don’t have electricity or running water.<br />
The education system is undeveloped,<br />
with many schools dilapidated, and half<br />
of Guianese failing to earn a diploma.<br />
There are only two main roads connecting<br />
the main towns along the coast. In the<br />
interior, people still travel by canoe.<br />
A similar strike erupted in 2008 over<br />
high fuel prices. It ended after eleven<br />
days, when the government agreed to a<br />
price reduction. Then in 2011 a rocket<br />
launch was delayed for twenty-four hours<br />
because of a strike by radar tracking<br />
operators.<br />
“We don’t have access to work,<br />
medical care, or education,” said Gauthier<br />
Horth, an opposition politician interviewed<br />
by France 24 magazine during last<br />
year’s strike. “We are not equal to other<br />
French citizens.”<br />
To resolve the strike, the French<br />
government agreed in writing to invest<br />
2.1 billion euros in health care, education,<br />
business development, and crime reduction<br />
in Guiana. This is in addition to a<br />
promised 1.1 billion euros in aid.<br />
It remains to be seen how much things<br />
will improve in French Guiana, though<br />
the protesters know the French government<br />
has reason to take better care of the<br />
welfare of Guianese: our future in space<br />
might actually depend on it. n<br />
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 69
on this day<br />
Over<br />
the line<br />
A century ago, in the final months of the<br />
First World War, a Barbadian-British soldier<br />
named Walter Tull was killed in battle. He<br />
was one of many thousands of casualties,<br />
but he was also unique, as James Ferguson<br />
writes: Tull was the first-ever black officer in<br />
the race-conscious British Army<br />
Illustration by Rohan Mitchell<br />
The British cemetery near<br />
the northern French village<br />
of Favreuil contains<br />
401 graves, the last<br />
resting places of British<br />
troops and a handful of<br />
Commonwealth soldiers and Germans<br />
killed in the First World War. Its rows of<br />
tombstones, immaculately tended and<br />
surrounded by tall poplars, stand secluded<br />
by a low wall from the surrounding muddy<br />
fields and scattered villages. Nearby, lorries<br />
thunder along the motorway that links<br />
Lille to Paris. The names of the dead are<br />
recorded, and sometimes their ages, yet<br />
there is one name of a man who was killed<br />
at Favreuil that is missing: Second Lieutenant<br />
Walter Tull. His body was never<br />
recovered, and we must assume that he<br />
lies under what war poet Edmund Blunden<br />
evocatively called the “Flanders clay.”<br />
Like many others, Tull died tragically<br />
young <strong>—</strong> he was twenty-nine <strong>—</strong> in a<br />
terrible conflict that was meant to end all<br />
wars. Yet his death <strong>—</strong> a century ago, on 25<br />
<strong>March</strong>, 1918 <strong>—</strong> also serves to emphasise<br />
the exceptional strengths of a man who<br />
not only rose from the humblest of backgrounds<br />
but also shrugged off prejudice<br />
and abuse to set two significant records.<br />
Walter Tull was the first mixedheritage<br />
professional outfield footballer<br />
to play in England’s First Division (Arthur<br />
Wharton, a goalkeeper born in Ghana,<br />
preceded him in the 1880s). This he<br />
achieved despite losing his father <strong>—</strong> a carpenter<br />
from Barbados <strong>—</strong> and his mother<br />
by the age of nine. Walter and his brother<br />
Edward were sent from their home town<br />
of Folkestone to the National Children’s<br />
Home orphanage in London’s Bethnal<br />
Green. The Methodist orphanage had a<br />
football team, and it soon became evident<br />
that Walter had exceptional talent as what<br />
we would nowadays call a midfielder.<br />
Edward’s interests lay elsewhere, and he<br />
became the first mixed-heritage dentist to<br />
practise in Britain.<br />
After leaving school at fourteen, Tull<br />
was apprenticed to a printing firm, but<br />
he continued playing football and was<br />
eventually offered a trial and accepted by<br />
Clapton, at the time one of Britain’s preeminent<br />
amateur clubs. In the 1908–09<br />
season, when Tull was regularly selected,<br />
Clapton won the Amateur Cup. His prowess<br />
did not escape the attention of bigger,<br />
professional clubs, and at the end of that<br />
season he was snapped up by Tottenham<br />
Hotspur with a £10 signing-on fee and a<br />
weekly wage of £4.<br />
Recently promoted Spurs got off to a<br />
bad start in the 1909–10 season, but Tull’s<br />
performance against Manchester United<br />
caught the eye of a Daily Chronicle journalist:<br />
“Tull’s display on Saturday must have<br />
astounded everyone who saw it. Such perfect<br />
coolness, such judicious waiting for a<br />
fraction of a second in order to get a pass in<br />
not before a defender has worked to a false<br />
position, and such accuracy of strength in<br />
passing I have not seen for a long time.”<br />
But something bad was soon to happen.<br />
On 9 October, 1909, during an away<br />
game at Bristol City, Tull was subjected<br />
to sustained and vicious racial abuse.<br />
A journalist reported: “A section of the<br />
spectators made a cowardly attack upon<br />
him in language lower than Billingsgate<br />
. . . Let me tell these Bristol hooligans<br />
that . . . in point of ability, if not in actual<br />
achievement, Tull was the best forward<br />
on the field.” After seven games, he was<br />
suddenly dropped from the first team. His<br />
biographer, Phil Vasili, speculates that<br />
Spurs’ directors were unnerved by “social<br />
pressures” <strong>—</strong> i.e. racism <strong>—</strong> and preferred<br />
to avoid further controversy.<br />
With little prospect of first team football,<br />
Tull moved to Southern League club<br />
Northampton Town, then managed by fellow<br />
Methodist Herbert Chapman, later to<br />
become an Arsenal management legend.<br />
Tull played 110 games for Northampton,<br />
mostly as a half back, was considered by<br />
the Northampton Echo as “in the front-rank<br />
of class players in this position,” and was<br />
reportedly on the verge of signing for<br />
Celtic when war was declared.<br />
Tull was the first of the Northampton<br />
players to enlist, joining the so-called<br />
Football Battalion, the 17th Battalion<br />
of the Middlesex Regiment. He was<br />
soon identified as an exceptional soldier<br />
70 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
Tull’s commanding<br />
officer wrote: “Now he<br />
has paid the supreme<br />
sacrifice; the Battalion<br />
and Company have<br />
lost a faithful officer;<br />
personally I have lost a<br />
friend”<br />
and was rapidly elevated to the rank of<br />
sergeant. Posted to northern France in<br />
November 1915, he wrote to Edward: “It<br />
is a very monotonous life out here when<br />
one is supposed to be resting and most<br />
of the boys prefer the excitement of the<br />
trenches.” But this enthusiasm would<br />
soon be tempered when he suffered from<br />
shellshock and trench fever and was<br />
repatriated to convalesce.<br />
It was at this point that Tull scored a<br />
second first. Military regulations, in<br />
the spirit of the times, explicitly stated<br />
that “any negro or person of colour” was<br />
barred from achieving officer status. As<br />
Vasili points out in his book Colouring<br />
Over the White Line, the Army’s top brass<br />
“argued that white soldiers would not<br />
accept orders issued by men of colour and<br />
on no account should black soldiers serve<br />
on the front line.” Yet, almost inexplicably,<br />
Tull was not returned directly to the<br />
trenches, but was sent to Scotland to train<br />
as an officer. In May 1917 he was commissioned<br />
as a lieutenant.<br />
When he was dispatched to the Italian<br />
front, it was <strong>—</strong> as the excellent Spartacus<br />
Educational website’s article on Tull<br />
remarks <strong>—</strong> “an historic occasion because<br />
[he] was the first ever black officer in<br />
the British Army.” At the Battle of Piave<br />
in January 1918 he was commended in<br />
dispatches for his “gallantry and coolness,”<br />
providing inspiration to the men<br />
he led back to safety. Several weeks later,<br />
he was to be moved back to France to<br />
take part in the British offensive against<br />
German lines.<br />
In the terrible churned-up mud of<br />
Favreuil, Tull was ordered to lead his<br />
troops on an attack on the enemy<br />
trenches. On 25 <strong>March</strong>, as his<br />
party entered No-Man’s-Land, he<br />
was hit in the head by a German<br />
bullet and died instantly. Such was<br />
the ferocity of the fighting that his men,<br />
despite several attempts under machine<br />
gun fire, failed to recover his body. It was<br />
never found.<br />
In his brief life, the grandson of a<br />
plantation slave in Barbados had become<br />
both a path-breaking sportsman and,<br />
unprecedentedly, an officer in the (then)<br />
highly colour-conscious British Army. On<br />
17 <strong>April</strong>, Tull’s commanding officer wrote<br />
to Edward: “Now he has paid the supreme<br />
sacrifice; the Battalion and Company<br />
have lost a faithful officer; personally I<br />
have lost a friend. Can I say more, except<br />
that I hope that those who remain may be<br />
true and faithful as he.”<br />
Today, Walter Tull is commemorated<br />
by a memorial at Northampton Town’s<br />
stadium, a statue in Northampton Guildhall,<br />
and a blue plaque on the house where<br />
he lived during his Tottenham days. A<br />
series of books, articles, and a play have<br />
kept his memory alive since 2000, and<br />
in 2014 the Royal Mint announced the<br />
release of a commemorative £5 coin<br />
featuring Lieutenant Tull. A campaign for<br />
a posthumous Military Cross, however,<br />
has met with no success. Poignantly, too,<br />
he possesses no headstone in Favreuil’s<br />
tranquil cemetery, where many of those<br />
who fought alongside him lie. n<br />
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 71
puzzles<br />
1 2 3 4 5 6<br />
CARIBBEAN CROSSWORD<br />
7 8<br />
Across<br />
7 Region of Australia hosting the Commonwealth<br />
Games [4,5]<br />
8 Cut into cubes [5]<br />
10 Unfeeling [5]<br />
11 Games event [9]<br />
12 Bathroom fixture [5]<br />
13 Antigua Sailing Week is one of these [7]<br />
16 Where planes fly [8]<br />
18 France’s continent [6]<br />
19 Havana’s sea promenade [7]<br />
21 Oak’s fruit [5]<br />
24 He takes the law into his own hands [10]<br />
25 Your mother’s brother [5]<br />
27 Underlings [5]<br />
28 The ESA has one in Kourou [5,4]<br />
Down<br />
1 Slopes at mountain base [9]<br />
2 Guidance [6]<br />
3 Female cattle [3]<br />
4 These flies transmit sleeping sickness [6]<br />
5 Not very democratic [8]<br />
6 Retrieve [5]<br />
9 Happy [7]<br />
14 Number [7]<br />
15 Hand-held fireworks [9]<br />
10 11<br />
12 13<br />
17 Modern day Romans [8]<br />
20 Cephalopods [6]<br />
22 Hors d’oeuvre [6]<br />
23 Put in a folder [5]<br />
26 Solid water [5]<br />
9<br />
14 15<br />
16 17 18<br />
23<br />
19 20 21 22<br />
24 25<br />
27 28<br />
26<br />
SPOT THE DIFFERENCE<br />
by Gregory St Bernard<br />
There are 13 differences between these two pictures. How many can you spot?<br />
Spot the Difference answers<br />
Rainbow in background is repositioned; girl on left’s mouth is different; nozzle of water gun is longer; girl at right’s bracelet is removed;<br />
girl on left’s trousers are replaced with a skirt; girl at centre has shorter hair; bead necklace is added to neck of girl at centre; blue dye spray<br />
from squeeze bottle of girl at centre is repositioned; blue dye spray bottle is smaller; shorts of girl in centre are replaced with track pants;<br />
sunglasses are added to boy at right; boy at right’s blue t-shirt is replaced with a pink one; drum design is different<br />
72 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM
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by www.sudoku-puzzle.net<br />
Fill the empty square with numbers<br />
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Sudoku 9x9 - Puzzle 5 of 5 - Easy<br />
Easy 9x9 sudoku puzzle<br />
5 6 7<br />
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2 5<br />
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If the puzzle you want to do has<br />
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4 9 3 5 7<br />
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1 4 6 2 3 5<br />
3 5 2 1 4 6<br />
8 3 5 2 4 6 7 9 1<br />
9 7 6 3 5 1 8 4 2<br />
1 4 2 9 8 7 6 5 3<br />
G R A N D A N S E S A M E O S<br />
E O N S 28 S P A C E P O R T<br />
U N O V E L G R A N D S O N O<br />
G<br />
7<br />
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17<br />
L T I T U D E 18 E U R O P E<br />
S T M D A<br />
M<br />
19<br />
A L E C 20 O N A<br />
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L R C A K<br />
F<br />
23<br />
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27<br />
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<strong>Caribbean</strong> Airlines<br />
CARIBBEAN<br />
Trinidad Head Office<br />
Airport: Piarco International<br />
Reservations & information:<br />
+ 868 625 7200 (local)<br />
Ticket offices: Mezzanine Level, The Parkade,<br />
Corner of Queen and Richmond Streets,<br />
Port-of-Spain;<br />
Golden Grove Road, Piarco;<br />
Carlton Centre, San Fernando<br />
Baggage: + 868 669 3000 Ext 7513/4<br />
Antigua<br />
Airport: VC Bird International<br />
Reservations & information:<br />
+ 800 744 2225 (toll free)<br />
Ticketing: VC Bird International Airport<br />
Hours: Mon – Fri 8 am – 4 pm<br />
Baggage: + 268-480-5705 Tues, Thurs, Fri, Sun,<br />
or + 268 462 0528 Mon, Wed, Sat.<br />
Hours: Mon – Fri 4 am – 10 pm<br />
Barbados<br />
Airport: Grantley Adams International<br />
Reservations & information: 1 246 429 5929 /<br />
1 800 744 2225 (toll free)<br />
City Ticket Office: 1st Floor Norman Centre Building,<br />
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Cuba (Havana)<br />
Airport: José Martí International<br />
Reservations and baggage: +1 800 920 4225<br />
Ticket office: Commercial Take Off<br />
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Airport: Maurice Bishop International<br />
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Reservations & information: + 800 523 5585 (International);<br />
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City Ticket Office: 128 Old Hope Road, Kingston 6<br />
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Across the World<br />
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Airport: Princess Juliana International<br />
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Ticket office: PJIA Departure Concourse<br />
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737 onboard Entertainment <strong>—</strong> MARCH/APRIL<br />
Northbound<br />
Southbound<br />
M A R C H<br />
Justice League<br />
Batman recruits a league of metahuman heroes <strong>—</strong> Wonder<br />
Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg, and The Flash <strong>—</strong> but may be too<br />
late to save the planet from a new enemy.<br />
Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Henry Cavill • director: Zack Snyder • action,<br />
adventure • PG-13 • 119 minutes<br />
Earth: One Amazing Day<br />
For one day, we track the sun from mountains to islands to<br />
exotic jungles. See how every day is filled with more wonders<br />
than you can imagine.<br />
Robert Redford, Jackie Chan • directors: Lixin Fan, Richard Dale • family,<br />
documentary • G • 95 minutes<br />
Northbound<br />
Southbound<br />
A P R I L<br />
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle<br />
Discovering an old video game, four teenagers are sucked into<br />
the world of Jumanji, where they will have to play the game or<br />
be stuck in it forever.<br />
Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart • director: Jake Kasdan • action,<br />
adventure • PG-13 • 119 minutes<br />
Coco<br />
Aspiring musician Miguel teams up with charming trickster<br />
Héctor on an extraordinary journey through the Land of the<br />
Dead, to unlock the story behind Miguel’s family history.<br />
Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt • director: Lee<br />
Unkrich • family, adventure • PG-13 • 105 minutes<br />
Audio Channels<br />
Channel 5 • The Hits<br />
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Channel 7 • Concert Hall<br />
Channel 8 • East Indian Fusion<br />
Channel 9 • Irie Vibes<br />
Channel 10 • Jazz Sessions<br />
Channel 11 • Kaiso Kaiso<br />
Channel 12 • Steelband Jamboree
parting shot<br />
Maya<br />
Coast<br />
Looking down to the <strong>Caribbean</strong> Sea from<br />
forty-foot cliffs, the ruined city of Tulum<br />
in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula was one of<br />
the last strongholds of the Maya. Inhabited<br />
until the sixteenth century, Tulum was<br />
rediscovered in the nineteenth and restored<br />
in the twentieth. Long after it was built,<br />
the Temple of Winds still guards Tulum’s<br />
seaward approach.<br />
Photography by Ann Stover/Shutterstock.com<br />
80 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM