Junot Diaz prepares to sign one of his books on the first night of Calabash 2009 at Jake's, Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth. - Photo by Mel Cooke
Millicent Graham took a deep breath and said "OK" before she opened what she called "the unstoppable Calabash Festival 2009" with her debut collection, The Damp in Things, referring to studying in Brighton, England, and recalling Jamaica through a fusion of English food and Jamaica's ways with food. There was laughter at Jake's, Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth, last Friday night as she recalled making 'kippo rundown', food and references to her father, blending in the opening poem, 'Scotch Broth'.
'Balancing Act' was among the poems for her female friends, the 11 short bursts of 'Yellow Dog' were written after a Wayne Brown workshop and Graham closed with Dawn, which concluded "sleep till I come/Don't raise up till I come".
Parental relationships
Esther Phillips, the second of the Peepal Tree Press trio, also opened with parental relationships, speaking of the father who left on one hand and the mother who was abandoned ("My mother's touch was not gentle/Every touch was fortissimo"). The audience, susceptible as all to matters of sex, whooped for Passion (which Phillips had initially named The Hots), written in a moment of need in a Miami hotel room, where "I'm surprised I don't short circuit the TV".
Phillips tapped on the lectern and 'rapped' her voice around the beat to close with 'Just Rhythm'.
Pollard's opening 'Cut Language from Leaving Traces' was also along genealogical lines, but for the generations after as it described her older grandson's dual utilisation of standard English and Jamaican English ("Didn't I tell them every time/Bilingual is the lick?"). Her reading touched on various places she has been, from Italy to Montserrat, as well as a place that everyone has seen, Pollard revisiting September 11, 2001, with 'When TV Towers Burn' ("Terror is terror everywhere").
Older collections
Pollard revisited older collections, closing with 'British Museum Revisited', to the backdrop of a lightning show offshore.
The whoops as Danticat and Diaz were introduced indicated the audience's anticipation, both reading two stories each. Danticat's Legends was about storytelling, the audience quiet as Danticat read "what come too easy nobody wants. What come too easy does not make legends". It was a story that went back to Haiti, to tales of three-legged horses and the brutality of the colonisers before closing "I tell you this story because it is all I know. I tell you this story because it is all I have".
Danticat's other reading focused on naming, from The Forming of Bones, centring around Sebastian, "a cane cutter, who like Lazarus came to life again".
Diaz's exuberance was evident and he warned beforehand that he had been told it was an adult event. So his first story was about cheating, Alma (who had "an ass that could drag the moon out of orbit") confronting her boyfriend Junior. Faced with the evidence, Junior said 'Baby, that is part of my novel'. And that is how you lose her".
The second story started off funny enough for tearful laughter and ended with tears only, the relationship between a mother and her daughter turning around the former's massive breasts. But the morning when she calls her daughter into the bathroom to feel for a lump, the latter is "overcome by a premonition that something in your life is going to change".
Irreversible changes
And it does, with a mastectomy, loss of hair and irreversible changes to mother and daughter. "It's all in that bathroom where it all begins, where you begin," Diaz ended.
And before he read, he summed up the festival itself.
"You guys are lucky. Calabash is like nothing on the face of the Earth. Those of us who are here as guests, it's like an excuse for the community to celebrate itself," Diaz said.
It was a large celebration; before Saturday's opening session, Calabash's programming director Kwame Dawes said the festival had had its biggest opening night ever. There was an interview with actor Melvin Van Peebles and a screening of his latest film before the opening night closed with a concert, Mutabaruka selecting the discs and Tarrus Riley singing the songs.
The high attendance carried through to the closing session on Sunday evening when Wayne Armond noted the bumper crowd as Beres Hammond's lyrics were celebrated acoustic style.
He said it was the highest attendance he had seen for the final session and quipped "it must be Beres because we have been here for seven years".