15/06/2023
-Society, Society-
‘Backstage’ at Calabash 2023
Coming home, catching up and celebrating literary genius
ONCE again, the staging of the Calabash International Literary Festival offered a fantastic three-day affair, delighting a massive audience under the big white tent by the seaside. Readings, book signings, meet-and-greets, food, art and crafts, live-music performances and great photo-ops – you couldn’t ask for more covering, or just attending, this super-exciting cultural event.
Unsurprisingly, coming home for Calabash was a real treat for the overseas-based Jamaican writers. “Just being home and getting to see people I haven’t seen in a long time makes it special,” shared Alecia McKenzie, who’s won critical hosannas for A Million Aunties, from which she read during her time on stage, offering a passage called “How to Paint Flowers.” While autographing copies later by the Kingston Bookshop tent, McKenzie (who has lived in Kingston and St. Catherine) told TALLAWAH that the late great Toni Morrison is tops among the writers she is always reading and re-reading. “Absolutely anything by her,” she shared.
For Curdella Forbes, who penned the prize-winning A Tall History of Sugar and currently teaches at Howard University, any mention of her favourite recent books must include Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud, who also read at Calabash on Friday’s opening night. “It’s a really wonderful book, [dealing] with Caribbean situations we don’t often talk about,” she told us. “And I love her use of Trini English in telling the story.”
Like McKenzie, Forbes says flying home from the States for the Calabash experience was beyond thrilling. “For breakfast this morning [at the hotel] they had eggs, muffins, bagels, but I just ignored the American foods and went for the ackee and saltfish, calaloo and fried dumplings. Everything Jamaican,” she reported with a chuckle.
Out and about we spotted the likes of Marlon James, who flew in to enjoy the readings solely as a patron, with a few of his friends in tow. Kei Miller chatted with retired UWI academic Prof. Rupert Lewis. Former Grace Kennedy boss Douglas Orane posed for our camera by the live-music stage hours before it was ripped by a dynamite performance from Tanya Stephens. We photographed Hollywood actress C.C.H Pounder and Justine Henzell under the big tent, but we missed out on Saturday’s appearance by Oscar winner and humanitarian Angelina Jolie, who posed with Allan ‘Mutabaruka’ Hope – a photo that went all over the world.
Meantime, we immensely enjoyed our little chat with Pulitzer Prize winner Natalie Diaz, whose work is simply transcendent. She had high praises for fellow poet Roger Robinson, especially his award-winning collection Portable Paradise. “It’s beauty, pain, joy and family all in one,” she noted. “I now teach it to my students.”
We also kicked it with Trinidadian big man Khaled Jared Hossein (author of Hungry Ghosts and winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize), who shared his top summer-reading recommendations: No Pain like This Body by Harold Sonny Ladoo (“It’s a Caribbean horror story…. Really captivating.”) and The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa by Stephen Buoro (“He’s from Nigeria… It’s about a guy who is obsessed with a white woman.”)
