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Caribbean Beat — March/April 2018 (#150)

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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 />

express the Swift’s essence<br />

of being “made to drive.”<br />

An overwhelming presence generated<br />

by a low, short, and wide stance. The<br />

manifestation of overflowing dynamism<br />

and muscular lines. Styling that<br />

creates a sensation of movement, even<br />

at rest, that accelerates the driver’s<br />

emotions.<br />

It’s a bold evolution of the Swift’s DNA.<br />

Completely new styling, a performanceenhancing<br />

lightweight chassis and advanced<br />

safety technologies. Swift Chief<br />

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 />

the 1.2-litre, 16-valve engine. The<br />

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direct-response steering, while<br />

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ride. Reinvigorated power units ensure<br />

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Suzuki’s customary excellent fuel<br />

economy.<br />

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


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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 />

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30 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15<br />

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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 />

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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 />

30 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15<br />

30<br />

14 15<br />

31<br />

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31<br />

CARIBBEAN BEAT-HALF PAGE2FAW.pdf 1 1/23/18 12:28 PM<br />

C<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 />

Villas Are Us<br />

Mahi Mahi & Flamboyant<br />

Luciana<br />

Casa La Mancha<br />

We specialize in seaside villa rentals, so call to let us<br />

make your sandy dreams come true!<br />

Tel: (868) 481-5986 / 236-5190<br />

Gillian@TobagoVillasAreUs.com<br />

www.tobagovillasareus.com<br />

a Tobago time...for real<br />

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 />

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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


WORD SEARCH<br />

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battle<br />

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bronze<br />

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<strong>Caribbean</strong> <strong>Beat</strong> Magazine<br />

<strong>Caribbean</strong> <strong>Beat</strong> Magazine<br />

Sudoku<br />

by www.sudoku-puzzle.net<br />

Fill the empty square with numbers<br />

from 1 to 9 so that each row, each<br />

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all of the numbers from 1 to 9. For<br />

the mini sudoku use numbers from<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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1 2 9 6 3<br />

6 9 4 3<br />

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9 7 6 8<br />

Sudoku 6x6 - Puzzle 2 of 5 - Easy<br />

Easy 6x6 mini sudoku puzzle<br />

2 5<br />

5 2 1 6<br />

4 1<br />

5<br />

If the puzzle you want to do has<br />

already been filled in, just ask your<br />

flight attendant for a new copy of the<br />

magazine!<br />

4 9 3 5 7<br />

6 7 9 2<br />

3 4 1<br />

www.sudoku-puzzles.net<br />

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www.sudoku-puzzles.net<br />

www.sudoku-puzzle.net<br />

Solutions<br />

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Word Search<br />

D S I E E S<br />

Sudoku<br />

Mini Sudoku<br />

Sudoku 6x6 - Solution 2 of 5 - Easy<br />

Sudoku 9x9 - Solution 5 of 5 - Easy<br />

1 4 6 2 3 5<br />

3 5 2 1 4 6<br />

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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 />

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www.sudoku-puzzles.net<br />

5 6 1 8 7 9 3 2 4<br />

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1<br />

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www.sudoku-puzzles.net<br />

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O V W E 9 P C T<br />

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26<br />

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B<br />

12<br />

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16<br />

H C S E A H<br />

I D E T 13 R E G A T T A<br />

L 14 N<br />

S O 15<br />

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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 />

21 C<br />

22 O R N<br />

L R C A K<br />

F<br />

23<br />

P<br />

27<br />

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H G L B O B A T T L E A O E U<br />

G I T R M F P E A K V D O G Y<br />

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K O U R O U B O B M A R L E Y<br />

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H R D E O C O Z R E T R E A T<br />

<strong>Caribbean</strong> <strong>Beat</strong> Magazine<br />

WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 73<br />

<strong>Caribbean</strong> <strong>Beat</strong> Magazine


79% (2017 year-to-date: 10 December)


<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 />

Broad Street, Bridgetown, Barbados<br />

Ticket office hours: 6 am – 10 am & 11 am –<br />

7 pm daily<br />

Flight Information: + 1 800 744 2225<br />

Baggage: + 1 246 428 1650/1 or + 1 246 428 7101<br />

ext. 4628<br />

Cuba (Havana)<br />

Airport: José Martí International<br />

Reservations and baggage: +1 800 920 4225<br />

Ticket office: Commercial Take Off<br />

Calle 23 No. 113, Esquina A Ovedado<br />

Plaza de la Revolución<br />

Havana, Cuba<br />

Grenada<br />

Airport: Maurice Bishop International<br />

Reservations & Information:<br />

1 800 744 2225 (toll free)<br />

Ticketing: Maurice Bishop International Main<br />

Terminal<br />

Baggage: + 473 439 0681<br />

Jamaica (Kingston)<br />

Airport: Norman Manley International<br />

Reservations & information: + 800 523 5585 (International);<br />

1 888 359 2475 (Local)<br />

City Ticket Office: 128 Old Hope Road, Kingston 6<br />

Hours: Mon-Fri 7.30 am – 5.30 pm,<br />

Saturdays 10 am – 4 pm<br />

Airport Ticket Office: Norman Manley Airport<br />

Counter #1<br />

Hours: 3.30 am – 8 pm daily<br />

Baggage: + 876 924 8500<br />

Jamaica (Montego Bay)<br />

Airport: Sangster International<br />

Reservations & information:<br />

/<br />

Across the World<br />

+ 800 744 2225 (toll free)<br />

Ticketing at check-in counter:<br />

8.30 am – 6 pm daily<br />

Baggage: + 876 363 6433<br />

Nassau<br />

Airport: Lynden Pindling International<br />

Terminal: Concourse 2<br />

Reservations & information: + 1 242 377 3300<br />

(local)<br />

Airport Ticket Office: Terminal A-East Departure<br />

Hours: Flight days – Sat, Mon, Thurs 10 am – 4 pm<br />

Non-flight days – Tues, Wed, Fri 10 am – 4 pm<br />

Flight Information: + 1 242 377 3300 (local)<br />

Baggage: + 1 242 377 7035 Ext 255<br />

9 am – 5 pm daily<br />

St Maarten<br />

Airport: Princess Juliana International<br />

Reservations & information: + 1721 546 7660/7661<br />

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Ticket office: PJIA Departure Concourse<br />

Baggage: + 1721 546 7660/3<br />

Hours: Mon – Fri 9 am – 5 pm / Sat 9 am – 6 pm<br />

St Lucia<br />

Airport: George F L Charles<br />

Reservations & information: 1 800 744 2225<br />

Ticket office: George F.L. Charles Airport<br />

Ticket office hours: 10 am – 4 pm<br />

Baggage contact number: 1 758 452 2789<br />

or 1 758 451 7269<br />

St Vincent and the Grenadines<br />

Airport: Argyle International<br />

Reservations & information: + 800 744 2225<br />

Ticketing: Argyle International Airport (during flight<br />

check-in ONLY)<br />

Tobago<br />

Airport: ANR Robinson International<br />

Reservations & information: + 868 660 7200 (local)<br />

Ticket office: ANR Robinson International Airport<br />

Baggage: + 639 0595 / 631 8023<br />

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NORTH AMERICA<br />

Fort Lauderdale<br />

Airport: Hollywood Fort Lauderdale International<br />

Reservations & information: + 800 920 4225<br />

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Ticketing: Terminal 4 – departures level (during<br />

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Miami<br />

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Reservations & information: + 800 920 4225<br />

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Ticketing: South Terminal J – departures level (during<br />

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Orlando<br />

Airport: Orlando International<br />

Reservations & information:<br />

+ 800 920 4225 (toll free)<br />

Ticketing: Terminal A – departures level<br />

(during flight check-in ONLY – Mon/Fri 11:30 am<br />

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New York<br />

Airport: John F Kennedy International<br />

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Ticketing: Concourse B, Terminal 4, JFK<br />

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Toronto<br />

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Ticket office: Terminal 3<br />

Ticketing available daily at check-in counters<br />

422 and 423. Available 3 hours prior to<br />

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Baggage: + 905 672 9991<br />

SOUTH AMERICA<br />

Caracas<br />

Airport: Simón Bolívar International<br />

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+ 58 212 3552880<br />

Ticketing: Simón Bolívar International Level 2 –<br />

East Sector<br />

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Caracas, Distrito Capital<br />

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Guyana<br />

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Ticket Office: Paramaribo Express, N.V. Wagenwegstraat<br />

36, Paramaribo<br />

Baggage: + 597 325 437


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 />

Channel 6 • Soft Hits<br />

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

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