Caribbean Beat — March/April 2018 (#150)

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Contents
No. 150 March/April 2018
54
24
EMBARK
17 Datebook
Events around the Caribbean in
March and April, from Guyana’s
Easter Regatta to Carnival in Jamaica
and St Patrick’s Day in Montserrat
24 Word of Mouth
The bright colours of Guyana’s
Phagwah celebrations mingle into a
shade of unity, and Sint Maarten’s
annual Carnival defies the ravages of
Hurricane Irma
28 the game
A gold repeat?
As the Commonwealth Games open
in Australia’s Gold Coast, can T&T’s
4x400 relay team, the reigning world
champions, repeat their victory?
Kwame Laurence reports
30 Bookshelf, playlist, and
screenshots
This month’s reading, listening, and
film-watching picks
36 Cookup
“That right there, that’s
Africa”
When US chef Ben Dennis arrived in
Tobago, he was astonished to find
traditional recipes that recall those of
his Gullah ancestors. He talks history
and heritage with Franka Philip
IMMERSE
40 closeup
The puzzle of “home”
Born in Trinidad, brought up
in Canada, writer André Alexis
is a “Nowherian” — and that
complicated identity, along with his
passion for exploring big ideas, drives
his philosophical and deeply literary
novels. A recent string of awards has
raised his international profile, but
as Donna Yawching learns, it was no
overnight success for one of the most
original writers in both Caribbean
and Canadian literature
46 own words
“I’m not trying to fill his
shoes”
Twenty-one-year-old Skip Marley,
grandson of the legendary Bob, on
growing up in Jamaica’s musical royal
family, his hopes for stardom, and
the message of his songs, for his own
and every other generation — as told
to Nazma Muller
48 showcase
Miriam
“Every Saturday is the same story.”
A tale of a woman and her four
persistent suitors — fiction by
Michelene Adams
ARRIVE
54 Destination
Havana hello
Caribbean Airlines’ newest
destination is one of the region’s —
and the world’s — most iconic cities.
From music to revolutionary history,
baroque architecture to pastel-hued
classic cars, from the Malecón to the
bar where mojitos were (supposedly)
invented — welcome to Havana, now
serviced by two direct flights from
Port of Spain each week
62 Travellers’ tales
Reggae city
Founded in 1612 on Brazil’s Atlantic
coast, the city of São Luís do
Maranhão is a treasurehouse of
historic achitecture, encrusted with
ornate blue tiles, and has a long
tradition of avant-garde poets. It’s
also — as unlikely as it sounds — a
hotbed of reggae music. David Katz
pays a visit, to investigate how this
city more than two thousand miles
from Kingston has adopted reggae
as its very own, with a new museum
celebrating the cultural link
8 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

CaribbeanBeat
An MEP publication
Editor Nicholas Laughlin
General manager Halcyon Salazar
Design artists Kevon Webster & Bridget van Dongen
Web editor Caroline Taylor
Editorial assistant Shelly-Ann Inniss
62
Business Development Manager,
Tobago and International
Evelyn Chung
T: (868) 684 4409
E: evelyn@meppublishers.com
Business Development
Representative, Trinidad
Mark-Jason Ramesar
T: (868) 775 6110
E: mark@meppublishers.com
ENGAGE
68 discover
Next stop: space
As more and more entrepreneurs look
towards space exploration, it’s still
almost unknown outside the industry
that one of the world’s busiest
launch sites is on the doorstep of the
Caribbean. Erline Andrews learns
how French Guiana’s half-century-old
spaceport is essential to our future
exploring the galaxy
Barbados Sales Representative
Shelly-Ann Inniss
T: (246) 232 5517
E: shelly@meppublishers.com
Media & Editorial Projects Ltd.
6 Prospect Avenue, Maraval, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
T: (868) 622 3821/5813/6138 • F: (868) 628 0639
E: caribbean-beat@meppublishers.com
Website: www.meppublishers.com
70on this day
Over the line
A century ago, as the First World War
drew to a close, a Barbadian-British
man named Walter Tull was killed on
the battlefield. He was one of many
thousands dead in the “Flanders clay,”
but also unique: as James Ferguson
writes, Lieutenant Tull was the first
officer of colour ever appointed in
the British Army, in defiance of race
prejudice
72 puzzles
Enjoy our crossword, sudoku, and
other brain-teasers!
Read and save issues of Caribbean Beat on your smartphone,
tablet, computer, and favourite digital devices!
Printed by Solo Printing Inc., Miami, Florida
Caribbean Beat is published six times a year for Caribbean Airlines by Media & Editorial Projects Ltd. It is also available on
subscription. Copyright © Caribbean Airlines 2018. All rights reserved. ISSN 1680–6158. No part of this magazine may be
reproduced in any form whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher. MEP accepts no responsibility for
content supplied by our advertisers. The views of the advertisers are theirs and do not represent MEP in any way.
Website: www.caribbean-airlines.com
80 parting shot
On Mexico’s Mayan Riviera, the
ruined city of Tulum keeps watch
over the Caribbean Sea, centuries
after it was abandoned
The Caribbean Airlines logo shows a hummingbird in flight. Native to the Caribbean, the hummingbird represents
flight, travel, vibrancy, and colour. It encompasses the spirit of both the region and Caribbean Airlines.
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 9

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Cover Two classics of Old
Havana: a vintage car
parked beside a baroque
colonial-era building
Photo Delpixart/iStock.com
This issue’s contributors include:
Michelene Adams (“Miriam”, page 48) returned
to Trinidad in 2010 after slowly travelling steadily
south from Canada to the Bahamas to Grenada over
a period of twenty-seven years. She teaches English
at the Centre for Education Programmes, University
of Trinidad and Tobago.
Erline Andrews (“Next stop: space”, page 68) is
an award-winning Trinidadian journalist. She is
a regular contributor to Caribbean Beat and her
work has also appeared in other publications in T&T
and the US, including the Chicago Tribune and the
Christian Science Monitor.
Born in San Francisco, resident in London, and
a frequent visitor to the Caribbean, David Katz
(“Reggae city”, page 62) is the author of three
books exploring Jamaican music and culture.
Nazma Muller (“I’m not trying to fill his shoes”,
page 46) is a Trinidad-born, Jamaica-obsessed writer
who has worked in newsrooms in both countries, as
well as in the UK.
Subraj Singh (“A unity of colour”, page 24) is a
writer from Guyana. In 2015, he won the Guyana
Prize for Literature for his manuscript Rebelle and
Other Stories. He was a writer-in-residence at the
University of Iowa as part of the 2017 International
Writing Programme. His writings have appeared in
the Guyana Arts Journal, A World of Prose for CSEC,
and the Guyana Chronicle.
Donna Yawching (“The puzzle of ‘home’”, page
40) is a journalist and longtime contributor to
Caribbean Beat. Born in Trinidad, she is based in
Toronto, and has lived on several continents and
travelled widely.
Crown Point, Tobago
Casino/Bar: 868 631-0044/0500
Jade Cafe: 868 6398361
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 11

A MESSAGE From OUR CEO
Dear Caribbean Airlines passengers,
My earliest memories of Carnival go back to
my childhood, when my mother would take
me to Port of Spain to watch the parade
of the bands. The colours and design of
the costumes, and the sheer delight of the
masqueraders as they immersed themselves
in the festival have stayed ingrained in my mind. I also
recall the happiness I felt when the masqueraders would part
with their headpieces and standards. I would hold on to those
keepsakes and reflect on them for weeks after Carnival, as
tangible reminders of the ingenuity and magnificence of the
festival, and I looked forward with joyful anticipation to seeing
it all again the next year.
For more than a decade, Caribbean Airlines has flown
people to Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago and throughout the
region. Masqueraders return year after year, bringing friends
to share their nostalgic experience of one of the world’s best
known events. This year, Trinidad and Tobago Carnival took
place on 12 and 13 February, and through our partnership
with the country’s National Carnival Commission, Caribbean
Airlines was the official airline of Carnival 2018, the proud
sponsor of the world’s biggest street party, which everyone
looks forward to a year in advance.
In addition to being the official airline of Carnival 2018, the
company also supported Pan Trinbago and focused on the
next generation by partnering with the Red Cross Children’s
Carnival, where young citizens participated in the national
festival.
Another major highlight in the lead-up to T&T Carnival
2018 was the announcement of our new partnership with the
Caribbean Airlines Skiffle Bunch Steel Orchestra. Skiffle Bunch
is one of San Fernando’s most renowned steel orchestras,
and Caribbean Airlines applauds their accomplishments and
the contribution they have made to the cultural landscape over
the last forty years. Caribbean Airlines was proud to sponsor
the band for the 2018 National Panorama competition.
Caribbean Airlines is in the business of connecting people
to festivals, and to friends and family. Now, we are connecting
the eastern Caribbean to North America, as we have finalised
the regulatory requirements to introduce non-stop service
between New York City and St Vincent and the Grenadines,
effective 14 March, 2018, subject to approval by the Trinidad
and Tobago Civil Aviation Authority. Caribbean Airlines was
one of the first airlines to offer non-stop flights to St Vincent’s
Argyle International Airport when it opened in 2017. This
service between John F. Kennedy International Airport in New
York and St Vincent will serve as an international gateway to
the beautiful Grenadine islands.
As an airline, we remain committed to supporting culture
across the region and beyond. Caribbean
Airlines is the official airline of Jamaica
Carnival 2018, which takes place from 4 to
8 April. We encourage you to join us there,
and fly with us to the many events taking
place across the Caribbean in the coming
months, such as:
• Guyana’s Bartica Easter Regatta: 31 March to 2 April
• April is jazz month in Tobago, with top international
artistes scheduled to perform at the Tobago Jazz
Experience: 16 to 24 April
• Antigua will host its annual sailing week from 28 April.
This event is one of the region’s main yachting regattas,
attracting boats from around the world
Beyond the Caribbean region, our destinations in North
America are bustling. In New York, the Tribeca Film Festival,
carded for 18 to 29 April, continues to bring together creators,
diverse audiences, and the film industry. Last year’s festival
saw record-setting attendance numbers, a trend which is
expected to be maintained this year.
Meanwhile, in Miami, the Carnaval on the Mile takes place
from 3 to 4 March. This cultural experience will feature a wide
array of artists. And the Calle Ocho Festival on 11 March is the
largest street festival in Miami, featuring the sounds of merengue,
reggaeton, bachata, balada, hip-hop, rap, and jazz.
Let your taste buds lead the way as you sip, savour, and
sample your way through the Toronto Food and Drink Market
from 31 March to 2 April, where it’s all about eating, drinking,
shopping, and learning.
Follow Caribbean Airlines from festival to festival, bring
your friends and your families, to create life-long memories
and enjoy the fun!
At Caribbean Airlines, it is our privilege to serve you. Please
visit our website at www.caribbean-airlines.com; become a
fan by liking us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/caribbeanairlines;
and follow us on Twitter @iflycaribbean.
Thank you for choosing Caribbean Airlines — we value
your business and look forward to serving you throughout our
network.
Garvin Medera
Chief Executive Officer
12 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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datebook
Your guide to Caribbean events in March and April, from
Guyana’s Easter Regatta to Carnival in Jamaica
brendan Delzin/shutterstock.com
Don’t miss . . .
Turtle-watching season
March to September (dates vary by location)
Across the Caribbean
Moonlight illuminates the path for female sea-turtles coming ashore. Soft
carpets of sand greet the endangered hawksbills, loggerheads, greens,
olive ridleys, and leatherbacks ready to lay their eggs. A few months later,
hatchlings will dig their way out of the sand, and dash adorably towards the
sea. Trinidad’s Grande Rivière, the west coast of Barbados, Golden Sea Beach in
Jamaica, and Park Beach in Bequia are just some of the best spots to experience
this encounter with nature. Following local precautions and booking a tour
guide are highly encouraged.
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 17

datebook
If you’re in . . .
MIAMI
GUYANA
TRINIDAD
kiwanis club of little havana
Carnaval Miami
Venues around Miami
10 February to 11 March
carnavalmiami.com
Every year, Miami’s Latin community
celebrate their roots at month-long
Carnaval Miami — one of the city’s
largest festivals of Latin culture, and
a community project fundraiser by
the Kiwanis Club of Little Havana.
March kicks off with Carnaval on the
Mile, a street festival stretching the
full length of Coral Gables’ “Miracle
Mile.” With food stalls, live bands,
and exhibits by over 150 artists,
downtown Coral Gables becomes a
hotspot for art-lovers. Foodies unite at
Cork & Fork, the Cooking Showdown,
and the Cuban Sandwich Smackdown.
In Miami, March has even been
proclaimed Cuban sandwich month.
But you’re guaranteed to work
off the calories at Calle Ocho Miami.
Traversing the twenty blocks of this
street festival will make you dance the
entire day, as you enjoy music stages,
international food stations, and other
entertainment. Havana, Cuba, may
be renowned for its ballet, vintage
cars, and cigars, but the Calle Ocho
festival in Miami’s own Little Havana
is notorious for the party — and for
breaking records. In 1988, the festival
set a world record for the longest
conga line, with 119,986 people, and
in 2000 it served up the world’s longest
cigar. Maybe this year they’ll serve up
the world’s largest Cuban sandwich!
ChuckSchugPhotography/istock.com
Bartica Easter Regatta
31 March to 2 April
Bartica, Essequibo
Guyana’s “many waters” meet at
the confluence of the Mazaruni,
Cuyuni and Essequibo Rivers, where
the mining town of Bartica hosts a
magnificent array of entertaining
activities over the long Easter
weekend. And it all began because of
a challenge from a competitive local
to a thrill-seeking foreigner. In 1947,
a visiting yachtsman sped across
the Essequibo in his twenty-twohorsepower-engine
yacht, displaying
“adventurous river navigation skills.”
Locals were intrigued. Not to be
outdone, Charles Guthrie, manager
of a Bartica electrical company,
pulled out his own arsenal — an
aluminium utility boat with the same
engine. Needless to say, the entire
town of Bartica and environs came
out to witness the contest, and the
rest is history.
The Easter Regatta begins with
a Street Jam on Easter Saturday,
followed by the Miss Regatta Pageant.
Easter Sunday and Monday bring the
main event: F1 Power Boat Racing,
where dozens of vessels compete in
an expanse of river broad as a bay.
Other activities include a gymkhana
presentation, a gospel concert, and
various sporting competitions.
NGC Bocas Lit Fest
National Library and other venues
around Port of Spain
25 to 29 April
bocaslitfest.com
A passion for bringing words alive
is palpable at the Anglophone
Caribbean’s largest literary festival.
Your biggest problem might be
deciding which events to attend,
from the selection of over a
hundred workshops, readings, lively
discussions, and film screenings.
This year’s headline writers include
Jamaica’s first female poet laureate,
Lorna Goodison, alongside Trinidadborn
Canadian novelist André Alexis
and star poets Kei Miller and Vahni
Capildeo. Caribbean writers are
the heart of the festival, joined this
year by authors from Sri Lanka, New
Zealand, and Fiji — part of a special
focus on global island literature.
Intellectual heft is expected in
discussions on the future of islands,
with special emphasis on economics,
development, and the environment.
And if you can’t attend the main
festival, there’s a month-long prefestival
programme of performances,
book launches, and films.
Event previews by Shelly-Ann Inniss
georgia popplewell
18 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

@eldoradorums
eldorado_rum
@eldoradorums

datebook
Mambo into March
Andres Garcia Martin/shutterstock.com
Wildlife Photographer of the Year
Exhibition
Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto
rom.on.ca
2017 South African Wildlife Photographer of the Year
Brent Stirton’s Memorial to a Species will be among
the one hundred images selected for their originality
and technical excellence
[16 December – 18 March]
courtesy of The New York Botanical Garden
New York Botanical Garden Orchid Show
Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, NYBG
nybg.org
View a series of installations crafted by one of the world’s
leading floral designers, Daniel Ost
[3 March – 22 April]
Started 16 December
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20 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

St Patrick’s Festival
Venues around Montserrat
discovermni.com
Go back in time with African and
Irish music performances, a heritage
feast, a freedom run, and more
[9-19 March]
New Fire Music Festival
Ortinola Estate, St Joseph, Trinidad
newfireworld.com
More than a music festival: a new way of life, with camping
under the stars, engaging workshops, and more
[23-25 March]
Fiesta del Tambor
Mella Theatre, Havana, Cuba
Cuba’s popular dance companies
and music orchestras compete in
percussion competitions and rumba
dancing contests
[5-11 March]
courtesy new fire music festival
30 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15
Ends 22 April
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 30 01 02 0
16 17 18 19
Escape the
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Work.
Discover
Play.
Hyatt Do Regency both.
It’s Trinidad. good not
to be home.
The newly renovated Hyatt Regency Trinidad offers guests the perfect
balance of business and pleasure. Part of the International Waterfront
Development, business guests have immediate access to our world-class
business facilities and expansive conference centre — one of the largest in
the English-speaking Caribbean. Guests will relax at Spa Esencia, our rooftop
infinity pool, 24-hour fitness centre and also enjoy local and international
cuisine at the Waterfront Restaurant, Sushi Bar and Lobby lounge.
For reservations, visit
trinidad.regency.hyatt.com.
HYATT REGENCY TRINIDAD
1 Wrightson Road, Port Of Spain
868 623 2222
The HYATT trademark and related marks are trademarks of Hyatt Corporation or its affiliates.
©2017 Hyatt Corporation. All rights reserved.
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 21

datebook
Awesome April
Lethem Easter Rodeo
Lethem, Guyana
Bronco- and bull-riding, a wild-cow milking competition and
best-dressed vaqueiro contest: Rupununi communities mark
Easter weekend with high adrenaline thrills
[31 March-2 April]
Jamaica Carnival
Venues around Kingston and Ocho Rios
visitjamaica.com
From pulsating beach parties to breakfast
fetes, mas camp sessions to J’Ouvert and
a high-energy street parade, Kingston
and Ocho Rios keep pumping
[31 March-8 April]
amanda richards
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22 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

SVG Gospel Fest
Venues around St Vincent
Gospel expressions in music,
song, dance, and drama lift
audiences up high
[1-30 April]
grenada tourism authority
Goat- and Crab-Racing
Venues around Tobago
Jockeys as fit as their goats gallop
alongside them for this Tobago Easter
tradition, while crab competitors move
at a more sideways pace
[31 March-3 April]
Pure Grenada Music Fest
Port Louis, Grenada
grenadamusicfestival.com
It’s all about the music, with dynamic performances
from top artistes including soca queen Alison Hinds,
Grammy-winning soul singer Chrisette Michele, and
reggae legends Morgan Heritage
[13-15 April]
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word of mouth
Dispatches from our correspondents around the Caribbean and further afield
A unity of
colour
At Guyana’s Phagwah
celebrations, Subraj Singh
notes how the festival’s
many colours blend into a
single, unifying shade
amanda richards
Providence Stadium, orginally built for
cricket, has long been acclimatised to
parties, concerts, and other non-sporting
events. Today it is the host for the biggest Phagwah
celebration in Guyana. Phagwah (or Holi), the Hindu
festival of colours, came to Guyana from India in the
nineteenth century, when immigrants were shipped
to Britain’s West Indian colonies to replace newly
freed Africans as plantation labour. This history is
immediate in my mind as I join the squeeze of people
entering the wet, colourful, powder-clouded space,
which holds an overpowering, invisible thing in the
air — I get a strong whiff of unity from it, but that
can’t be right — binding everyone to everyone else.
It begins at the gate. In the multi-hued world
that Phagwah brings, colour-blindness — the good
kind — can be seen in all its kaleidoscopic glory.
I see a small black boy with a yellow water-gun
playfully squirting “stainer” at a troop of smiling,
fair-skinned Indian girls in front of me, their white
pants and white tops purpling from the liquid.
I see groups of friends from a variety of racial
backgrounds, wrapping each other in hugs and
cascading piles of powder — green, red, white,
yellow — the colours of the Guyanese flag. Some
white tourists with bra straps showing through wet
t-shirts grin as strangers daub crimson and pink
powder on their faces, granting them acceptance in
the form of iridescent pigment. I see a mixed-race
friend and her black boyfriend — “Happy Holi, you
guys!” — and they both powder my dark skin, my
cheeks, my beard, my hair, with a green that now,
in retrospect, I regard as the exact shade of envy. I
watch them walk away, pressed to each other.
I watch the people, dancing to Bollywood
music, throwing powder on their family and
friends and others they do not know, with blue and
orange and scarlet pluming from their hair, with
pink-stained teeth, with drops of water flying from
writhing bodies, with all of their faces covered in
the same multitude of colours — blending to create
the same shade of black. I marvel at how they all
look like each other in the shade of Phagwah.
I wait inside the stadium. I finally see him enter
the gate. His shirt is clean, bright white. “I want
you to be the first to colour me,” he says, and
when he is close enough I pull him into a hug. I
can smell the scent of him under the musky, holy
smell of Phagwah powder. My hands linger on his
hips for longer than usual, because the hundreds of
people flocking the stadium on this one day only
have eyes for their loved ones — eyes for joy and
happiness and togetherness, or eyes blinded with
colour that they hurriedly rush to the waterpipes
to wash out. After I paint his face pink, we walk
around, happily pushed against each other by the
crowd of colourful people who help to paint us in
their shade of black.
24 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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word of mouth
Anya Kazantseva/shutterstock.com
Carnival come
back again
When Hurricane Irma devastated
St Martin six months ago, few residents
had Carnival in mind. But this year’s
festival has become a symbol of rebirth
for the island, Laura Dowrich reports
When Hurricane Irma completed
her devastation of St Martin
in September 2017, Austin
Helliger was among hundreds left without
a home. He couldn’t even find refuge in his
parents’ house, as that too was destroyed.
The businessman, who was on the verge
of launching his own Carnival band, had
second thoughts.
Post-Irma revealed apocalyptic scenes
on the island, in which Dutch Sint
Maarten shares a border with French
Saint-Martin. Trees were uprooted, buildings
destroyed, and leisure craft used by
families and visitors on sunny weekend
sailings were turned topsy-turvy, sometimes
miles away from their original
berth. Chaos erupted, as desperate
residents began looting before the Dutch
military were sent to enforce law and
order. Carnival was one of the furthest
things from most residents’ minds.
“The first couple of weeks, I was like,
I don’t want to do this,” says Helliger of
his Carnival band. “But I did a boat ride
after the hurricane and it was amazing to
see that four hundred people came and
gave me their money. It was an emotional
experience, and everyone was asking
what the next event is.”
So come April, Helliger will make
his debut in Sint Maarten’s forty-ninth
Carnival. His will be one of the eight
bands registered for the festival.
Helliger’s determination to do his band
reflects the bigger determination of the
country to show the world they are open
for business. This Carnival is being seen
as a symbol of resilience and hope following
the ravages of Irma.
“We have so many people literally telling
us every day that Carnival will happen, Carnival
must happen. It’s an important and
vital part of our culture and mental recovery.
And though we may lose our material
things, you cannot take away our spirit of
enjoyment and togetherness,” said Alston
Lourens, president of the Sint Maarten
Carnival Development Foundation, after
the board met to discuss the annual event a
few weeks after Irma’s passage.
Carnival in Sint Maarten began on
11 November, 1970, Sint Maarten’s Day,
to replicate the annual Carnival held in
neighbouring St Thomas. When French
Saint-Martin also started celebrating the
holiday, the Dutch side moved its Carnival
to 30 April, the Queen’s Birthday, with a
Grand Carnival Parade.
Today the parade is still held on the
Queen’s Birthday, but the festivities begin
a month earlier — this year, from 12 April
to 3 May. Most events take place in one
central location, the Carnival Village,
a stadium-like facility with shops and
Caribbean cuisine, described as the only
venue of its kind in the region.
Carnival ends with the burning of
King Momo, a large effigy made of straw,
wood, and plaster. Momo is a derivation
of the Ancient Greek Momus, god of satire
and mockery. King Momo represents the
excess and wildness of Carnival, and
gives people permission to break loose
during the season.
And in 2018, the return of King Momo
has a special significance: it means things
are getting back to normal. n
26 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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The game
A gold
repeat?
Photo by Alexander Hassenstein / Getty Images Sport
Back in 1966, Trinidad and
Tobago’s 4x4 relay team took
gold and set a world record at the
Commonwealth Games. Now T&T,
the reigning world champions,
are looking to repeat their
Commonwealth Games victory,
more than five decades later. But
the competition will be stiff, as
Kwame Laurence reports
28 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Jarrin Solomon, Lalonde
Gordon, Machel Cedenio,
and Jereem Richards of
Trinidad and Tobago’s
men’s 4x400 metres relay
team celebrate after winning
gold at the 2017 IAAF
World Athletics
Championships
Trinidad and Tobago’s best-ever
Commonwealth Games outing
came in 1966 in Kingston,
Jamaica. Lennox Yearwood, Kent
Bernard, Edwin Roberts, and 440-
yard champion Wendell Mottley
capped off an excellent showing with victory in
the final track event, the men’s 4x440 yards relay.
There was the huge bonus, too, of establishing a
world record in the race: the run of three minutes,
2.8 seconds put an exclamation mark on T&T’s
terrific overall performance of five gold, two silver,
and two bronze medals.
For the Jamaican athletes back in 1966, the mile
relay was the last chance to earn Commonwealth
Games gold at home. “Jamaicans were there to
see Jamaicans win,” recalls Mottley, “and we
were there to disappoint them. We did so on such
a regular basis that by the end of the games they
were looking for salvation.
“With George Kerr running in the Jamaican
team, there were high expectations, especially
since Edwin Skinner was injured and we had Yearwood
as a substitute,” Mottley explains. “They
felt they would end the
games on a high note,
with a gold for Jamaica.
We had other plans. We
had trained and worked
out that baton pass to a
finesse.”
Yearwood ran the
leadoff leg for T&T,
handing off to Bernard.
“And then we started to drive the pressure,”
Mottley recalls. “Kent caught up, and then Ed
Roberts ran the third leg, overhauling the field.
When he gave me that baton, there was no jumble.
I had a dream handover from Ed, and Trinidad and
Tobago had already gone clear.
“My job was to secure that victory, and I ran
the leg of a lifetime. I remember coming down
that stretch, and the crowd was virtually silent
except for the few Trinis who had made it there.
My colleagues joined me for a victory lap around
the Kingston Stadium. And then, flashing up on the
lights, ‘World Record’!”
At that point the pro-Jamaican sentiment
in the stadium transformed into regional pride.
“The whole crowd warmed to the reality of the
moment,” Mottley says, “that Trinidad and Tobago
had broken a world record. Their Caribbean enthusiasm
overflowed. It was one of the most joyous
“My job was to secure that
victory, and I ran the leg of
a lifetime,” recalls Wendell
Mottley of the 1966 race
occasions of my life. I cannot tell you how often
I relive that moment. The individual event brings
you success, but there’s nothing like teamwork and
winning a relay.”
Fifty-one years after Mottley anchored his team
to that famous victory in the Jamaican capital,
another T&T quartet enjoyed the sweet taste
of team success. This time, the triumph came in
London, as Jarrin Solomon, Jereem “The Dream”
Richards, Machel Cedenio, and Lalonde Gordon
struck 2017 IAAF World Championship 4x400
metres gold in a national record time of 2 minutes,
58.12 seconds. Renny Quow also shared in the win,
running the first leg for T&T in the qualifying round.
This same quintet could feature at the 2018
Commonwealth Games, running from 4 to 15
April in Australia’s Gold Coast region. With such a
formidable group to choose from, the Red, White,
and Black will be tough to beat Down Under. Add
to the mix a fit Deon Lendore, and the chances of
T&T leaving Australia with 4x4 gold are greatly
enhanced.
Jamaica, however, may want to return
the 1966 compliment,
and spoil the party for
Team T&T. The northern
Caribbean nation
certainly has the firepower
to challenge
the world champions.
Nathon Allen was the
sixth-fastest quartermiler
in the world last
year, at 44.19 seconds. And two other Jamaicans
were in the top twenty as well: Demish Gaye at
fourteenth, with a 44.55 run, while Akeem Bloomfield
clocked 44.74 for the seventeenth spot.
Meanwhile, reigning Commonwealth Games
champions England are keen to return to the top
of the podium. Botswana, with Isaac Makwala in
their lineup, will also be a threat. Makwala was
ranked third in the world in 2017 at 43.84 seconds,
while his countryman Baboloki Thebe produced a
44.02 run to end the year fifth. The Bahamas have
hopes too, which will largely depend on 2017 world
number-four Steven Gardiner (43.89).
No individual Trinidad and Tobago quartermiler
made the 2017 top twenty. As a team, though,
T&T proved to be the best, and will bid to underline
that status on 13 April in the Gold Coast 2018 men’s
4x400m championship race.
On your mark! n
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 29

Bookshelf
The Tower of the Antilles, by Achy Obejas (Akashic Books, 150 pp, ISBN 9781617755392)
For every Cuban passport stamped,
every long-desired visa claimed that
takes Cubans away from their tierra
natal, how many Cubas exist in the
imagination, in the psychogeography
of limbo? The short stories in Achy
Obejas’s newest collection thread a
clear and bittersweet needlework of
longing, exile, erotic need, and chaos
between Cubans living at home and
those who strike out, with desperation
and pragmatism, to America.
Many of these stories are
navigated by the needs of the
human body: shelter, food, sex. In
“Kimberle”, two women steer the
tense, desire-laced uncertainty
between them by sharing a series of
lovers, each more improbable and
exciting than the next. “The Cola of
Oblivion” marks the sharp difference
between those who have fled Cuba,
and those who have remained; a “visitor” is reminded that
her mother “never sent a single vitamin . . . not a single can
of meat or iPod, not a single anything.”
Obejas reveals with equal intensity
the desires of the human spirit,
cataloguing the results that spiral
from losing security, sanctuary,
and sight of oneself. “The Sound
Catalogue” witnesses an immigrant’s
gradual, terrifying loss of hearing,
set against the fading ricochet of
her life’s most valuable sounds: gunshots,
the roar of frenzied mobs in
revolt, the Cuban national anthem.
Cuba exists in these pages as a
living, organic entity: vibrant and
sinewy even in the memories of the
citizens who have left it. Obejas
reminds her readers that Cuba is
no single destination, and that
the Cuban imagination is a dense,
intricately networked map unto
itself. These stories come to life in
explorations of sleepy-eyed boys
with concupiscent superpowers, of
large brown women building towers of boats in the Antilles.
“Is there any real chance you can leave a place?” these
stories ask. The answers are multiple and mysterious.
The Dear Remote Nearness of You, by
Danielle Legros Georges (Barrow Street Press, 62
pp, ISBN 9780989329699)
In her second collection of
poems, Haiti-born, US-based
Danielle Legros Georges gives
us access to worlds that are
both submerged and emerging.
Whether her poems’ speakers
contemplate centenarian eels,
or seek to shift the rubble left
by Haiti’s devastating 2010
earthquake, The Dear Remote
Nearness of You takes careful
account of the cost of survival.
The atmospheric quality of
these poems is dense with attention to the sounds of
an inhabitable life: the shock of a shouted racial slur,
the high-pitched screech of children, the very sound of
the earth splitting. The unsettling intimacies Georges
reveals encompass our human relationships with animals,
alongside our human understanding of ourselves. Haiti’s
own mirrored conversations with itself, through generations
of privation and exquisite natural beauty, are the
centrepiece of this book’s success.
Kingston Buttercup, by Ann-Margaret Lim
(Peepal Tree Press, 72 pp, ISBN 9781845233303)
“I remember a barrel / with
the biggest doll I’d ever seen.
/ I remember nights without
a mother.” Ann-Margaret
Lim’s second collection of
poems teems with the typically
unsaid, releasing domestic,
maternal, and historic memory
from the unlatched suitcases
of generational secrecy and
shame. In her narrator’s eyes,
Jamaica is a crossroads of
extreme violence and ecstatic
joys, which she offers to her readers in images of
doppelgänger girls lining the obituaries, big-bottom
Julie mangoes, men who lavish kicks and kisses on their
firstborns, and poet Mervyn Morris “bringing life from
the depths of souls / to his class, which was never /
contained on the Mona campus.” Kingston Buttercup is
a worthy successor to Lim’s debut collection, The Festival
of Wild Orchid: flowers intertwine their symbolisms at
the heart of both books, wafting multiple meanings of
strength, deadliness, and comfort.
30 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Writing on Water, by Maggie Harris (Seren
Press, 136 pp, ISBN 9781781723708)
Wooden stilt-houses
perched on riverbanks;
rafts disintegrating beneath
the tempestuous sea; terraces
teeming with secrets
and too many mouths to
feed: home, in Maggie
Harris’s stories, is a complex
endeavour. Guyana-born,
Wales-based Harris steers
her protagonists in and out
of peril and pleasure, creating
short fiction that sweeps
us into riptides and rough waters of human emotion.
In these stories, mothers wrestle with the demands of
their children and the creeping tendrils of their other
suppressed desires; myths and monotonies stir in
the same cauldron of everyday living; the Caribbean
and the United Kingdom cradle journeys of hope,
horror, and the grey space in between. As the central
character from Writing on Water’s title story convinces
us, “Who was she to think the word ‘home’ meant a
place? This . . . in-between-ness, this was it.”
Pocomania and London Calling, by Una
Marson (Blouse & Skirt Books, 154 pp, ISBN
9789768267030)
Una Marson’s Pocomania,
first staged in Jamaica in
1938, remains one of the
Caribbean’s most important
works of theatre. Marson
was a dramatist, poet,
and activist, the first black
woman broadcaster to
be employed by the BBC.
This necessary publication
engages new generations
on the plays’ cultural significance,
their trailblazing
political engagement, and their feminist agency. Pocomania
directly and bravely confronts colonial attitudes
towards Jamaican folk religion, while London Calling
exposes the racist, classist weaknesses of the British
empire with satirically crafted humour. “I think it is
terrible how most of us live under the delusion that we
are free,” one of the central figures in London Calling
says: these are plays that speak as potently of systemic
oppression, of the long and heavy arm of institutional
racism and misogyny, as they did in the 1930s.
Reviews by Shivanee Ramlochan, Bookshelf editor
In his new book In the
Forests of Freedom:
The Fighting Maroons
of Dominica (Papillote
Press, 231 pp, ISBN
9780993108662), Dominica’s
preeminent historian
Lennox Honychurch tackles
an aspect of his country’s
history little known to
outsiders. In this Q&A, he
explains why it matters.
In the Forests of Freedom focuses on the Dominican
Maroons, but also carries the reader through the growth
of an entire island’s consciousness. Tell us about this
important parallel.
I have always been interested in the neglected corners of
Caribbean history. I seek to include the enslaved, indentured,
or indigenous groups who have left few, if any, written records
of their own, but who played a significant role in our region’s
history. How does one go about locating their position in the
mosaic of Caribbean heritage from their point of view, when
the records at your disposal are written by the coloniser? I had
to search beyond the focus of the coloniser’s lens.
How do you hope your work amplifies our Caribbean
understanding of slavery, revolt, and rebellion?
When one hears about Maroons in the Anglophone Caribbean,
the immediate reaction is to think of Jamaica, because
for decades academia and popular literature have been
dominated by the Jamaican experience. In terms of slave rebellions,
Haiti has been represented as the prime example. I wish
to show that the reaction to enslavement across the region was
widespread and deeply engrained, even in the so-called “small
islands” where populations were more tightly confined. There
were social diversification and hierarchies, multi-faith patterns
and cultural tensions, diverse skills and a vast bank of acquired
knowledge that came together in the Caribbean. The way that
their leaders absorbed and acted upon what was happening in
the colonial and metropolitan centres of power during the age
of revolution is also important.
How has the spirit of Maroon resistance survived in
contemporary Dominica?
As Dominica moved to self-government, along with the
nationalist symbols of flag, anthem, and coat of arms, there
came the legends of nationhood. Among the most vocal were
the Rastafarians. In their advocacy of healthy living, vegetarianism,
and respect for the natural environment, as well as the
encouragement of creativity in dance, music, and art, they
were seen as heirs of the Maroon experience. Dominicans are
increasingly conscious of this inheritance and it provides a
significant motivation to face the challenges ahead.
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 31

playlist
Palmyra and Other Places David Bertrand
(Blujazz Productions)
The flute, in jazz music, has a
less prominent place than the
saxophone or trumpet, but
in this new album New Yorkbased
Trinidadian flautist David
Bertrand makes a sincere
attempt to expand the repertoire
of the instrument. Seven
of the eight tracks of sublime
quartet playing are new compositions by Bertrand: the
listener is given an opportunity also to revel in the studied
application of jazz language to the inherent native
vernacular of Trinidadian rhythm and tone. The titles of
the tunes also suggest the idea that this is a subliminal
musical autobiography: “Palmyra”, “Claude’s Nariva”
and “Wood Slave” recalling Bertrand’s home island’s
habitat and fauna; “Lexington and 63rd” and “245
South 1st” offering a survey of his New York present.
The result is testament to the continued strides made
by musical émigrés from the Caribbean to an American
diaspora, inspiring art that takes no prisoners.
Vacation Jimmy October (OverDose Music
Group)
Young Caribbean musicians are
taking the lead in placing their
innovative native rhythms and
the cadence of their accented
voices at the centre of the new
pop music, rather than just
being mimic men. With this new
five-track EP, Trinidad’s Jimmy
October articulates over the
myriad rhythms of the modern Caribbean to identify his
brand of pop in a world hearing island beats as the new
normal. These songs — four of them collaborations of
unselfish musical partnership — also point to the trend
of locating subjects as maudlin as love at first sight and
titillating them to excess as paeans of what will happen
when two get together. “Girl, you got the waist, like a
merry-go-round / Looking at your face make the time
slow down / Girl, I can’t wait, I need to know now / If you
gonna let me be with you.” It works! Hip, singable hooks
and mid-tempo dance beats with a Caribbean DNA make
for a short set of easy listening — and an urgent wish for
more of this kind of sly island pop.
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32 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Major Lazer Presents: Give Me Future Various
artists (Mad Decent)
EDM trio Major Lazer’s frontman
Diplo has been described as
the “coloniser du jour” for his
perceived cultural appropriation
of black music, including Caribbean
music; his fellow members,
Trinidadian Jillionaire and Jamaican
Walshy Fire, may laugh at
that characterisation. An unsettling
indictment, since in this soundtrack to the behind-thescenes
documentary about the group’s groundbreaking
2016 Cuban mega-concert for 400,000 people, half of the
twenty-three performers are Caribbeans from Trinidad,
Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. There’s no denying the
impact Major Lazer has had in taking tropical rhythms and
voices to areas of commercial music importance hitherto
uncharted. On this album, new Latin rhythms and digital
reggae vibes mix with Lazer’s trademark dance music,
replete with its distorted electronic squeaks and island
beats, via a number of collaborations that explore the
nexus of Afrobeat, soca, dancehall, and other diaspora
music, to suggest that one person’s colonisation could be
another’s diffusion of global pop.
Single Spotlight
My Kinda Girl Beres Hammond (VPAL Music)
Jamaican reggae icon Beres
Hammond is the king of lovers
rock, and this new single embodies
the kind of romantic longings
that typify the sub-genre: “I see
the look in all the brothers’ eyes
/ As if they are waiting for you
to despise / But when you hug
me in front of everyone / I know
you are stating this is where you belong / You’re my kinda
girl.” Hammond is steeped in the American R&B tradition,
and the husky timbre of his voice has the smooth crooner
stamping a “kinda” elder statesman vibe on the sexiness.
This groovy rocker has a charm that can make couples smile
when dancing close. This is grown folks’ music, without
any snub of a younger audience in search of templates for
a great song that can carry beyond the fleeting attention
span of modern pop or dancehall. The young producer of
the single, Kury Riley, says it was a privilege working with
the “musical vocal god of decades.” It is our privilege to
continue listening to Beres Hammond.
Reviews by Nigel A. Campbell
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 33

SCREENSHOTS
Cocote
Directed by Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias, 2017,
106 minutes
In Cocote, the hybridity that is the essence of the Caribbean
condition is made manifest with unflinching formal daring
and piercing thematic reach.
At its simplest a narrative of
revenge, Cocote opens out
further into an often abstract
reckoning not only with violence
but also with religion,
class and, corruption, told in
a cinematic language that is a
bracing attempt to create an
Antillean aesthetic.
At the centre of Cocote
— the word, ominously, is
Dominican Spanish for neck,
specifically the neck as a body part that can be broken or
severed — is Alberto, who, as played by Vicente Santos,
is a beguiling mix of the muscular and the melancholic. A
gardener to a wealthy family in Santo Domingo, Alberto
returns to his own family’s village when a well-connected
(thus officially untouchable) policeman murders his father
over an unpaid debt. As an evangelical Christian, Alberto
balks at the expectation of him participating in the death
rituals, a syncretism of Roman Catholicism and West
African belief practices. Spiritual conflict will not prove his
greatest challenge, however: Alberto is bluntly told that,
as the eldest son, he is also expected to avenge his father’s
brutal killing.
Nelson de los Santos Arias’s stylistic proclivities were
previously on display in his
first feature, Santa Teresa
and Other Stories, a muscleflexing
gloss on Chilean writer
Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666.
In Cocote he gives these tendencies
full freedom — documentary-style
ethnographic
observation blends with
conventional drama, colour
with monochrome 35-mm cinematography,
expansive fixedcamera
takes with energetic
hand-held ones, and a spectacularly climactic 360-degree
shot, the visuals wrapped in an immersive and inventive
sound design.
Admittedly this isn’t all seamless (and it isn’t meant to be)
— but it works, brilliantly. Cocote is deliriously innovative,
palpably Caribbean cinema, by a filmmaker who has put us
on notice of his considerable talents.
For more information, visit luxbox.com/cocote
34 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Sergio & Sergei
Ernesto Daranas Serrano, 2017, 93 minutes
Playing loose and fast
with actual events,
the veteran Cuban
filmmaker Ernesto
Daranas Serrano
comes up trumps
with Sergio & Sergei,
a humanist, magicalrealist
political satire containing echoes of Gravity.
Set in 1991, the film follows Sergio (Tomás Cao), a
Moscow-trained Marxist philosopher at the University
of Havana and amateur radio enthusiast. He becomes
unlikely comrades over the frequencies with Sergei
(Héctor Noas), the lone cosmonaut aboard the Mir space
station — who, with the USSR in free fall, is in danger of
being forgotten by his minders. Sergio decides to enlist
the aid of another radio buddy, Peter (Ron Perlman), a US
journalist with a love of conspiracy theories and alcohol,
to bring the stranded space traveller home.
There is much genial humour in this sprightly, solidly
made comedy. Yet it is a single, stark image that proves
most moving: a Soviet flag forlornly adrift in the cosmos.
For more information, visit sergioandsergeifilm.com
The Silence of the Wind
Álvaro Aponte-Centeno, 2017, 93 minutes
The Silence of the Wind
opens with an arresting
image: a close-up of
an eye staring through
a hole in a tarpaulin.
The eye belongs to an
undocumented migrant
aboard a boat off the
Puerto Rican coast. Also aboard the boat is Rafito (Israel
Lugo), whose business it is to bring such migrants into
Puerto Rico.
The understated and sympathetic debut feature by
Álvaro Aponte-Centeno, The Silence of the Wind joins
a number of Caribbean films taking undocumented
migration as its subject. Yet the film is less concerned with
the dynamics of the issue — no fingers are pointed — and
more interested in painting a realist portrait of people
like Rafito who, for whatever reasons, find themselves
facilitating a system that is now part of regional life. Yet
that system is far from benign, as the film’s harrowing
final moments, set again on the implacable sea, remind us.
For more information, visit cercamon.biz
Reviews by Jonathan Ali
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 35

cookup
“That
right
there,
that’s
Africa”
When US chef Ben Dennis first
visited the Caribbean, it set him
thinking about food as a form
of African diaspora heritage.
Then he arrived in Tobago and
discovered traditional candies
identical to ones made by his
own Gullah ancestors in South
Carolina. He tells Franka Philip
why this culinary link matters
Isn’t it cool when you visit another country and see familiar How did you make a connection to Trinidad and Tobago?
ingredients being used in ways you’re used to? This was the
big thrill for US chef Ben Dennis, when he visited Trinidad One of the more renowned herbalists in your country,
and Tobago and discovered that local candies like toolum and Francis Morean, he was in Charleston and met an elder
nutcake were similar to those once made by his ancestors, who might have told him about me. But he knew the connection
with the Merikins. I never knew the story in my
the Gullah Geechees of South Carolina. The Gullah are
descendants of formerly enslaved people from various Central and life. They don’t teach us our history. But there’s something
West African ethnic groups settled in South Carolina and Georgia. here [in Trinidad] called hill rice, and it was grown in
They developed a distinct Creole culture that has preserved their the Low Country in South Carolina. I don’t know if the
African heritage.
Merikins brought the hill rice here or if it was already here,
Dennis has visited T&T twice, and explored possible links but the Merikins came from my area and the low country
between the Gullah people and Trinidad’s Merikins — descendants of Georgia, Virginia, and I think as far as Louisana. They
of African-American soldiers who were given land in south Trinidad settled in Moruga.
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
is one of a group of contemporary culinarians shedding light on symposium. We connected, and he’s like family to me
historic foodways in the American South and across the African now. So we did the rice symposium and we were up in the
diaspora. When he was in Trinidad in November 2017, we spoke mountains with this rice. Before I came to Trinidad, Slow
about his blossoming relationship with the Caribbean.
Food [an international organisation devoted to food heritage]
had this top ten list of foods that were missing, and
number one was this rice. I get into the fields in Moruga
and I’m looking at this rice — African glaberrima, the scientific name — and I’m thinking,
this is it, still growing here.
I just came back from Haiti, where I connected with a farmer who I gave some seeds
from back home, and he told me he hadn’t seen it since he was a kid. So that means it
was in Haiti too! I also saw it in a Puerto Rican cookbook, so it might have been there
as well. What we know for sure is that it’s still growing in Trinidad.
I read that you found our bene (sesame seed) balls and that was a revelation for you.
That was a huge connection! I got off the plane in Tobago and saw what you all call
toolum, which is the coconut and molasses. A professor, Dr David Shields, he always
sends out stuff about old things that are missing. The Gullah street candy used to be
done by old Gullah ladies — they were the bene seed balls and the coconut molasses
36 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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jonathan boncek

candy, which we call monkey meat. So I
look at this candy, the coconut and molasses,
and I had a picture of an old Gullah
lady with a tray of candies. One of them
was the peanut candy [nutcake] and the
other was the coconut molasses candy. I
was like, wow, this is amazing! That made
my heart sing. We still see the bene candies
— we call them bene cookies — but
the other old candies, we don’t see them.
Did you get the recipes from here to take
back?
Yes, I learned the basics of how to make it
from Trinidad. I heard they do it in West
Africa, too. This is a candy that is traditional,
you know, New World traditional.
To see the similarities of how we do those
candies was fascinating.
Toolum, also known as monkey meat
Ben Dennis writes: “There was a street candy called monkey meat here in
Charleston, sold by Gullah Geechee ladies during the colonial period and up until
the early 1960s. It’s not seen much anymore, unlike in T&T, where toolum is still
common. The addition of lemon peel is the only difference I’ve noticed in the recipes,
but I’m sure each cook adds different small different touches to their recipe.”
1 cup finely grated coconut
4 tbs molasses
2 tsp grated or finely chopped ginger
¼ tsp dried orange peel, chopped or grated
¼ tsp dried lemon peel
²⁄ ³ cup brown sugar
Place sugar in a small pot and let it liquefy over low heat. Then add grated
coconut and molasses. Mix thoroughly, then add the ginger and orange peel. Stir
over a low fire until the mixture leaves the side of the pot — make sure it doesn’t
burn. Drop spoonsful of the mixture onto a greased dish or pan. Let it cool just a
little, and form into balls. Let it harden and chill just a bit.
Were you always this passionate about
your roots, or is this something that came up as you got older?
I had the roots set into me, but it wasn’t something that was
really talked about. I was always into history, and particularly
black history. You’re born into it, but it took people from
the outside to make me realise what we had. When I got to
St Thomas in 2004, that was when it really hit me. St Thomas
is full of people from Haiti, Jamaica, and St Kitts, and I realised
that a lot of people there knew about our culture.
What are some of the similarities between Caribbean food and
what you are used to in South Carolina?
The one-pot cooking, the slow cooking of meats, the barbecuing
and smoking of meats, the seafood, the love for fish, the greens
and the okra — that right there, that’s Africa.
It seems that okra is the common thread among black people,
isn’t it?
I would say that’s our mother plant. We love okra, its part of
our heritage and part of our culture. To me, that’s one of the
connectors.
I once saw on television where Andrew Zimmern on his programme
Bizarre Foods went into a Gullah community and they
were eating squirrels. Is that something that happens still?
Back home, sometimes you see them skinning a big deer, you
go to what we call the Sea Islands and you will still see the deer
being skinned and squirrels being prepared. Even in the city, in
some of the old black communities, you see it. It’s still part of the
culture, but it’s dying. The younger generation doesn’t want that,
they want it easy.
What about your media side? Are you going to be doing shows
on the food channels?
I have appeared on Top Chef [on cable channel Bravo], but as a
guest talking about the culture of food. TV is not my big thing,
unless I can spread the word of culture, unless I can share with
other black chefs who are passionate about the diaspora. TV can
sometimes put you in a bad light — sometimes the way they edit
you can show you in a light that makes you look ignorant. I would
do TV again, but it has to be about culture and food.
“People have been doing ‘soul
food’ — I don’t like that term. We
have to do African diaspora food,
‘culture food’”
Is it important for more black chefs to come forward throughout
the diaspora and tell these stories?
Coming up as chefs, we only saw one side. People have been
doing “soul food” — I don’t like that term. We have to do African
diaspora food, “culture food.” When you learn about the culture
ways and get these old recipes and old ingredients, it inspires
you. It would be great to see more chefs dig into this culture —
don’t be ashamed!
We call it brown food, because it’s brown stews and gravies,
but you can sexy it up . . . We have to get out of this mindset of
what white chefs are doing. You know what they’re going to do?
They’re going to take our food and make it seem like they discovered
something. We have to reclaim our foodways, reclaim
our culture. n
38 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Immerse
Zoe Davidson
40 Closeup
The puzzle of “home”
46
Own Words
“I’m not trying to fill
his shoes”
48 Showcase
Miriam
André Alexis, Trinidadian-Canadian author of Fifteen Dogs

CLOSEUP
The puzzle of
“home”
For writer André Alexis — born in Trinidad, bred in Canada —
home is “not any one thing.” In his elegant, inventive novels,
he explores the intricacies of the human mind through the
play of complex ideas. Along the way, as Donna Yawching
learns, Alexis has reinvigorated both Canadian and
Caribbean writing — and a string of recent awards shows
how his literary ambitions have impressed the critics
Photogrpahy by Zoe Davidson
It is fair to say that André Alexis is a writer like no other.
Of course, one might argue that’s true of any writer worth
his salt — but, with Alexis, there’s enough salt to flavour
an ocean.
Name one other writer who has won a country’s highest
literary prize with a book (ostensibly) about a pack
of dogs, or one whose version of God appears to be a talking
sheep. His short story about a young man’s obsessive desire for
a soucouyant predates the Twilight series by at least a decade,
and another in which all the characters have versions of his own
name is just flat-out weird.
And yet Alexis is not a “novelty” writer, seeking out the outrageous
in order to make a splash. On the contrary, he is a deeply
philosophical, unfailingly literary author, whose passionate
interest is the exploration of ideas. Big ideas: love, power, divinity,
the concept of home — all of which show up in his works,
twisting and turning into different forms, different visions. “I
have a very small set of concerns,” he quips. “But I work them
like crazy.”
Born in Trinidad in 1957, Alexis moved to Canada when he
was three and a half. He grew up largely in Ottawa, the nation’s
capital, with stints in small-town Ontario, before ending up
in Toronto thirty years ago. Home, for him, is a conundrum, a
constant search. “It’s one of the explorations of my lifetime,”
he says. “I keep thinking about it and wondering about it and
questioning what it is. Having lost it as a child, it’s very difficult
to find it again.”
This is a theme that recurs in virtually all of his work. It runs
like an undercurrent throughout his first novel, Childhood (1998)
— a fictional autobiography that has very little to do with his
actual life — and closes the narrative in several other works. In
Asylum, the author, musing on his self-exile, writes: “I now think
the hardest part of leaving home has been the loss of coherence.”
A character at the end of Hidden Keys “wondered if home were
people or a place. It was, of course, both and neither.”
And in Fifteen Dogs (winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Giller
Prize, Canada’s most coveted literary award), the last nanosecond
of consciousness of the last dog alive — not coincidentally,
the bard, the poet, the troubadour — is a flashback to “home,”
and an awareness of love, which are perhaps the same thing.
With so many tantalising — and often contradictory — hints,
it is impossible not to wonder where André Alexis considers to
be home. Is he Trinidadian? Is he Canadian? Both? Neither? His
answer, of course, is enigmatic: home, he declares, “is multiform;
it’s not any one thing. It’s the sound of the chickens in the
backyard, the sound of the sea; but also, it’s snow, pine trees, the
silence that comes in winter.” (A conversation with Alexis is like
this: ideas, images, walking on a cloud.)
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His earliest experiences of separation and loss, dislocation
not just physical but also emotional, may be responsible for his
Nowherian identity (a term coined by St Lucia’s Nobel laureate
Derek Walcott). When he was barely one year old, Alexis’s
Trinidadian parents decided to migrate to Canada: his father
to study medicine, his mother law. They left their two children
— André and his baby sister Thecla — with separate sets of
relatives. His mother Ena Borde now says, “André felt we should
not have separated them. I think that affected him a lot when he
was young.” Alexis lived with an uncle for two and a half years,
until — pregnant with her third child — Ena reunited her family,
bringing the children to Canada.
Alexis views this period of his life as “two breaches: there was
the loss of my parents, and (subsequently) the loss of my home.
It makes you re-examine what the world is, at a very basic level.
And doing it at three or four, you don’t have the equipment; you
have to invent the equipment to understand the world. And so
Canada was the country to learn home in, not to be at home.”
His books reflect this split: both cultural realities are overt
in the narratives; neither is denied, neither is idealised.
His description of a wedding or a wake is instantly
recognisable by any West Indian, anywhere in the world. A
costume parade in small-town Ontario is Trinidad’s Carnival in
miniature. Alexis writes in pristine English, but the occasional
Trini phrase slides slyly into the prose (“Oh lors!” wails one
character, with not even a hint of explanation to the nonplussed
non-Caribbean reader, who probably dismisses it as a typo). Alexis
loves it when a fellow-Trinidadian catches these little winks, like
a secret code.
“My work is the work of an immigrant,” he says, “and couldn’t
not be. If you take a mango seedling and put it in Canada, what
is it? It’s still a tropical plant, and always will be. I’m a tropical
plant.”
Which would make perfect sense, if his works were overtly
about transplant: the hackneyed immigrant story (stranger in
a strange land, obstacles/triumphs/heartbreaks/redemption).
But they’re not — his dislocations are more often mental
than geographical. This mango seedling has been thoroughly
naturalised: writing about Ottawa and Toronto, or the Ontario
countryside, Alexis achieves a sense of place that is more vivid,
more real, than the born-and-bred Canadian novelists, most of
whom are still searching plaintively for “identity” (“We are nice,
we are polite, we are not American”).
In an early interview with Canadian literature professor
Branko Gorjup (published in Books in Canada, April 1998), Alexis
declared: “I don’t feel myself particularly part of any branch of
the Canadian literary tradition, but I don’t feel myself disconnected
from it either. As to the West Indian heritage . . . yes, I
am very much West Indian in the way I grew up . . . Trinidad is
and always will be the first environment that I was exposed to.
However, that doesn’t mean that I consider myself a West Indian
writer. I couldn’t write as I write now had I stayed in Trinidad . . .
It may be that alienation was necessary for my creativity.”
Alexis was drawn to writing early in life. “I wanted to be
either a musician, or something artistic,” he recalls. He started
playing guitar around age fourteen, and picked up writing
shortly afterwards. He still plays the guitar, but clearly writing
won the creativity derby. (Though not completely: at the time of
our interview, he was working on the libretto for an opera.)
He studied English at Carlton University, but after a year “I
realised I didn’t really want to do English,” he explains, with
no apparent irony. Next he took a shot at Russian, lasting half
a year. “That was the last time I was in university. I don’t have
any degrees,” he reveals, almost proudly. His high-achieving
parents were less than thrilled. Says Ena Borde: “As a parent
you think, he has a good mind, why doesn’t he get a degree
that would take him through life?” But she knew better than
to press her shy, bookish son: “I always gave my children the
freedom to make their own decisions.”
Abandoning academia, Alexis found a job in a bookshop — a
way to be surrounded by books without having to fit them into
the “completist” framework of formal education. He read widely
and esoterically, but denies being erudite: “I just like ideas.
Ideas are my natural subject, because I think the human mind
is my natural subject.” Nevertheless, his books are studded with
names and theories that the average reader would struggle to
recognise.
At thirty, Alexis moved to Toronto, where destiny patiently
awaited him. His daughter Nicola was born a few years later
— shortly before Alexis was fired from his job at Book City for
refusing to work overtime at an event. (“Insubordination?” I
suggest helpfully. “Yes, insubordination,” he exclaims. “I like
that word, it makes me look like a rebel!”).
42 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

He was unemployed, with an infant daughter to support.
“The proper thing,” he muses, “would have been to get a
proper job. But I knew if I did, I would never be a writer.”
Instead, he applied for unemployment insurance, and wrote.
“It could have gone either way,” he shrugs.
Alexis’s work attracted notice right from the start: his
first book of short stories, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa
(1994) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize,
and his first novel, Childhood (1998), took two Canadian
awards. Pastoral (2014) was on another prestigious shortlist,
and finally with Fifteen Dogs (2015) Alexis hit the jackpot, winning
the C$100,000 Giller Prize as well as Canada’s Writers’
Trust Fiction Prize.
But it was a long, slow road, and rags were a very real
possibility before riches finally appeared. “I would get up at
5 am and write,” he recalls. “I earned $50 here doing a book
review, $50 there. I mean, you worked like a beast. It’s a life.
It’s not a rich life.”
“The main thing that stands out with André is his stick-toitiveness,”
says his mother. “He was writing for almost forty years
before getting recognition. There were some pretty dry years.”
The dry years are (probably) behind him. In March
2017, Alexis was shocked to receive the Windham
Campbell Prize, administered by the Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Candidates
are nominated secretly — they know about it only if they win.
Awarded in recognition of a writer’s entire body of work, it is,
at US$165,000, one of the richest literary prizes in the world.
“If you take a mango seedling
and put it in Canada, what is
it? It’s still a tropical plant, and
always will be. I’m a tropical
plant”
Alexis’s closest friend, the poet Roo Borson, thinks the
recognition is well deserved and long overdue. “He lived a very
impoverished life for a long time,” she says. “Now he can live by
his art. That’s incredibly important, that makes an enormous
difference in a person’s life. He has more freedom — he’s just
generally happier.”
Asked if he’s surprised at all this fame and fortune, Alexis
doesn’t hesitate: “Yes. I never expect to do well. It’s not
that I don’t think I’m a good writer, or that I’m relentlessly
self-deprecating; it’s that you don’t think about that.” He fully
expects (he says) to sooner or later find himself back at his
old $50-a-review life (“I think I’m going to go back to it. I’m
sure”). But this seems unlikely. If nothing else, he is in high
demand for literary juries and university writing residencies.
And for good reason. Alexis is an extraordinarily skilled
writer, as well as an unusually thoughtful one. “André’s
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 43

writing is gorgeous,” exclaims Borson. “It’s playful, the sentences
are beautiful, I love reading them. It has an ingenuous
charm. He’s one of the best writers out there today. He’s devoted
to the aesthetics of writing.” His mother, less effusive but still his
biggest fan, comments: “He can write a sentence — there’s no
doubt about that.”
His writing “reflects the world, in a skewed way,” says Borson.
“There is a philosophical basis, but his work is not academic.
He’s not scholarly. He takes in a huge amount of information,
then re-combines it in a way that is deeply thoughtful and yet
playful at the same time.”
The best example of this might be his prizewinning novel
Fifteen Dogs, Alexis’s most accessible work. As it opens, two
ancient Greek gods, Apollo and Hermes, are drinking in a
Toronto pub. (This is treated as a mundane event.) A drunken bet
leads them to grant the gift of human consciousness to a group
of dogs, in order to see if they end up any happier than humans.
The implications are tremendous:
the book is an extended rumination
on power, violence, religion,
love, language, and poetry — all
while presenting the world from
a canine point of view (sensuality,
savagery, smells, food).
“I’ve displaced the humans,”
Alexis says. “So when you look at
the dogs you’re not seeing them
as humans, but you’re not seeing them as dogs either. It’s a trick
of the light.” (Why dogs? Alexis’s stint babysitting a friend’s
dogsledding operation in rural Ontario may have had something
to do with that. As Borson says: real life, skewed.)
His books may be onion-like in their numerous layers, but in
person, Alexis is straightforward and easy to talk to, with not
a hint of pretentiousness. “I’m a very boring human being,” he
insists. “I basically just sit around and write.” In Toronto, his
sitting-around happens in a neighbourhood Starbucks café: “I
take a corner and I stay there for five hours. I usually have my
headphones in. I have a coffee, I have a sprouted grain bagel with
cream cheese, and then I write. That’s it.”
When he can, though, he prefers to go far away and
sequester himself: the book that gave him the most pleasure
was Pastoral, which was written “every single day” for three
“I just like ideas. Ideas are
my natural subject, because I
think the human mind is my
natural subject”
months, in London, England. “It’s a city I love, a city that I’m
a stranger in,” he explains. He also has fond memories of a
three-month stint in Buccoo Village, Tobago: “It’s my kind
of place because, think about it, nothing’s happening! It’s a
writer’s paradise. I was five minutes from the sea and I never
saw the sea! I’m a writer.”
And an ambitious one, at that. While most novelists are
grateful to get one book done and (if they’re lucky) move
on to the next, Alexis is currently working on a construct
of five. He calls it a “quincunx,” which is technically the geometric
pattern of five found on dice, playing cards, and dominoes: four
points arranged in a square, with a fifth in the middle. Interpreting
this as a kind of divine ordering, Alexis has written the first three
books of the structure, and is working on the fourth — but, to
complicate matters, the final book will actually be number three
of the series, the dot in the middle, connecting and illuminating
all the others. (“André needs to
challenge himself continuously,”
Borson muses.)
This massive project is not a
series in the conventional sense:
the first three books do not follow
each other in chronology, storyline
or form. Pastoral is structured
to reflect Beethoven’s “Pastorale”
Symphony; Fifteen Dogs is a Greek
apologue (a moral tale); Hidden Keys is a giant and pointless
riddle, inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
The overlap is in the ideas being explored, the rocks being
turned over.
Alexis says he had the entire structure in mind before starting
on the first book: “They all came to me at once — so I know
what the last one is. It’s convenient. But it’s also why I feel like
I’ve been doing the same work for the last ten years.” When all
five are written, he hopes to publish an omnibus edition, in the
proper order, which, he says, “will reveal the ideas in different
lights, and different depths.”
“The quincunx is probably the biggest project that André will
write in his life,” says Borson. Maybe she’s right. But — Alexis
being who he is — who knows? Maybe a sextet is percolating
behind those owlish glasses, even as we speak. n
44 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Own words
“I’m not
trying to
fill his
shoes”
Skip Marley, grandson of
the legendary Bob and
the latest member of the
Marley clan to strike out
for musical stardom, on the
importance of family and
the message of his music —
as told to Nazma Muller
Photography courtesy Meredith Truax
46 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

I
think I always knew who my grandfather
was, because my momma told me. But the
first time I realised the significance of the
impact he had, I was twelve. I realised that
I wanted to be a musician about a year after
that — when I was around thirteen years old.
I have always loved music, but I was shy about
my singing voice. But one night, while on tour with
my uncle Stephen, he pushed me on stage during
a concert and prompted me to sing “One Love” to
a crowd of hundreds. He gave me the microphone,
and from that moment on, I felt music. I remember
coming off the stage and seeing everyone crying.
They said they never knew that I sang songs.
Finally, they had the next one.
Am I claiming Bob’s throne? Maybe. He’s living
through us, in all the choices we make every day.
But I’m not trying to fill his shoes. I just want to be
the voice of the next generation.
new artist would be happy for the chance to learn and soak up some of that. I’ve
always been Cedella Marley’s son, so I don’t really have anything to compare it
to. But, having her for a mom definitely influences me to work hard, have love
and respect for people and the planet. Music is art, and it sends a message. So I
want people to enjoy the art in the music, but also get the message.
“It’s different times, but it’s the same fight
as my grandfather’s. But it’s not a physical
fight — it’s a mental battle”
On “Chained to the Rhythm”, for example, I
sing about walls, truth, and greed. We’re about
to riot / they woke up the lions. And on my single
“Lions” I send the message that my generation will
not have their rights taken away or be told how to
pray, and will instead start a movement.
It’s different times, but it’s the same fight as my
grandfather’s. But it’s not a physical fight — it’s a
mental battle. When I say “my generation” or “this
generation,” it’s to reassure people that when we
come together and stand strong, we’re people, and
we’ll outnumber those who wrong.
I enjoy working with and being around all my
family — they are some of the best in this business.
Last year I toured with my uncles, Damian and
Stephen, and this year we were all on Kayafest
together in Miami. I’ve also performed with my
great-aunt, Marcia Griffiths. There is so much
experience and wisdom among everyone — any
I
was born in Kingston, and I love being there with my family as much as we
get the chance. I am blessed to travel to many places in the world — Sweden,
Ethiopia, and other islands in the Caribbean. Jamaica has a unique energy
that people won’t feel anywhere else, which is one of the reasons I love it. The
best thing about living in Miami is my family and the sunshine.
Right now I am in the studio working on my EP, and so what’s next is —
more music. Who would I like to collaborate with? Some of the best collabs
can be unplanned and unexpected, so I don’t really keep a list. One of my first
collaborations was with [Riddim Twins] Sly & Robbie and Spicy Chocolate for
their Reggae Power 2 album. This year I worked with some great artists and
producers — from Katy Perry to Supadups. Right now I am featured on this
cool track by SEEB called “Cruel World”. Collaborating with each one came
with its own vibe, and we created something unique. Based on the experiences
of the last couple of years, I would like to keep an open mind and just
see what opportunities come.
I don’t get stressed out. The one time I got a little bit stressed was when I
was on the [2017] Grammy stage with Katy Perry. It was surreal. You always
see these people [on TV], and being in the same room with them, that’s huge
for me. Katy gave me free range to do whatever I wanted. And we really
meshed well. I’m so thankful for the opportunity, you know, to reach so many
people. It’s impactful. Katy’s message is powerful, we all need to listen. She is
a creative person. I’ll remember her and the experience forever.
I like a lot of different music and artists. Lately we’ve been focused on
finishing up my project, so mainly I listen back to the tracks that I’m working
on. Besides that, I have been listening to Burning Spear and Steel Pulse. I also
listen to the Melody Makers’ albums.
My songs are expressions of thoughts and reactions to life, and what I
observe happening in the world. I wrote songs all through my teens. The same
way that you see events in the news or around you that make you think and feel
a certain way, that’s how it is for me too — I just put it into music and lyrics.
The message for my generation is one of love, equality, and the unification
of mankind, you know. I think that it’s something for every generation, not
just my own. We all need to live with more respect and freedom for people
and our planet.
I wouldn’t get involved in politics. My grandfather once said, “Never let a
politician grant you a favour. They will always want to control you forever.” I
don’t need to be a politician to help bring about change. We have the power —
not the other way around, so we need to be doing things differently.
People can live in love and harmony, and come to an understanding, so we
all grow together. But it has to come from within. n
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SHOWCASE
Saturday is Desmond day, and every Saturday is the same story. She could hear
him calling by the gate just as she put the soup in a bowl to cool, and she ain’t even
have to catch a glimpse of the long, narrow head through the curtain to know is
him. And sometimes he reach while she still turning the split peas on the fire.
Those days he sit down in the kitchen and tell her at least three times how
good the pot smelling. As if he ain’t know she going to invite him to have
a bowl with her, as if he ain’t see the pattern yet after all this time. And when it ready,
Desmond sit down in the chair opposite hers, and after nearly every spoonful, he wipe his
moustache with two fingers. And he compliment the dumplings, and the salt meat, and the
thickness of the soup, and he can’t help but notice how orange the pumpkin is, and sweet,
and he had swear he never would have taste a split peas soup like his mother could have
make, but this one just as more-ish as hers (Desmond always take two bowls).
Then after lunch, when the table clear, he sit down in the Morris chair in the drawing
room till she finish wash the wares, and when she done, he stay and talk to her for about an
hour while she sew. Miriam was a
seamstress, and though readymade
clothes more and more available,
people in the neighbourhood still
coming by her regular.
Wasn’t till about the third time
he visit that Desmond start bringing
his clothes that want a needle.
First it was only two buttons on
one shirt that he ask her to sew on.
Miriam
One woman, four gentleman
Illustration by Shalini Seereeram
Say he “hopeless with needle and
thread,” and he “know is a lot to
ask but . . .” Miriam figure it must
be because she sympathise a little
too much that he come to take her
for granted. She remember clear
clear what she tell him the first time
when he watch her sheepish. How is
not everything a body could do, and
what it take out of her to sew on two
buttons?, and if he feel he can’t ask
her a favour, that’s a bad sign.
Of course, the first few Saturdays
she was still wondering how he come to visit her in the first place. The first few
Saturdays, Miriam change her dress before he reach, tie her hair with a brighter scarf than
the one she’s usually wear in the house, and take the apron from around her waist (though
she say a little prayer that nothing would have fall on her clothes). When Desmond come in
the kitchen and stand up close, watching over her shoulder while she stir the pot, she find
her face getting hot. She tell herself it can’t just be food that bring him.
But now she ain’t so sure. When Desmond leave, he have a thick slice of sweetbread in
greaseproof, and his three pairs of workpants darn, wrap in brown paper, and the parcel
tie with twine. He wave to her from by the gate, a grin splitting his narrow head in two.
“Saturday!” he shout like a promise as he stride off.
“He come for a pair of able hands,” she say to herself as she watch him go.
callers . . . A short story by
Michelene Adams
Sunday after John Rawlins wake up from a weekend of carousing with woman, he walk
over by Miriam. He come in wearing dungarees, no string tie, no grease in his hair.
Sometimes Friday and Saturday evening, she see him passing with one woman or
another in the old Zephyr he buy third-hand from somebody living on the hill, but he don’t
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At least four woman in the village
claim their child is John Rawlins
own, but he careful to pick the kind
of woman who, for one reason or
another, wouldn’t try and prove it
even nod at her then. She know he see her, but his eye anywhere
else — out the other window, on the road, or he turn to look at
the woman who always hook up under the arm he have stretch
out across the top of the seat. At least four woman in the village
claim their child is John Rawlins own, but he careful to pick the
kind of woman who, for one reason or another, wouldn’t try and
prove it. So he home free.
Nobody besides his mother know
the side of him Miriam is see every
Sunday. As he reach, he head for
Bally is a tailor, a widower. He have a shop that start out as a
hole in the wall, but after his wife dead, Bally throw himself
into his work so hard that he spitting out clothes fast as a
factory. Some people say that’s why Bally children so lawless, that
is their father guiding hand they missing. Bally sister come to take
care of the children, but is best she didn’t bother, because she used
to drink, and by two o’clock in the afternoon, she sleeping on the
gallery with a set of Stag bottles on the floor by her foot. Bally
send her home after seven months or so.
Bally have a plague of children: Rupert, who driving taxi;
Angie — she living with a police constable; and Bobby, the one
who win a scholarship to the university, but he selling snow cone
from a bicycle cart and wearing his hair in a ponytail, because
like he and books vex. And all the younger ones wild, especially
the boys, running through the streets like a pack of goats. All
name after Indian gods, like Bally and his wife find religion
late — Vishnu, Indra, Sita, Shiva, Krishna . . . Miriam ain’t even
sure how many.
Sometimes on a evening during the week, Bally
come “for a little breeze” by her. They sit
in the gallery and he shake his head
more than he talk. Sometimes when
the scrubbing brush. While she in the back picking tomato
and green fig, Rawlins nearby cleaning out the chicken coop.
“You can’t manage everything by yourself,” he say, as he fill
a pail of water to wash down the run. He turn off the tap and
look straight in Miriam eye. “You ain’t go believe this,” he say,
“but every Sunday I tell myself, ‘This the last weekend of your
slackness, John Rawlins. Time to stop your womanising.’ But
when Marilyn Harvey walk past me with that roll of she hipline,
or Joan Darlington sitting in the window upstairs and give me a
smile. If any of them woman pass any kind of invitation (because
even when they ain’t realise it, they’s be passing invitation), I
there with them.”
Miriam take the figs and tomato inside, and through the
window, she see Rawlins on his hands and knees scrubbing the
concrete.
“Is absolution he here for,” she say.
the night damp and the scent of jasmine reach her from the little
piece of garden she have in the front of the house, she look at
Bally. She watch the curve of his eyebrow, and his jawline, and
his hands — neat fingers clasp in his lap — and she think to
herself she might be able to calm down those children — maybe
is a woman they need. Maybe all Angie need is a woman in the
house again, and she might come back home and settle down.
So she get up and bring some tea with a mint leaf. “To soothe
your nerves,” she tell him, and he hold the cup in one hand and
rub his temple with the other one. But when he done drinking
he get to his feet and tell her he have to wake up early to finish a
waistcoat. When she open the gate for him to pass, he stand up
watching down the road.
“You see Angie lately?” he finally ask. “She scrawny and her
skin like it grey. She used to be a nice-looking girl. I tired talk,
though. I wash my hand of all of them.”
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As he pass through the gate, Miriam watch how he’s stoop a
little when he walk and how his hands making two fists.
“He want somebody to pass his children on to,” she say.
But Nathaniel Mendoza have her confuse. First time she see
him was the day her neighbour son had help her cut down
the zaboca tree that was sick. She come out to wet the
heliconia when the sun start to go down, and find this tall brownskin
man leaning on the gate watching at the trunk and branches pile on
the pavement for the City Council truck to pick up.
“You will miss your zabocas,” he say, as if they accustom talking
over the wall just so. “Eh heh,” she say, softly, expecting him
to say something more, but he just walk away. She remember
she stand up on the gallery wiping her wet hands on her dress
watching him go. He was whistling.
But a couple weeks later, he show up at the gate carrying a
paper bag with two perfect Pollock pears. She thank him and
offer him a glass of lime juice, so he pass through the gate after
her and follow her into the gallery. Nathaniel from Paramin,
that little village nestled in the Maraval hills. You could see it
in the distance on your left on the way to Blanchisseuse. “Not
everybody could make it up there,” he say. “Is only four-wheel
drive could climb them hills.”
He tell her he have five brothers and sisters, and all of them
still in that village. When she say all she know about Paramin
is they look Spanish, they’s grow chive, they always bring out
a blue devil band at Carnival, and they play parang, he laugh
and say his parents is sell seasoning in the market, two brothers
involve in blue devil mas since they in their teens, and he is the
mandolin man in a parang band. “Maybe is true, and all we good
for in Paramin is growing chive, spitting fire, and making music
for Christmas.”
His face break open in a smile, and Miriam find he remind her
of something from when she was small, but she ain’t sure what.
She smile, too, though.
“Parang ain’t parang without the mandolin,” she say.
When Nathaniel talk, he’s use his hands plenty, as if the words
not enough to tell the story. Miriam sit and listen and watch at
the shapes his hands making. He not handsome, but he have a
kind face, and eyes like he always studying something more.
He working on the wharf, and he tell Miriam about some of the
things he see: Filipino sailors, small like boys; Koreans — big
hard-back men — walking along the docks holding hands. He
always find that odd, but everybody have their own way, he say.
Once he watch a Norweigan officer standing on the deck of a
cruise ship, throwing down coins for a local woman below. Her
husband was there, but the captain like he didn’t care.
But a lot of the time he cross one long leg over the next one
and listen to her. It look like the stories he’s tell make her want
to talk, too. Sometimes she surprise at what she remember. All
kind of thing from when she was small — how she used to play
in the dry river bed with twin sisters who live in a house where
everything paint pink. Or the time they were staying in Las
Piedras and she sleepwalk out to the sea and nearly drown. She
find she want him to listen. When Nathaniel say he going, she try
to think of things she could talk about that might get him to lean
back in the chair and cross his legs again. She look in his face
and her heart flutter — almost like a bird that frighten — but she
don’t have anything to keep him. He wave from by the gate and
walk brisk towards the junction.
Around five o’clock most Saturdays after that he come, and
he tell his tales leaning back in the chair, his long legs stretch out,
but he always leave once the neighbours start to turn on their
lights. She invite him to stay for a little roast bake and smoke
herring one evening, but he thank her and say, “Is time to head
up. I have a good way to go to get home.” Miriam find that after
Nathaniel gone on those Saturdays, she sit down in the gallery
thinking about her parents, about her brother and sister who in
America years now, about school days. Sometimes she ain’t even
remember to watch the news on the little TV she have in the
drawing room, and instead she just stay on the gallery with the
lights of houses twinkling in the hills.
“What this Paramin man come down here for?” she hear herself
ask softly, but she can’t see that he really come for anything
in particular.
The strangest dream she ever have is come back in a
different form every so often. In one dream, she on the
gallery, and a man pass and tip his hat and tell her she have
a beautiful garden, and he especially fond of the lovely red plant,
and gone on his way. In another one, she come out of the service
with all the congregation and in the courtyard the men turning
from their wife and smiling at her, and one of them whisper,
After his wife dead, Bally throw
himself into his work so hard that
he spitting out clothes fast as a
factory
“That’s a wonderful red plant growing wild in your garden,” and
before she have time to answer, he disappear in the crowd. Is have
her uncomfortable when she wake up; she never like the idea of
getting praise or compliment when she ain’t deserve it, and in the
dream she don’t have chance to say they must be mix hers up with
some other garden, because she ain’t have no such plant. But by
the time she get out of the bed and gone to the kitchen to make
tea, she forget till the next time.
The following Saturday morning she went to the market
and bring back the usual ingredients for the soup. She
peel the dasheen and cassava and sweet potato and put it
to boil. She cut up the chive and onion and crush the garlic. She
burst the split peas in the pressure cooker, and as she take it off
the fire, she hear Desmond call out. He early today. She walk out
to the gallery, and he beam at her from the gate. He was carrying
a shopping bag with some piece of clothes or the other in it. She
take a deep breath.
“Desmond,” she hear herself say, “I can’t invite you in today,
nuh.”
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His eyebrows raise. “Oho,” he say. “You busy?”
“I going South as soon as I finish cook. My cousin been asking
me to come down by her in Siparia long time now and I decide I
go take the bus and go for the weekend.”
Miriam cousin had really ask her a few times to visit, but is
only when she see Desmond long head at the gate that she decide
to go. She had always wonder what it would be like to travel in
one of them new buses. “Luxury ride.” She had seen those words
somewhere — must be in the papers.
Desmond look down at the bag in his hand and open his
mouth, but he close it again. “Alright, Miriam,” he say. “We go
pick up.”
She gone back in the kitchen after he walk up towards Main
Street, and she rest her hands on the kitchen counter and look
at them.
When John Rawlins show up as usual the next Sunday
morning, Miriam was reading the Express in the
drawing room. She part the curtain and wave at him.
He say “Morning” as he close the gate behind him, and almost in
the same breath, he ask her if she want him to start with the fowl
run or if she need anything special do.
“Why we don’t just sit down for a change and have a cup a
coffee,” she say.
When Nathaniel talk, he’s use his
hands plenty, as if the words not
enough to tell the story. Miriam sit
and listen and watch at the shapes
his hands making
Rawlins eye fly open.
“Dew still on the plants, John. Watch.”
“Sit down?” he say, excited. “But I ain’t come to sit down,
Miriam. I come to give you a hand. I sure something round here
need doing.”
Miriam shake her head. “I not feeling for busyness round me.
Maybe you should stop for a while and just . . . well, just breathe.
Is Sunday, after all, you know.”
John sigh hard. He look round the yard.
“Best I go by my mother. I’s usually go there after I leave by
you. She’s be glad for the pull out,” he say.
The Anglican church bell ring seven o’clock. Rawlins start to
tap his thigh.
Miriam watch him and smile slow. “Alright, John,” she say.
He sigh again and get to his feet then he lift the latch on the
little wooden gallery gate.
She was sitting outside listening to the radio after dinner one
night the next week when Bally call out.
“Miriam,” he say with a sad smile, “Good evening.”
“Bally,” Miriam greet him, “I glad you pass. Come and sit
down a while. I had wanted to ask you something.”
He push the gate, come up the steps, and get in the old rocking
chair.
“I was thinking about Mayaro,” she say.
Bally furrow his brow. “Mayaro?”
“Yes, boy.” She clasp her hands in her lap. “When I was on the
bus coming from South the other day, I realise how good it is for
a body to see something different sometimes. That road to South
ain’t playing it pretty. The rolling hills . . . When last you and your
children went somewhere for a little breeze?”
Bally look at her, puzzled. Then he give a dry kind of laugh
and lean back in the chair. “I ain’t go nowhere with my children
since my wife die.” He frown and look off down the street
towards his house.
“That’s a long time,” Miriam say softly.
“Four years,” Bally say. “We used to drive in the van to
Rampanalgas when some of them was still small. Sita was a
baby, and Krishna wasn’t even born. We used to play cricket on
the beach — take bat and ball and thing.”
“That sounding real nice,” Miriam smile.
Bally nod, and Miriam find like his eyes damp.
“Maybe you could take the van and go one Sunday? Maybe
you could ask Angie to go to help you with the younger ones?”
“Maybe,” Bally murmur. “Angie love the sea.” He look up at
Miriam. “The salt might be good for all of us,” he say.
Saturday evening about fiveish and Miriam watering the
croton she have in a pot in the gallery.
“I had come last week,” she hear a deep voice say.
It startle her, but she look up to find Nathaniel, wearing a
yellow All Stars jersey, standing with his arm on the metal gate.
“But like you had gone out.”
“Yes, yes,” Miriam still watering the croton, “I went South.
You not coming in?” she ask. The water spill over the brim of the
plate under the pot.
“South? Eh eh! Nice, man. You have family there?” He come
up the stairs and lean up in the entryway.
“Yes, yes,” she say, “And long time I promise I would visit. We
had a real nice time catching up. In fact,” she chuckle, “I have
stories to tell you. My cousin tell me plenty things I never knew
about my family.”
“Stories? Nice,” Nathaniel say, then like he remember he carrying
something. He take out a container from the bag.
“I bring some smoke herring,” he tell her. “I season it with
lime, and I put pimento and chive from my garden. Tomato, too,
of course” He pause, then, “I was hoping you might make some
roast bake again.”
Miriam catch her breath. “I will roast the bake to go with the
herring,” she say, gazing at the watering can. “Come in the kitchen,
nuh, and I will tell you one or two of the stories while I prepare.”
She look up now and watch him good, and she find he just
there, like all he doing is waiting to listen. She hold out her
arm and step aside for Nathaniel to pass through the narrow
doorway, but he pause, then bend down, untie his shoes and
leave them on the gallery.
When he raise up again he give a slight bow, and gesture to
her to lead him into the house. n
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ARRIVE
Bernardo Galmarini / Alamy Stock Photo
54 Destination
Havana hello
62
Travellers’ Tales
Reggae city
Hard at work in Havana, Caribbean Airlines’ newest destination

Destination
Equal parts esplanade, seawall, and highway, Havana’s
famous Malecón stretches for five miles, from the
harbour of Old Havana to the Vedado neighbourhood,
lined with monuments and landmark buildings. Built at
the start of the twentieth century, it remains the city’s
most popular spot for seeing and being seen
54 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Havana
hello
The newest destination in Caribbean
Airlines’ network is also one of
the Caribbean’s most iconic cities.
Welcome to Havana!
bim/istock.com
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What could be more Cuban than a mojito,
the refreshing cocktail of white rum, lime
juice, and mint? La Bodeguita del Medio
claims to be the mojito’s birthplace. Scholars
of mixology don’t all agree, but the
traditional bar was certainly a favourite of
writer Ernest Hemingway, one of Havana’s
most famous resident expats
Milosz Maslanka/shutterstock.com
56 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Bernardo Galmarini / Alamy Stock Photo
The Gran Teatro, which opened in
1915, is home to the world-famous
Cuban National Ballet
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Havana is one of the world’s great cities
of music — not just salsa, rhumba, and
son, but jazz, reggae, hip-hop, and
classical, spilling out into the streets in
every neighbourhood
B&M Noskowski/istock.com
58 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Lazyllama / Alamy Stock Photo
Its Moorish façade makes the Palacio
de las Ursulinas one of Old Havana’s
most distinctive buildings
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Who needs a beach when you
have the Malecón — a favourite
swimming spot for generations of
Havana youngsters
Vova Pomortzeff / Alamy Stock Photo
Havana fact file
VEDADO
Population: 2.1 million
Area: 280 square miles
Founded in 1515 by a Spanish conquistador, Havana is
believed to be a Taíno name, derived from the original
inhabitants of Cuba
Malecón
CENTRO
El Morro
Planning a visit? Here’s some key information for travellers:
Foreign tourists require travel cards to enter Cuba, as well
as travel insurance. Contact the nearest Cuban embassy for
further information.
Cuba has two official currencies: the peso, for small everyday
purchases, and the convertible peso (also called CUC, or
“dollar” in local slang), used in most shops and businesses.
Credit cards are not widely accepted, but ATMs accept some
foreign debit cards. US dollars are not officially accepted
(though some vendors will accept or convert them) but euros
are in widespread use.
O L D H AVA N A
Parque Central
Plaza de la Revolución
El Capitolio
La Bodeguita
del Medio
Internet access can be limited and irregular, so it’s a good idea
to make hard copies of any documents you’ll need during
your trip, including plane tickets, itineraries, and health or
insurance information.
Caribbean Airlines flies direct to Havana from Port
of Spain twice each week, with convenient connections
to other regional destinations
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travellers’ tales
Reggae city
On Brazil’s Atlantic coast, the city of São Luís do
Maranhão has a complicated colonial past, ample
historic architecture, a tradition of avant-garde poets
— and it’s also a hotbed of reggae music. David Katz
heads there to learn more about an unlikely outpost
of Jamaican music, and the new reggae museum that
celebrates this cultural link
Marco Paulo Bahia Diniz/shutterstock.com
62 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

In an anonymous meeting hall on a São Luís backstreet, the
sweat is dripping off the walls. Several generations of one
family are partying together at the front of the dance floor,
and the divisive demarcations of race and class that often
dominate contemporary Brazil seem absent. Although
English is not widely spoken, dancers mime the choruses
of obscure roots classics by Eric Donaldson, the Maytones, and
Larry Marshall, all Jamaican countryside singers of a bygone
age — you could be forgiven for thinking that dancehall never
happened, let alone soca, grime, or dubstep.
A handwoven tapestry of the Maranhão State Vinyl Association
hangs proudly from the ceiling, and when DJ Jorge Black drops
the needle onto Tradition’s “Gambling Man”, a languid slice of
British lovers rock from 1978, waltzing couples push to the fore,
anxious to demonstrate their command of ritmo agarradinho, an
intricate, ecstasy-inducing move for clinching close-dancers that
roughly translates as the “rhythm grab.” It is the dance of choice
for all discerning Maranhese, who shun prospective partners that
cannot master it.
São Luís do Maranhão is one of the most intriguing and
atypical cities of Brazil’s far northeast. Located midway
between the beach bum’s utopian expanse of Fortaleza and
the ornate Amazonian metropolis of Belém, it was built on
an island flanked by two broad rivers that feed an Atlantic
bay, the picturesque yet dilapidated town centre attesting
to its former opulence. São Luís’s complicated history and
peculiar geographical location have rendered it one of the most
ethnically diverse of all Brazilian cities, its relative isolation
yielding a strikingly unique culture. The town’s long locus as a
Waltzing couples push to the fore, anxious
to demonstrate their command of ritmo
agarradinho, an intricate, ecstasy-inducing
move for clinching close-dancers
Opposite page Festival time in São Luís
Above Even the city’s traffic lights are
decorated with azulejos
ostill/shutterstock.com
slave port and its proximity to the Amazon basin have resulted in substantial
black and Amerindian communities, and many of European descent reached
the city from the barren hinterlands known as the sertão, all of which is
reflected in local cultural practices.
For instance, the annual festival of Bumba-meu-Boi centres on the myth
of a slaughtered bull resurrected by an Amerindian shaman with the help of
St John the Baptist. The local variant of Candomblé, known as Tambor de Mine,
mixes West African spiritual traditions with Amerindian elements, while the
Tambor de Crioula and Cacuriá dance traditions have their roots in West Africa,
augmented by European and Amerindian influences.
São Luís also has deep associations with romantic and Parnassian poetry,
and reggae, not samba, is the music of choice, being so deeply engrained in the
local psyche that the state government has just established a Reggae Museum
in the heart of the old colonial centre — the only such institution outside of
reggae’s Jamaican homeland. It is another of the many unexpected aspects
of this vibrant and colourful city, known variously as the “Brazilian Athens,”
“Love Island,” and the “Brazilian Jamaica,” which forms a very rewarding
destination for travellers who make the effort to reach here.
“
São Luís is a distant place that’s not easy
to get to, even by plane,” says Otávio
Rodrigues, a journalist and broadcaster
who presented the popular Bumba Beat radio
show in São Luís during the 1990s. “The nearest
metropolitan capitals are about 1,000 kilometres
away, and historically the city was more connected
to Europe than to the rest of the country, which
resulted in a well-educated elite with a remarkable
list of writers, poets, and journalists, but also a
poor mass, mainly of African descent, or of mixed
Amerindian, African, and European. Aside from
the beautiful buildings of the historic centre and
a kind of bucolic poetry in certain circles, the city
has none of Europe’s glamour. Instead, popular
traditions like Bumba-meu-Boi and Cacuriá stand
as some of the best examples we can find of
Brazil’s rich folkloric universe.”
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This was once the site of a village of the indigenous Tupinambá tribe,
known as Upuon Açu. When French settlers arrived in 1612, they named
the town St Louis de Maragnan, after Louis XIII, but the Portuguese soon
ousted them, renaming the city São Luís in 1615. Dutch invaders occupied the
settlement from 1641 to 1645, and when they left the Portuguese made São
Luís one of the most noteworthy outposts of their South American empire,
designating it part of an independent state in the eighteenth century and a
subsequent commercial metropolis.
Its industries were based on plantation economies of sugar cane, cocoa,
and tobacco. The city’s fortunes peaked during the US Civil War, when
São Luís began exporting cotton to Britain, making it the third largest city
in Brazil, but the end of the war initiated a long decline. During the 1950s,
citizens of São Luís had the lowest life expectancy in the entire country, but
the lack of ready finance ironically helped preserve the city’s colonial centre,
sparing it the fate of more prosperous neighbours whose ancient structures
were bulldozed in the 60s and 70s.
São Luís’s complicated history and peculiar
geographical location have rendered it
one of the most ethnically diverse of all
Brazilian cities
An amble around the city’s historic centre today makes it abundantly clear
why São Luís was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. The
heart and soul is the area known as Praia Grande, due to its proximity to the
largest in-town beach, which is also sometimes referred to as the reviver, since
the district is undergoing extensive renovation. It is home to dozens of houses
flanked by ornate azulejos, the distinctive blue tiles brought as ships’ ballast
from Portugal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A smaller
number of mustard- or rust-coloured tiles were brought from France and
the Netherlands, and sloping tiled roofs, elaborate shuttered windows, and
wrought iron balconies are equally evocative portals of the past.
With so much of historic and architectural importance, UNESCO has
begun the long, slow process of reviving this area of cultural significance, and
although there is much still to be achieved, even the roofless structures of Praia
Grande retain uncommon beauty, such is the dramatic effect the large number
Brazil
Belém
São Luís
Salvador
A distinctive blue-tiled façade in
the historic quarter
of azulejos inevitably have on the eye. Particularly
striking examples can be found on Rua Portugal,
where the Museu de Artes Visuais (or Museum of
Visual Arts) has a whole floor devoted to them.
Surrounding streets such as the narrow Rua Dialma
Dutra and Rua Nazareth have plenty more.
Nearby, the Domingos Vieira Filho Cultural
Centre on Travessa do Giz and Casa do Maranhão
on Rua do Trapiche are both great places to
learn about Bumba meu Boi, Tambor de Mine,
and other local cultural traditions, while Casa
de Nozinho on Avenida Portugal displays local
folk art in handcrafted wood. These venues often
have informal tours in English, offered by local
volunteer guides, with those at Casa do Maranhão
being especially motivated to share their insights
on aspects of the prevailing culture.
The Museu Historico e Artistico (or Historical
and Artistic Museum) of Maranhão on Rua do Sol
is another place to get a sense of the city’s glory
64 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

lazyllama/shutterstock.com
days. It’s the preserved home of a wealthy family of the nineteenth century.
In addition to many artefacts of the period, there is an original copy of Aluísio
Azevedo’s abolitionist novel O Mulato, which is considered the first work of
Naturalism in Brazilian literature, though Azevedo was primarily associated
with a set of Romantic poets then based in São Luís. Their ranks included
Antônio Gonçalves Dias, regarded as the National Poet of Brazil for his 1843
opus “Canção do Exílio”, or “Song of Exile,” and Joaquim de Sousa Andrade,
an abolitionist poet known professionally as Sousandrade, who wrote a Pan-
American epic, “Guesa”, published in 1871. Andrade subsequently became the
city’s first mayor after Brazil was declared a republic in 1889.
That poetic tradition continues to the present, with important instances
surfacing in the bitter years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, most notably in
Ferreira Gullar’s “Poema Sujo” or “Dirty Poem”, an homage to resistance in
São Luís, written in exile in 1975.
My days in São Luís were typically spread among the cultural delights
of the Praia Grande, exploring its azulejos, Art Deco palaces, and baroque
churches, as well as the small crafts and food market, Casa Das Tulas
(where you can find local dishes such as the caldeirada maranhense seafood
stew, and an enigmatic soft drink labelled Guarana Jesus). Or I would
nip across the Jose Sarney Bridge to the beaches of Calhau and Araçagy,
passing through the administrative centre of
the rapidly expanding “Cidade Nova” in the
process. As Otávio Rodrigues explains, “The
centro histórico is located in front of Baía de São
Marcos (or Saint Mark’s Bay), where the Anil and
Bacanga rivers meet; a bridge was constructed
in 1970 to connect the city to the coastline, and
what was a wild area of sparse, rustic houses
became the ‘New City,’ where tall buildings and
shopping malls pretend to exalt some modernity.
Around all of that we have the residential
neighbourhoods, where part of the city’s history
was also written, and where we still can find
traditional fishing and farming procedures,
besides portions of original forests.”
Catching an inevitably spectacular sunset on
the beach or at a hilltop plaza overlooking the bay
from the reviver is a marvellous way to end the
day’s explorations. And once the sun goes down in
São Luís, reggae time has certainly arrived.
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 65

The São Luís skyline: old tiled roofs
and skyscrapers in the distance
Marco Paulo Bahia Diniz/shutterstock.com
The story of reggae in São Luís is a long and complex one, spawned by
the efforts of a few early record collectors during the 1970s, including
Ademar Danilo, whose pioneering radio show helped to introduce reggae
culture to the city — so much so that Danilo has been appointed the Reggae
Museum’s first director. Merchant seamen and the operators of radiolas — as
sound systems are locally known — also played important roles, with a range of
resident characters all aiding the music’s dissemination and local identification.
The city clearly retains one of the most unique reggae scenes in the world
— hence the motivation behind the museum, which aims to “materialise the
memories of a song that conveys messages of equality, peace, freedom, and
love,” looking at the “yesterday, today, and tomorrow of reggae in Maranhão,
Brazil, and the world,” according to the official opening statement.
“Reggae is important in São Luís for a lot of different reasons,” Rodrigues
says. “The reggae scene emerged here in the late 70s among some of Brazil’s
poorest people, similar to how it developed in Jamaica: through competing
sound systems, open-air dances, and specialist radio programmes. And
although the music’s religious subject wasn’t absorbed, the social message and
especially the romantic mood found a friendly territory in which to spread.
“The scene got bigger and bigger throughout the 80s and 90s, building a
cultural bridge between the two countries which more recently fed the rise
of local studio production and superstars, pushing reggae music in different
directions. So it’s easy to imagine what reggae did, and continues to do, for the
people of São Luís’s self-esteem.”
“In São Luís, one soon understands that reggae plays a profound role in the
local economy,” adds Kavin D’Palraj, a musician from Chennai who wrote his
doctoral dissertation on São Luís reggae. “It has affected political practices
and outcomes, defines relationships between neighbourhoods and different
socio-economic strata, and continues to stir passionate debate on the destiny
of the city and its people.”
Ultimately, Rodrigues feels that São Luís’s
Reggae Museum is primarily concerned with
local validation and the potential to increase the
number of overseas visitors. “We’re talking about
forty years in the timeline, which includes big
and colourful sound systems, rare records, radio
diffusion, dance crews, pioneers, DJs, and others
that worked to get it going. So from this point of
view, the museum will help maintain the history,
honour a lot of local people, and evoke reggae’s
relevance in the local culture.
“On the other hand,” he adds, “São Luís is a
touristic city with colonial architecture, beaches,
and folkloric festivals, and reggae became an
appeal for visitors here too. But the local scene
is still authentic, with radiolas playing far in the
outskirts or other places where tourists prefer not
to go. For most of them, the so-called ‘Brazilian
Jamaica’ is visible only on t-shirts and some
red-gold-and-green things at the souvenir shops
in the old town. So in this sense, a museum will
contribute to keeping the reggae spirit alive and to
broadening its appeal.” n
Caribbean Airlines operates daily flights
from destinations across the Caribbean to
Miami and Paramaribo, with connections
on other airlines to São Luís
66 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

ENGAGE
ESA/Stephane Corvaja
68 Discover
Next stop: space
70
On This Day
Over the line
3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . liftoff at Kourou’s Centre Spatial Guyanais

DISCOVER
Next stop:
space
As space exploration grabs the attention of
today’s entrepreneurs, few people know that
one of the world’s key launch sites is located
on the doorstep of the Caribbean, in French
Guiana. The Centre Spatial Guyanais is essential
to our future in space, writes Erline Andrews
— but does it benefit ordinary Guianese?
Photography by NASA/D Stover
The James Webb Space
Telescope, due to be sent into
orbit next year, promises to
help us learn more about the
universe than we ever have
before. A successor to the famed Hubble
telescope, the JWST is one hundred times
more powerful, and will be the biggest of
its kind. Named after the influential former
head of NASA, the JWST took decades to
design, almost US$9 billion, and the effort
of a multinational team of scientists. It is
hoped the telescope’s sensitive infrared
cameras will be able to detect and
photograph galaxies, planets, and stars in
the farthest reaches of the universe.
And this extraordinary telescope —
plus other examples of the most cuttingedge
space campaigns of coming years
— will launch from what most people
might find an unlikely place: the jungle
of a sparsely populated and little known
territory of the Caribbean.
French Guiana, sandwiched between
Suriname and Brazil, is not known for
tourism — its shark-infested waters mean
beaches aren’t a draw. It’s not known for
any particular export, like bauxite from
nearby Guyana. It’s not internationally
known for any particular festival or event,
like Carnival in its neighbour Trinidad and
Tobago to the northwest.
But the French overseas department
— geographically in South America
but culturally linked to France’s other
Caribbean territories — is home to one of
the world’s most significant launch sites
for space missions.
The Centre Spatial Guyanais (CSG)
— known in English as the Guiana Space
Centre — began operations in 1968 on the
outskirts of the town of Kourou. It turns
out a location still under the administration
of France, with more area covered
by forest than by cities or towns, was
ideal to develop Europe’s extraterrestrial
ambitions.
French Guiana’s position near the
equator means the earth’s rotation gives
an extra boost to rockets, saving money
because less fuel is needed. Proximity
to the ocean and large swaths of uninhabited
land remove the concern that
falling equipment could land on people or
buildings below. The area is not prone to
earthquakes or hurricanes.
The CSG’s first launch took place on
the night of 24 December, 1968, four years
after the French government decided
to establish it, explains director Didier
Faivre. “It was a very small launcher,”
he says. “But you have to imagine that
nothing existed at this time. No roads, no
harbour . . .
“To decide at the highest level in
France to put here in a remote country an
important strategic asset of French policy
was a really bold decision,” Faivre adds.
Over the past five decades, Kourou
has grown from a coastal outpost
to a thriving commercial centre,
home to the CSG’s employees. British
author Alain de Botton, writing for the
UK Independent, gave a sense of the stark
difference between the space centre and its
surroundings after he visited in 2009:
“There were three control centres, a
generating plant, barracks for a division
of the Foreign Legion, two swimming
pools, and a restaurant specialising in
the cuisine of the Languedoc,” he wrote.
“These were scattered across hectares of
marsh and jungle, generating bewildering
contrasts for visitors who might walk out
of a rocket-nozzle-actuator building and a
moment later find themselves in a section
of rainforest sheltering round-eared bats
and white-eyed parakeets, before arriving
at a propulsion facility whose corridors
were lined with Evian dispensers and
portraits of senior managers.”
The CSG is administered and funded
by the ESA, Europe’s NASA equivalent,
in partnership with the French space
agency CNES and private company
Arianespace. Its average eleven launches
each year are used mainly to send satellites
into space for commercial and governmental
purposes, like communication
and national defence. The centre has
launched more than half of the world’s
commercial satellites.
But it has also been responsible for
missions investigating what could help us
or harm us beyond earth’s atmosphere. All
five automated transfer vehicles or cargo
ships that were sent to the International
Space Station between 2008 and 2014
launched from French Guiana. Not only
did the ships take supplies to the station,
which has a crew that conducts a variety
68 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

of research — they were also monitored
to help improve spacecraft design.
The Gaia, which cost 740 million
euros and has been called “the most
sophisticated space telescope ever built
by Europe,” was launched from Kourou in
2013. Its purpose is to map the Milky Way,
locating a billion stars, one per cent of the
number in the galaxy — more than have
been attempted before.
Over the next few years, the CSG will
be used to execute missions important
not only for Europe but for the rest of the
world. The JWST launch, the most highly
anticipated, is set for 2019. Before that, in
October, Kourou should see off Europe’s
first attempt to orbit Mercury. It’s the
planet closest to the sun, which makes
this a technologically challenging mission,
costing 1.65 billion euros. It’s taken
almost two decades to develop the two
spacecraft, called orbiters, that will take
seven years to get to their destination.
And a new launch site is being built
for a new rocket, the Ariane 6, which has
been designed with efficiency in mind,
to help combat competition from Elon
Musk’s Space X — which has shaken up
the space exploration industry by being
the first to reuse a rocket.
For all its importance to Europe’s
space ambitions, the centre has not
Decades in the making,
the James Webb Space
Telescope, due to be
launched from Kourou, will
change the way scientists
understand our galaxy
been doing nearly as much for French
Guiana. Space technology is developed
and constructed in Europe and North
America, then shipped to Guiana, so it’s
not adding to the skills development of
average Guianese.
French Guiana made international
headlines early last year, when a fiveweek
labour strike — which saw protesters
blocking roadways — forced the
delay of three space missions, costing
private companies and countries across
the world millions of dollars. Part of the
motivation for the strike was the feeling
that not enough labour union members
were being hired for the construction of
the new launch site.
In contrast to the value of the CSG,
French Guiana is the second poorest of
France’s overseas departments. About
twenty per cent of the residents are
unemployed, and close to forty per cent
live in poverty. The crime rate and cost
of living are high, and many households
don’t have electricity or running water.
The education system is undeveloped,
with many schools dilapidated, and half
of Guianese failing to earn a diploma.
There are only two main roads connecting
the main towns along the coast. In the
interior, people still travel by canoe.
A similar strike erupted in 2008 over
high fuel prices. It ended after eleven
days, when the government agreed to a
price reduction. Then in 2011 a rocket
launch was delayed for twenty-four hours
because of a strike by radar tracking
operators.
“We don’t have access to work,
medical care, or education,” said Gauthier
Horth, an opposition politician interviewed
by France 24 magazine during last
year’s strike. “We are not equal to other
French citizens.”
To resolve the strike, the French
government agreed in writing to invest
2.1 billion euros in health care, education,
business development, and crime reduction
in Guiana. This is in addition to a
promised 1.1 billion euros in aid.
It remains to be seen how much things
will improve in French Guiana, though
the protesters know the French government
has reason to take better care of the
welfare of Guianese: our future in space
might actually depend on it. n
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 69

on this day
Over
the line
A century ago, in the final months of the
First World War, a Barbadian-British soldier
named Walter Tull was killed in battle. He
was one of many thousands of casualties,
but he was also unique, as James Ferguson
writes: Tull was the first-ever black officer in
the race-conscious British Army
Illustration by Rohan Mitchell
The British cemetery near
the northern French village
of Favreuil contains
401 graves, the last
resting places of British
troops and a handful of
Commonwealth soldiers and Germans
killed in the First World War. Its rows of
tombstones, immaculately tended and
surrounded by tall poplars, stand secluded
by a low wall from the surrounding muddy
fields and scattered villages. Nearby, lorries
thunder along the motorway that links
Lille to Paris. The names of the dead are
recorded, and sometimes their ages, yet
there is one name of a man who was killed
at Favreuil that is missing: Second Lieutenant
Walter Tull. His body was never
recovered, and we must assume that he
lies under what war poet Edmund Blunden
evocatively called the “Flanders clay.”
Like many others, Tull died tragically
young — he was twenty-nine — in a
terrible conflict that was meant to end all
wars. Yet his death — a century ago, on 25
March, 1918 — also serves to emphasise
the exceptional strengths of a man who
not only rose from the humblest of backgrounds
but also shrugged off prejudice
and abuse to set two significant records.
Walter Tull was the first mixedheritage
professional outfield footballer
to play in England’s First Division (Arthur
Wharton, a goalkeeper born in Ghana,
preceded him in the 1880s). This he
achieved despite losing his father — a carpenter
from Barbados — and his mother
by the age of nine. Walter and his brother
Edward were sent from their home town
of Folkestone to the National Children’s
Home orphanage in London’s Bethnal
Green. The Methodist orphanage had a
football team, and it soon became evident
that Walter had exceptional talent as what
we would nowadays call a midfielder.
Edward’s interests lay elsewhere, and he
became the first mixed-heritage dentist to
practise in Britain.
After leaving school at fourteen, Tull
was apprenticed to a printing firm, but
he continued playing football and was
eventually offered a trial and accepted by
Clapton, at the time one of Britain’s preeminent
amateur clubs. In the 1908–09
season, when Tull was regularly selected,
Clapton won the Amateur Cup. His prowess
did not escape the attention of bigger,
professional clubs, and at the end of that
season he was snapped up by Tottenham
Hotspur with a £10 signing-on fee and a
weekly wage of £4.
Recently promoted Spurs got off to a
bad start in the 1909–10 season, but Tull’s
performance against Manchester United
caught the eye of a Daily Chronicle journalist:
“Tull’s display on Saturday must have
astounded everyone who saw it. Such perfect
coolness, such judicious waiting for a
fraction of a second in order to get a pass in
not before a defender has worked to a false
position, and such accuracy of strength in
passing I have not seen for a long time.”
But something bad was soon to happen.
On 9 October, 1909, during an away
game at Bristol City, Tull was subjected
to sustained and vicious racial abuse.
A journalist reported: “A section of the
spectators made a cowardly attack upon
him in language lower than Billingsgate
. . . Let me tell these Bristol hooligans
that . . . in point of ability, if not in actual
achievement, Tull was the best forward
on the field.” After seven games, he was
suddenly dropped from the first team. His
biographer, Phil Vasili, speculates that
Spurs’ directors were unnerved by “social
pressures” — i.e. racism — and preferred
to avoid further controversy.
With little prospect of first team football,
Tull moved to Southern League club
Northampton Town, then managed by fellow
Methodist Herbert Chapman, later to
become an Arsenal management legend.
Tull played 110 games for Northampton,
mostly as a half back, was considered by
the Northampton Echo as “in the front-rank
of class players in this position,” and was
reportedly on the verge of signing for
Celtic when war was declared.
Tull was the first of the Northampton
players to enlist, joining the so-called
Football Battalion, the 17th Battalion
of the Middlesex Regiment. He was
soon identified as an exceptional soldier
70 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Tull’s commanding
officer wrote: “Now he
has paid the supreme
sacrifice; the Battalion
and Company have
lost a faithful officer;
personally I have lost a
friend”
and was rapidly elevated to the rank of
sergeant. Posted to northern France in
November 1915, he wrote to Edward: “It
is a very monotonous life out here when
one is supposed to be resting and most
of the boys prefer the excitement of the
trenches.” But this enthusiasm would
soon be tempered when he suffered from
shellshock and trench fever and was
repatriated to convalesce.
It was at this point that Tull scored a
second first. Military regulations, in
the spirit of the times, explicitly stated
that “any negro or person of colour” was
barred from achieving officer status. As
Vasili points out in his book Colouring
Over the White Line, the Army’s top brass
“argued that white soldiers would not
accept orders issued by men of colour and
on no account should black soldiers serve
on the front line.” Yet, almost inexplicably,
Tull was not returned directly to the
trenches, but was sent to Scotland to train
as an officer. In May 1917 he was commissioned
as a lieutenant.
When he was dispatched to the Italian
front, it was — as the excellent Spartacus
Educational website’s article on Tull
remarks — “an historic occasion because
[he] was the first ever black officer in
the British Army.” At the Battle of Piave
in January 1918 he was commended in
dispatches for his “gallantry and coolness,”
providing inspiration to the men
he led back to safety. Several weeks later,
he was to be moved back to France to
take part in the British offensive against
German lines.
In the terrible churned-up mud of
Favreuil, Tull was ordered to lead his
troops on an attack on the enemy
trenches. On 25 March, as his
party entered No-Man’s-Land, he
was hit in the head by a German
bullet and died instantly. Such was
the ferocity of the fighting that his men,
despite several attempts under machine
gun fire, failed to recover his body. It was
never found.
In his brief life, the grandson of a
plantation slave in Barbados had become
both a path-breaking sportsman and,
unprecedentedly, an officer in the (then)
highly colour-conscious British Army. On
17 April, Tull’s commanding officer wrote
to Edward: “Now he has paid the supreme
sacrifice; the Battalion and Company
have lost a faithful officer; personally I
have lost a friend. Can I say more, except
that I hope that those who remain may be
true and faithful as he.”
Today, Walter Tull is commemorated
by a memorial at Northampton Town’s
stadium, a statue in Northampton Guildhall,
and a blue plaque on the house where
he lived during his Tottenham days. A
series of books, articles, and a play have
kept his memory alive since 2000, and
in 2014 the Royal Mint announced the
release of a commemorative £5 coin
featuring Lieutenant Tull. A campaign for
a posthumous Military Cross, however,
has met with no success. Poignantly, too,
he possesses no headstone in Favreuil’s
tranquil cemetery, where many of those
who fought alongside him lie. n
WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM 71

puzzles
1 2 3 4 5 6
CARIBBEAN CROSSWORD
7 8
Across
7 Region of Australia hosting the Commonwealth
Games [4,5]
8 Cut into cubes [5]
10 Unfeeling [5]
11 Games event [9]
12 Bathroom fixture [5]
13 Antigua Sailing Week is one of these [7]
16 Where planes fly [8]
18 France’s continent [6]
19 Havana’s sea promenade [7]
21 Oak’s fruit [5]
24 He takes the law into his own hands [10]
25 Your mother’s brother [5]
27 Underlings [5]
28 The ESA has one in Kourou [5,4]
Down
1 Slopes at mountain base [9]
2 Guidance [6]
3 Female cattle [3]
4 These flies transmit sleeping sickness [6]
5 Not very democratic [8]
6 Retrieve [5]
9 Happy [7]
14 Number [7]
15 Hand-held fireworks [9]
10 11
12 13
17 Modern day Romans [8]
20 Cephalopods [6]
22 Hors d’oeuvre [6]
23 Put in a folder [5]
26 Solid water [5]
9
14 15
16 17 18
23
19 20 21 22
24 25
27 28
26
SPOT THE DIFFERENCE
by Gregory St Bernard
There are 13 differences between these two pictures. How many can you spot?
Spot the Difference answers
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;
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
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;
sunglasses are added to boy at right; boy at right’s blue t-shirt is replaced with a pink one; drum design is different
72 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

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Caribbean Beat Magazine

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

Caribbean Airlines
CARIBBEAN
Trinidad Head Office
Airport: Piarco International
Reservations & information:
+ 868 625 7200 (local)
Ticket offices: Mezzanine Level, The Parkade,
Corner of Queen and Richmond Streets,
Port-of-Spain;
Golden Grove Road, Piarco;
Carlton Centre, San Fernando
Baggage: + 868 669 3000 Ext 7513/4
Antigua
Airport: VC Bird International
Reservations & information:
+ 800 744 2225 (toll free)
Ticketing: VC Bird International Airport
Hours: Mon – Fri 8 am – 4 pm
Baggage: + 268-480-5705 Tues, Thurs, Fri, Sun,
or + 268 462 0528 Mon, Wed, Sat.
Hours: Mon – Fri 4 am – 10 pm
Barbados
Airport: Grantley Adams International
Reservations & information: 1 246 429 5929 /
1 800 744 2225 (toll free)
City Ticket Office: 1st Floor Norman Centre Building,
Broad Street, Bridgetown, Barbados
Ticket office hours: 6 am – 10 am & 11 am –
7 pm daily
Flight Information: + 1 800 744 2225
Baggage: + 1 246 428 1650/1 or + 1 246 428 7101
ext. 4628
Cuba (Havana)
Airport: José Martí International
Reservations and baggage: +1 800 920 4225
Ticket office: Commercial Take Off
Calle 23 No. 113, Esquina A Ovedado
Plaza de la Revolución
Havana, Cuba
Grenada
Airport: Maurice Bishop International
Reservations & Information:
1 800 744 2225 (toll free)
Ticketing: Maurice Bishop International Main
Terminal
Baggage: + 473 439 0681
Jamaica (Kingston)
Airport: Norman Manley International
Reservations & information: + 800 523 5585 (International);
1 888 359 2475 (Local)
City Ticket Office: 128 Old Hope Road, Kingston 6
Hours: Mon-Fri 7.30 am – 5.30 pm,
Saturdays 10 am – 4 pm
Airport Ticket Office: Norman Manley Airport
Counter #1
Hours: 3.30 am – 8 pm daily
Baggage: + 876 924 8500
Jamaica (Montego Bay)
Airport: Sangster International
Reservations & information:
/
Across the World
+ 800 744 2225 (toll free)
Ticketing at check-in counter:
8.30 am – 6 pm daily
Baggage: + 876 363 6433
Nassau
Airport: Lynden Pindling International
Terminal: Concourse 2
Reservations & information: + 1 242 377 3300
(local)
Airport Ticket Office: Terminal A-East Departure
Hours: Flight days – Sat, Mon, Thurs 10 am – 4 pm
Non-flight days – Tues, Wed, Fri 10 am – 4 pm
Flight Information: + 1 242 377 3300 (local)
Baggage: + 1 242 377 7035 Ext 255
9 am – 5 pm daily
St Maarten
Airport: Princess Juliana International
Reservations & information: + 1721 546 7660/7661
(local)
Ticket office: PJIA Departure Concourse
Baggage: + 1721 546 7660/3
Hours: Mon – Fri 9 am – 5 pm / Sat 9 am – 6 pm
St Lucia
Airport: George F L Charles
Reservations & information: 1 800 744 2225
Ticket office: George F.L. Charles Airport
Ticket office hours: 10 am – 4 pm
Baggage contact number: 1 758 452 2789
or 1 758 451 7269
St Vincent and the Grenadines
Airport: Argyle International
Reservations & information: + 800 744 2225
Ticketing: Argyle International Airport (during flight
check-in ONLY)
Tobago
Airport: ANR Robinson International
Reservations & information: + 868 660 7200 (local)
Ticket office: ANR Robinson International Airport
Baggage: + 639 0595 / 631 8023
Flight information: + 868 669 3000
NORTH AMERICA
Fort Lauderdale
Airport: Hollywood Fort Lauderdale International
Reservations & information: + 800 920 4225
(toll free)
Ticketing: Terminal 4 – departures level (during
flight check-in ONLY – 7.30 am to 7 pm)
Baggage: + 954 359 4487
Miami
Airport: Miami International
Reservations & information: + 800 920 4225
(toll free)
Ticketing: South Terminal J – departures level (during
flight check-in ONLY – 12 pm to 3.00 pm);
Baggage: + 305 869 3795
Orlando
Airport: Orlando International
Reservations & information:
+ 800 920 4225 (toll free)
Ticketing: Terminal A – departures level
(during flight check-in ONLY – Mon/Fri 11:30 am
– 2.15 pm)
Baggage: + 407 825 3482
New York
Airport: John F Kennedy International
Reservations & information: + 800 920 4225
(toll free)
Ticketing: Concourse B, Terminal 4, JFK
International – open 24 hours (situated at departures,
4th floor)
Baggage: + 718 360 8930
Toronto
Airport: Lester B Pearson International
Reservations & information: + 800 920 4225
(toll free)
Ticket office: Terminal 3
Ticketing available daily at check-in counters
422 and 423. Available 3 hours prior to
departure times
Baggage: + 905 672 9991
SOUTH AMERICA
Caracas
Airport: Simón Bolívar International
Reservations & information:
+ 58 212 3552880
Ticketing: Simón Bolívar International Level 2 –
East Sector
Hours: 7 am – 11 pm
City Ticket Office: Sabana Grande Boulevard,
Building “Galerias Bolivar”, 1st Floor, office 11-A,
Caracas, Distrito Capital
+ 58 212 762 4389 / 762 0231
Baggage: + 58 424 1065937
Guyana
Airport: Cheddi Jagan International
Reservations & information: + 800 744 2225
(toll free)
Ticket office: 91-92 Avenue of the Republic,
Georgetown
Baggage: + 011 592 261 2202
Suriname
Airport: Johan Adolf Pengel International
Reservations & information: + 597 52 0034/0035
(local); 1 868 625 6200 (Trinidad)
Ticket Office: Paramaribo Express, N.V. Wagenwegstraat
36, Paramaribo
Baggage: + 597 325 437

737 onboard Entertainment — MARCH/APRIL
Northbound
Southbound
M A R C H
Justice League
Batman recruits a league of metahuman heroes — Wonder
Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg, and The Flash — but may be too
late to save the planet from a new enemy.
Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Henry Cavill • director: Zack Snyder • action,
adventure • PG-13 • 119 minutes
Earth: One Amazing Day
For one day, we track the sun from mountains to islands to
exotic jungles. See how every day is filled with more wonders
than you can imagine.
Robert Redford, Jackie Chan • directors: Lixin Fan, Richard Dale • family,
documentary • G • 95 minutes
Northbound
Southbound
A P R I L
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
Discovering an old video game, four teenagers are sucked into
the world of Jumanji, where they will have to play the game or
be stuck in it forever.
Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart • director: Jake Kasdan • action,
adventure • PG-13 • 119 minutes
Coco
Aspiring musician Miguel teams up with charming trickster
Héctor on an extraordinary journey through the Land of the
Dead, to unlock the story behind Miguel’s family history.
Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt • director: Lee
Unkrich • family, adventure • PG-13 • 105 minutes
Audio Channels
Channel 5 • The Hits
Channel 6 • Soft Hits
Channel 7 • Concert Hall
Channel 8 • East Indian Fusion
Channel 9 • Irie Vibes
Channel 10 • Jazz Sessions
Channel 11 • Kaiso Kaiso
Channel 12 • Steelband Jamboree

parting shot
Maya
Coast
Looking down to the Caribbean Sea from
forty-foot cliffs, the ruined city of Tulum
in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula was one of
the last strongholds of the Maya. Inhabited
until the sixteenth century, Tulum was
rediscovered in the nineteenth and restored
in the twentieth. Long after it was built,
the Temple of Winds still guards Tulum’s
seaward approach.
Photography by Ann Stover/Shutterstock.com
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