Colin Channer, Calabash founder and artistic director.
The Gleaner Honour Awards - Today, we continue to highlight those who have been nominated to receive the 2008 Gleaner Honour Award early next month at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel, New Kingston. In the category arts and culture, the nominee is the Calabash Literary Festival.
At all of eight years old the Calabash International Literary Festival, 2008 Gleaner Honour Award recipient in Arts and Culture, has exploded the myth that 'Jamaicans don't read', cradled the creativity of nascent writers and made a sleepy town on Jamaica's farming-rich south coast a haven for the word - spoken, scribbled, scripted and sung - one May weekend each year.
All at no cost to the thousands who now overflow the swathes of white tenting high overhead, outside Jake's, the Island Outpost in Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth, or the writers who hone their talent in weekend workshops spread over a year in Kingston.
The festival's vision is stated on its website, www.calabashfestival.org:
"The mission of the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust is to transform the literary arts in the Caribbean by being the region's best-managed producer of workshops, seminars and performances. We will achieve these goals by focusing on our audiences, managing our budget, creating a community of supporters in the media, government, business, the performing arts, philanthropic organisations and publishing, and by becoming the festival of choice for the world's most gifted authors."
Poetry workshops
Outside of cyberspace, that mission statement has translated into anniversary reissues of Roger Mais' Brother Man (2004), John Hearne's Voices Under The Window (2005), and Claude McKay's Banana Bottom (2008). New voices have also been put into print, a set of chapbooks dubbed A Six Pack For the Soul compiling the verse of Niki Johnson, MBala, Owen 'Blakka' Ellis, Saffron, Andrew Stone and Ishion Hutchinson from the initial poetry workshops in 2004.
There has also been 'Iron Balloons: Hit Fiction From Jamaica's Calabash Writers Workshop', which put the prose of workshop participants Konrad Kirlew, Alwyn Bully, A-dZiko Simba and Sharon Leach alongside that of more established writers, including Elizabeth Nunez, Kaylie Jones and Calabash founder and artistic director, Colin Channer.
Channer, along with the festival's programming director Kwame Dawes and production director Justine Henzell are the affable and most visible faces of the Calabash organisers. Also listed on the website are Michael Bennett (music director) and directors Marie Brown, Marcia Bullock, Carolyn Cooper, Carrole Guntley and Frank Pringle.
Reacting to the Gleaner Honour Award, Channer said "We are delighted to be the winners of the 2008 Gleaner Awards in the arts. I sincerely hope that we'll still find it in ourselves to continue to be fun-loving troublemakers, after being included in this distinguished list of awardees."
And he amplified on the festival's mission statement. "Calabash was conceived and planned as an international festival. We wanted to do in the literary arts, what reggae did in music, which was to deepen its roots in Jamaica while reaching outward to the rest of the world," Channer told The Gleaner.
Deepening roots
If a taller, stronger stem and a bounty of blossoms are indicative of deepening roots, then in its eighth year, Calabash can lay claim to tapping into the substratum of Jamaican literature. The number of Jamaican writers, always prominent at previous stagings, was at a significant high, Erna Brodber (The Rainmaker's Mistake), Beverley East (Reaper of Souls) and Rosie Stone (No Stone Unturned) reading in 'Ladies First' session to start off Saturday, May 25, the festival's second day.
In the mid-afternoon 'Life Sentence' session that same day, where memoirs were the order of the day, Lorna Goodison read From Harvey River and Beverley Manley revisited a turbulent time in Jamaica's history with excerpts from The Manley Memoirs.
On the following closing day Kei Miller was a standout in a fiery, midday session. And Thomas Glave, editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, had opened the festival.
Insularity was not a factor, as authors from Nigeria, the USA, Cuba, Bolivia, Ireland, Canada, Belarus and Scotland were guests in Treasure Beach.
500 yellow butterflies
Naturally, over eight years of readings, concerts and seminars, there have been tremendous Calabash moments. Channer's three standouts are (Gleaner managing director) Oliver Clarke's display of incredible stage charisma when he read from John Hearne's Voices Under the Window in 2005; Trevor Rhone, reading from an unpublished version of Bellas Gate Boy in 2002; and the first Calabash in 2001, when 500 yellow butterflies descended on the surrounding trees then disappeared as soon as the festival was done.
Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott's Chatterbox interview and reading session with Kwame Dawes was a highlight of this year's Calabash, Channer saying ahead of the festival: "Derek Walcott's appearance at the festival will further enhance an international reputation for bold programming and precise organisation that began with the first Calabash in 2001. Walcott's reading and his onstage conversation with Kwame Dawes will be one of those experiences that people will talk about for the rest of their lives."
Walcott dropped a few choice comments and a tongue lashing on Trinidadian novelist V. S. Naipaul. "I'm 78. I never thought I would get here ... I just don't like it now when art makes a fuss. I don't want to be bright ... I have come to the point where even if it seems to be repetition, I don't care. I am very irritated by style. Style has a way of attracting attention to the writer ... nobody strives for anonymity. I would like to evaporate in front of the crowd," he said.
For Naipaul, Walcott read the long and stinging The Mongoose, beginning with:
"I have been bitten
I must avoid infection
Or else I will be as dead
As Naipaul's fiction."
As for Naipaul's facial hair, Walcott said he had a "bushy beard to cover features that have always sneered". And remembering an invitation from Naipaul to go to a particular club in Trinidad, Walcott said "he doesn't like black man but he likes black c...t" and noted that "he won the prize, now he is trying to bite the hands that helped him".
Commonwealth Writers' Prize
There was a prize of another sort at the 2007 Calabash International Literary Festival, as the Commonwealth Writers' Prize winners for Best First Book and Best Book were announced on the final day.
The day before, seven of the eight contenders in the categories read at Calabash, the three Best First Book regional winners going in the morning and the four Best Book hopefuls reading in the evening.
Maxine Case (All We Have Left Unsaid), D. Y. Bechard (Vandal Love) and Andrew O'Connor (Tuvalu) read their Best First Book Award regional winners. Naeem Murr (The Perfect Man), Shaun Johnson (The Native Commissioner), David Adams Richards (The Friends of Meager Fortune) and Lloyd Jones (Mister Pip) were the regional winners in the Best Book Award.
Bechard, Jones and Calabash were the eventual winners.
High literary standards
Ahead of the 2007 festival, Channer said for him, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize announcement in Treasure Beach was confirmation that Calabash is "an exciting festival with high literary standards that takes place in a developing country to First-World standards".
The word in its sung form has got as much attention as the spoken at Calabash. Each year features a Calabashment concert on the Saturday night (Rootz Underground and Chalice were this year's performers; Pam Hall, Johnnie Clarke, Tarrus Riley and the Clarendonians among those who performed before). The catalogues of Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Bob Marley have been given acoustic treatment, where the lyrics take pride of place.
And Third World's 96 Degrees in the Shade, Bunny Wailer's Blackheart Man and Bob Marley's Exodus albums have been given sterling anniversary treatment by a cast of musicians, which includes Steve Golding, Ibo Cooper, Wayne Armond and Seretse Small.
Live performer
This year, for the first time, the performer who was being honoured performed live at Calabash, as a joyous, full-white-clad Bob Andy, closing the festival with generous servings from his Songbook.
There was also another notable first for Calabash in its eighth year. The hat was passed to spur on contributions and the programmes were sold for a very modest $50. "Wave yu programme," Dawes urged. "If yu don't have one yu cheap an wutless. Buy a programme. An jus give the $100. Mek de change gwaan."
Channer told The Gleaner after the festival: "The programmes were distributed free of cost for the first seven years of the festival. Distributing the programmes free of cost was one of the many ways in which we showed our gratitude to the thousands of people who consistently showed us love year after year. This year, we created a bigger and better programme and added a nominal fee to cover the costs of printing. Calabash is a cooperative venture, a great adventure if you will. We're nothing less than a band of merry guerrillas who believe that pencils and pens are better suited to our cause than guns. So by charging a smalls for the programme we've created a way for all the people who support us to chip in."
The collection drive, a suggestion of an ardent 'Calabasher', will be repeated. Moving is not an option.
Adding on rooms
After this year's Calabash, Channer told The Gleaner: "Calabash is a festival put on by the people of Treasure Beach with guidance from Justine Henzell, Kwame and me. It is their festival, and they have been doing a tremendous job of making sure that there are more available rooms every year. People are adding on rooms to their homes. New guesthouses are opening up."
So at all of eight years old, the Calabash International Literary Festival has solicited submissions for its 2008 to 2009 workshops (each participant will receive a $30,000 scholarship), set its dates for next May and long made plans for its 10th anniversary in 2010.
"We began the planning for Calabash 2010 at the end of the first Calabash in 2001," Channer said.
Donna Duncan-Scott (left), Beverley Anderson-Manley and Alwyn Scott enjoy a performance at the Calabash Festival last year.
Items on display during the Calabash Festival at Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth, last year. - File