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Contents

No. 150 March/April 2018

24 EMBARK

IMMERSE

ARRIVE

17 Datebook

40 closeup

54 Destination

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

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

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

46 own words

“I’m not trying to fill his shoes”

30 Bookshelf, playlist, and screenshots This month’s reading, listening, and film-watching picks

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

36 Cookup

48 showcase

“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 8

The puzzle of “home”

WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

Miriam

“Every Saturday is the same story.” A tale of a woman and her four persistent suitors — fiction by Michelene Adams

Havana hello

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

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 ENGAGE 68 discover

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

Barbados Sales Representative Shelly-Ann Inniss T: (246) 232 5517 E: shelly@meppublishers.com

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

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

70 on 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

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

Enjoy our crossword, sudoku, and other brain-teasers!

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.

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A D V E R T O R I A L

eauty needs to be more than skin deep. What counts is being able to express the Swift’s essence of being “made to drive.” An overwhelming presence generated by a low, short, and wide stance. The manifestation of overflowing dynamism and muscular lines. Styling that creates a sensation of movement, even at rest, that accelerates the driver’s emotions. It’s a bold evolution of the Swift’s DNA. Completely new styling, a performanceenhancing lightweight chassis and advanced safety technologies. Swift Chief Engineer Masao Kobori says: “We set out to create a car that makes people go ‘WOW!’ the instant they see it, the instant they get inside, and the instant they step on the accelerator.” Top Gear summed it up as “Another great product from Suzuki, the Swift is a cracking and likeable supermini” — introducing the new Suzuki Swift! The new Swift comes equipped with the 1.2-litre, 16-valve engine. The newly designed, lightweight suspension helps to retain the Swift’s characteristic direct-response steering, while providing a supple and comfortable ride. Reinvigorated power units ensure lively performance without sacrificing Suzuki’s customary excellent fuel economy.

IntroducIng the all new Contact your local Suzuki dealer today to arrange a test drive! More information on the allnew Suzuki Swift can be found at www.suzukicaribbean.com

Sit inside, and the bold evolution of the Swift’s DNA continues. Once seated, the impulse to take off immediately begins to well up, thanks to a meticulously implemented “driver first” design. The racecar-like, D-shaped steering wheel, front seats that firmly hold, and a centre console angled towards the driver help form a more sporty, higher quality environment that unifies car and driver. The new Swift is meant to drive the heart. Sporty, high quality, advanced, and just simply easy to own, the love affair Caribbean people have had with the Suzuki Swift looks set to continue with the introduction of this latest model.

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

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 12

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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

Destination:

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ADVER TORIAL

Hyatt Regency Trinidad

Celebrating ten years operating with exCellenCe

his year, Hyatt Regency Trinidad is celebrating its tenth anniversary, having opened on 29 January, 2008. Its construction contributed to the revitalisation of Port of Spain’s waterfront area, spurring additional business and employment opportunities and growth. With an extensive upgrade in 2017, Hyatt Regency Trinidad now has 423 sleeping rooms with fifteen suites, including the Presidential and Diplomat Suites. Guest rooms, event spaces, dining areas, the lobby, spa, and all common areas were enhanced to fit the continually changing needs of today’s traveller. Placing an emphasis on Hyatt’s mission of “caring for people so they can be their best,” the renovation’s main focus was on guest rooms. Introducing a light and airy design, the reenergised guest rooms now feature white oak flooring, modern vanities and light fixtures, sixty-five-inch flatscreen televisions, sleek credenzas, sofas, and overall smart furnishing. Space was used strategically to include useful work spaces and multifunctional areas around the room for relaxing or getting ready. Hard to imagine the hotel is already ten years old, but Hyatt Regency Trinidad has undoubtedly made its mark on the hospitality sector and business and social landscape over the last decade. Considered the benchmark for hotels and service in Trinidad and Tobago, the hotel is well known for its superior service and high quality offerings. True to the Regency Brand, Hyatt Regency Trinidad is a place “designed around the power of meaningful connections and delightful surprises — where guests come together to share, socialise, collaborate, and exchange ideas with colleagues, friends, family, and reconnect in the course of their busy lives.” The hotel is passionate about enriching the guest experience. You feel it in the welcoming atmosphere, from the moment you walk in to the moment you leave. The location, beauty, and service far exceed expectations — but the most important and exciting aspect of Hyatt Regency Trinidad is its associates. The hotel is blessed to have found ladies and gentlemen who define the culture and make for the heart and soul of Hyatt Regency Trinidad. Every day, they welcome guests and create energising experiences by connecting them to who and what matters to them most.

Trinidad.regency.hyatt.com

datebook

brendan Delzin/shutterstock.com

Your guide to Caribbean events in March and April, from Guyana’s Easter Regatta to Carnival in Jamaica

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

datebook

If you’re in . . . MIAMI

GUYANA

TRINIDAD

Carnaval Miami

Bartica Easter Regatta

NGC Bocas Lit Fest

Venues around Miami 10 February to 11 March carnavalmiami.com

31 March to 2 April Bartica, Essequibo

National Library and other venues around Port of Spain 25 to 29 April bocaslitfest.com

WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM

ChuckSchugPhotography/istock.com

kiwanis club of little havana

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!

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.

A passion for bringing words alive is palpable at the Anglophone Caribbean’s largest literary festival. Your biggest problem might be

georgia popplewell

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.

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,

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

@eldoradorums

eldorado_rum

@eldoradorums

datebook

courtesy of The New York Botanical Garden

Mambo into March 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]

New York Botanical Garden Orchid Show

Andres Garcia Martin/shutterstock.com

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]

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• Reliable • • Affordable • • Trustworthy •

Car

rvi e S l Renta

#31 Wildey, St. Michael, Barbados Tel: 1 (246) 436 2466 • (246) 233-9712 Email: lynnshe@gmail.com 20

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St Patrick’s Festival

New Fire Music 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]

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

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courtesy new fire music festival

Mella Theatre, Havana, Cuba Cuba’s popular dance companies and music orchestras compete in percussion competitions and rumba dancing contests [5-11 March]

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EscapePlay. the Work. ordinary. Discover Do both. Hyatt Regency It’sTrinidad. 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.

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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]

Venues around Kingston and Ocho Rios visitjamaica.com From pulsating beach parties to breakfast fetes, mas camp sessions to Jâ€™Ouvert and a high-energy street parade, Kingston and Ocho Rios keep pumping [31 March-8 April]

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amanda richards

Jamaica Carnival

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SVG Gospel Fest

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Goat- and Crab-Racing

Pure Grenada Music Fest

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]

Port Louis, Grenada grenadamusicfestival.com Itâ€™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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Venues around St Vincent Gospel expressions in music, song, dance, and drama lift audiences up high [1-30 April]

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word of mouth Dispatches from our correspondents around the Caribbean and further afield

A unity of colour

rovidence 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

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amanda richards

At Guyana’s Phagwah celebrations, Subraj Singh notes how the festival’s many colours blend into a single, unifying shade 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.

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word of mouth

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

hen 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

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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 er upted, 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

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The game

A gold repeat? Photo by Alexander Hassenstein / Getty Images Sport

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Back in 1966, Trinidad and Tobagoâ€™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

rinidad and Tobago’s best-ever Commonwealth Games outing came in 1966 in Kingston, Jamaica. Lennox Yearwood, Kent Bernard, Edwin Roberts, and 440yard 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 leadof f 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

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.”

ifty-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. Ja ma ica, however, may wa nt to ret u r n the 1966 compliment, and spoil the party for Team T&T. The northern Caribbean nation certainly has the firepower to c h a l lenge 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

“My job was to secure that victory, and I ran the leg of a lifetime,” recalls Wendell Mottley of the 1966 race

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

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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.”

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. 30

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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.

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.

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

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.

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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.

Major Lazer Presents: Give Me Future Various artists (Mad Decent)

Single Spotlight My Kinda Girl Beres Hammond (VPAL Music)

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.

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

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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

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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

Sergio & Sergei Ernesto Daranas Serrano, 2017, 93 minutes

The Silence of the Wind Álvaro Aponte-Centeno, 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 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

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cookup

“That right there, that’s Africa”

sn’t it cool when you visit another country and see familiar ingredients being used in ways you’re used to? This was the big thrill for US chef Ben Dennis, when he visited Trinidad and Tobago and discovered that local candies like toolum and nutcake were similar to those once made by his ancestors, the Gullah Geechees of South Carolina. The Gullah are descendants of formerly enslaved people from various Central and West African ethnic groups settled in South Carolina and Georgia. They developed a distinct Creole culture that has preserved their African heritage. Dennis has visited T&T twice, and explored possible links between the Gullah people and Trinidad’s Merikins — descendants of African-American soldiers who were given land in south Trinidad as a reward for fighting for the British in the War of 1812. Dennis is one of a group of contemporary culinarians shedding light on historic foodways in the American South and across the African diaspora. When he was in Trinidad in November 2017, we spoke about his blossoming relationship with the Caribbean.

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 How did you make a connection to Trinidad and Tobago?

One of the more renowned herbalists in your country, Francis Morean, he was in Charleston and met an elder who might have told him about me. But he knew the connection with the Merikins. I never knew the story in my life. They don’t teach us our history. But there’s something here [in Trinidad] called hill rice, and it was grown in the Low Country in South Carolina. I don’t know if the Merikins brought the hill rice here or if it was already here, but the Merikins came from my area and the low country of Georgia, Virginia, and I think as far as Louisana. They settled in Moruga. Francis hit me on Facebook, he wanted to do this rice symposium. We connected, and he’s like family to me now. So we did the rice symposium and we were up in the mountains with this rice. Before I came to Trinidad, Slow 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

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jonathan boncek

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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.

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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

Zoe Davidson

Immerse

Closeup 40 The puzzle of

“home”

Own Words 46 “I’m not trying to fill

his shoes”

Showcase 48 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

t 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,”

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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.”

is 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

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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!”).

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.”

he 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

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

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.”

nd 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

“I just like ideas. Ideas are my natural subject, because I think the human mind is my natural subject”

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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

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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.

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 experi-

“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

ences 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 WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM

SHOWCASE

aturday 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. 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 Illustration by Shalini Seereeram 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.

Miriam One woman, four gentleman callers . . . A short story by Michelene Adams

unday 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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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

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.”

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

ally 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

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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.

ut 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.

he 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.

he 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.” WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM

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.

hen 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.

he 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

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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.

aturday 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

Destination 54 Havana hello

Travellersâ€™ Tales 62 Reggae city

Hard at work in Havana, Caribbean Airlinesâ€™ 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

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Havana hello

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The newest destination in Caribbean Airlines’ network is also one of the Caribbean’s most iconic cities. Welcome to Havana!

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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

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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 worldâ€™s great cities of music â€” not just salsa, rhumba, and son, but jazz, reggae, hip-hop, and classical, spilling out into the streets in every neighbourhood

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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

Havana fact file Population: 2.1 million Area: 280 square miles

Planning a visit? Here’s some key information for travellers:

Founded in 1515 by a Spanish conquistador, Havana is believed to be a Taíno name, derived from the original inhabitants of Cuba

El Morro Ma

Parque Central

CENTRO

VEDADO

lec ón

El Capitolio

La Bodeguita del Medio

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. 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.

Plaza de la Revolución

Caribbean Airlines flies direct to Havana from Port of Spain twice each week, with convenient connections to other regional destinations 60

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travellers’ tales

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

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Reggae city

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n 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 Opposite page Festival time in São Luís Above Even the city’s traffic lights are decorated with azulejos

Waltzing couples push to the fore, anxious to demonstrate their command of ritmo agarradinho, an intricate, ecstasy-inducing move for clinching close-dancers 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.

“

ão 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.” WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM

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

Belém São Luís Brazil Salvador

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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

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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 PanAmerican 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 f ishing 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

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The São Luís skyline: old tiled roofs and skyscrapers in the distance

he 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.”

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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

ESA/Stephane Corvaja

ENGAGE

Discover 68 Next stop: space

On This Day 70 Over the line

3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . liftoff at Kourouâ€™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

he 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

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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.

ver 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

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

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

he 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

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and abuse to set two significant records. Walter Tull was the f irst 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

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.

t 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

puzzles 1

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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]

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE

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17 Modern day Romans [8] 20 Cephalopods [6] 22 Hors d’oeuvre [6] 23 Put in a folder [5] 26 Solid water [5]

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

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Sudoku 6x6 - Puzzle 2 of 5 - Easy

Sudoku 9x9 - Puzzle 5 of 5 - Easy Easy 9x9 sudoku puzzle

Fill the empty square with numbers from 1 to 9 so that each row, each column, and each 3x3 box contains all of the numbers from 1 to 9. For the mini sudoku use numbers from 1 to 6.

3 7

5 1

9 3

2 4

If the puzzle you want to do has already been filled in, just ask your flight attendant for a new copy of the magazine!

4 6

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Easy 6x6 mini sudoku puzzle

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4 6 5 3 1 2

5 1 6 2 4 3

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4 8 6 5 1 7 9 3 2

2 7 1 6 3 9 8 5 4

5 9 3 4 8 2 7 1 6

1 3 5 2 9 4 6 8 7

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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

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737 onboard Entertainment — MARCH/APRIL Northbound

Southbound

M A R CH

Justice League

Earth: One Amazing Day

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.

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.

Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Henry Cavill • director: Zack Snyder • action, adventure • PG-13 • 119 minutes

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

Coco

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.

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.

Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart • director: Jake Kasdan • action, adventure • PG-13 • 119 minutes

Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt • director: Lee Unkrich • family, adventure • PG-13 • 105 minutes

Audio Channels Channel 5 • The Hits

Channel 8 • East Indian Fusion

Channel 11 • Kaiso Kaiso

Channel 6 • Soft Hits

Channel 9 • Irie Vibes

Channel 12 • Steelband Jamboree

Channel 7 • Concert Hall

Channel 10 • Jazz Sessions

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