The Images can be viewed in the Photo Gallery as:

• ZED Triste Tropique Isle


The idea for the images for Triste Tropique...Isle borrows from the mood created in a memoir (Triste Tropique) written by the anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss about his travels delving into the cultures of various settlements...the Caribbean included.

"Although ostensibly a travelogue, the work is infused with philosophical reflections and ideas linking many academic disciplines, such as sociology, geology, music, history and literature. The title literally means The Sad Tropics, but was translated into English by John Russell as A World on the Wane." The work is deeply reflective concluding with thoughts about "humankind's place in the universe and our connections to the world and to one another." (Wiki)

Lévi-Strauss explored such ideas as Mytho-graphy, the "artistic representation of mythical subjects", from which could be drawn a linkage to places and the folk-tales which derive.


The Poems, which accompany these photographs, are sampled as a celebration of the joys and mental explorations of the Calabash International Literary Festival, which for ten years, let us into expressions of the most personal effusions of Worlds. They are presented only for an educational, non-commercial purpose... as vague hints of an impressionistic 'photographic narrative'.

The folio begins in the realm of 'wonder'. Laurens van der Post speaks of a people who "all participated so deeply of one another's being that the experience could almost be called mystical...back in the moment which our European fairy-tale books described as the time when birds, beasts, plants, trees and men shared a common tongue, and the whole world, night and day, resounded like the surf of a coral sea with universal conversation."

Kwame Dawes in I Am A Stranger On Earth invokes:

There are days when this unfamiliar earth
speaks to me and calls me and calls me
stranger, alien, brief sojourner here,
It comes with the discovery of a new flower,
the name of which I study with devotion and awe;
or the way a sudden storm whips
the fallen leaves and bends the trees.
I stand in the mind of the storm,
I feel like an obstruction--dispensable.
The earth never tells me my true home.
I have never seen it, nor even in dreams;
I have no assurances that it is there...

...as an alien at heart, free of the tyranny
of truth. In this rootless state my poems
like prayers follow no prescribed path,
but record the slaughter of the wicked
with cool remove. I embrace my fate
while the wind and water spin about my head.

In his poem The Traveller, he achieves an "arrival", where:

the ancestors found their way to our feet,
to our hearts, to our livid tongues...

...and in the sky, Nyankopon looks on
with the same unwinking eye of the moon.

The great Bajan poet, Kamau Brathwaite rides a turbulent wave in the poem, Coral. This is from Part IV of his opus, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1969), in the section on Islands.

He hurls into glimpses of the past:

Here now are canoes, huts, yellowing corn husks, cassava,
hard harpoon heads, broken pots on the headland;
broken by time, by neglect, the tough boots
of Columbus, of pirate, the red boots of flame;
cracked souls of Africa, broken by whip,
bit of pain between teeth; broken by rain,
the new shoots of the green-dollar cane...

...Bogles' legs swinging steep from the steeple of pain,
dead clapper, dead leader, dead bell,
leaden tongue, the snapped neck,
slacker...

Then the poem swoops and rises to an orchestrated crescendo:

rain unhooks flowers,
green stars
of the soil stare up from the stalks,
the sky glints in the wet mud
streaked with trees,
hedges, darker
ponds. I hear the boom
of the mango bursting its sweetness, spectacular
cloud riders through the tall
pouis: walls of white'
walls of red, wells
of bottomless
gloom.

Until a form of release of this soul's journey:

And slowly
uncurling embryo
leaf's courses sucking grain's armour,
my yellow pain swims into the polyp's eye.

In To Absorb The Green, Lorna Goodison advises:
Do not leave Xamayca forever, your wild self sprouts here like long-limbed guinea grass
dispersed, blown about and tossed, seeded first
off the Guinea Coast. You are African star grass.

And in Travelling Mercies. Lorna Goodison pleads:
keep us on this voyage
to union
send down travelling mercies,

These images, from Jamaica, felt, as they were occurring, like Up-Streaming...Into The Heart of Lightness.

Highly Recommended:
SO MUCH THINGS TO SAY: 100 CALABASH POETS (Edited by Kwame Dawes & Collin Channer; Published by Akashic Books)

Correction:
The "page" (Image # 39 in the Photo Gallery), on which Jackie Kay's poem appears, has a typo...the line under things far away should read:

vast linguistic space

Triste: A Musical Interlude in Another Language & Tempo: Belafonte Stylings

Spanish:
Cu cu ru cu cu Paloma

Dicen que por las noches
no más se le iba en puro llorar;
dicen que no comía,
no más se le iba en puro tomar.
Juran que el mismo cielo
se estremecía al oír su llanto,
cómo sufrió por ella,
y hasta en su muerte la fue llamando:

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay cantaba,
ay, ay, ay, ay, ay gemía,
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay cantaba,
de pasión mortal moría.
Que una paloma triste
muy de mañana le va a cantar

a la casita sola
con sus puertitas de par en par;
juran que esa paloma
no es otra cosa más que su alma,
que todavía espera
A que regrese la desdichada.

Cucurrucucú paloma, cucurrucucú no llores.
Las piedras jamás, paloma,
¿qué van a saber de amores?
Cucurrucucú, cucurrucucú,
Cu cu ru cu cú, cu cu ru cu cú,
cu cu ru cu cú, paloma, ya no le llores

English:
Cu cu ru cu cu Paloma

They say that at nights
He simply went through by just crying
They say that he wasn’t eating
It simply didn’t suit him just taking (some food)
They swear that the sky itself
Was vibrating by listening to his weeping
How he was suffering for her,
And even when he was dying he was calling at her:

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay he was singing
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay he was wailing
Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay he was singing
He was dying from mortal passion.

That a sad dove
Very early in the morning will sing
At the lonely house
Whose small doors are widely open
They swear that this dove
Is no other (thing) than his soul,
That is still waiting
For the unhappy (woman) to return.

Cu cu ru cu cú dove, cu cu ru cu cú don’t cry.
The stones never, dove,
What will they know of loves?
Cu cu ru cu cú, cu cu ru cu cú,
Cu cu ru cu cú, cu cu ru cu cú,
Cu cu ru cu cú, dove, don’t cry anymore

AUDIO: Belafonte Sings of the Sad Dove

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1geGCzxrDw

Travel...Globalization...Identity::Appearances...While Crossing Borders::Barriers (Actual, Imagined, Cryptic) & Processing An Internalized Theme in Triste Tropique.

Border Crossing: Identity in the Global Village:

www.travelandleisure.com/articles/border-crossing-august-2003

I admire all the photos Zed but #74 got my attention. I think I recognize the hills in the background, as viwed from Great Bay, as well as the old brick oven. I especially like how you got two ovens in the pic when only one actually exists. Am I correct?

Hi gbb...you are so correct. That image is along the Great Bay road, and indeed, there is only one ruin of a brick oven. (bring back those days, please!)

But, in the era of straight film photography, which this photo is, you could set your exposures a wee under, roll back the "exposed" image a portion of a frame, and instantly take another slightly under-exposed pic on top of the previous one...in a sense double-exposing...This was done fairly intuitively, and resulted in calculated surprises, like image #74, where the background hillside seems to be penetrating the young woman.

In my "warped" mental states, I imagine that this topography will stay within her, triste-ly, forever...we are personally attracted to the idea of topophilia... literally, the love of a place & loosely tapping into the spirit of a place and how it imprints itself on our personalities and our stories.

gbb...do you know how the brick oven was used, what was made in it...who owned it & was it used communally? Did it simply fall out of favour when in-door kitchens came into being?

Zed, the owners of the oven (the Crowes) owned the adjacent house which is now called Sand Dune. They also had a retail business (a shop) on the roadside directly in front of the oven. The oven was used to bake buns and breads, and perhaps whatever else may have been popular back then. My recollection is vague. I was only just becoming "aware" around the same time the business was on the decline, but others a little more matured may be able to fill in the gaps.

It is eerie that you used the word "topography" here without knowing the history of the property. The land as you see it now has absolutely no resemblance to what it was when I was a child. There was a gigantic (to a young child anyway) sand dune behind the oven and, as children, we used to slide down its slopes on pieces of cardboard. The dune met its match when the sand was trucked off to construct the bauxite refineries. I know I'm over reaching here but perhaps you subconsciously sensed a void there in Mother Earth, thus introducing a female into the picture?

Topophilia is a new word for me but it sure fits in with some real life experiencies I've had. There are few places, mostly from childhood, that I'm invariably triggered into "revisiting", and the most majestic of memories will resurface, resurrecting smells and sights and faces that are in fact a part of my very essence. I couldn't agree more about the spiritual connection. Thanks for sharing.

Hey man faar out!

gbb...back at yu! Fascinating info about the brick oven and how it relates to Mrs Maize's farmland in the shadows of the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains.

So, you are saying that the surrounding land, from which her cottages derive their name, Sand Dune, are phantom vestiges of actual sand dunes, which I am guessing, might have had some of the same rolling characteristics as the mounds at Back Seaside.
How fortunate that the Gilpins (and, presumably, their heirs) have been such good stewards of that awe-incredible, majestic lay of land, shaped gently by natural, human-animal forces, with their snake-y bowers and watched over by the sabal (thatch) palm sentinels.

As for the un-conscious associations of the brick oven to femininity and the curves which quote and mimic the "lost" topography, I take that as an astute observation.
If you view my sepia folio of photos (ZED Shadows of Time 2011-04-12) in the Photo Gallery, you'll notice that the Cover image is a straight shot of the brick oven, with a very anthropomorphic face, in a state of ruin, with "vegetal" hair pon the maiden's head.

There's a recollection of indigenous, swelling architecture in the oven's barrel-vaulted roof (an instant association are the Greek Islands (JK) & North Africa). Does the rising smoke billow the the roof shape?

But, more so, the American Desert Southwest, especially, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment) exerts a special draw for what dem philosophers refer to as the numinous (spiritual;supernatural; surpassing comprehension; mysterious).
At Taos, and other adobe pueblos, there, the living forms are skin-smoothed, rounded and feminine, but especially the individual, small, mamma-ry ovens (the horno), which the women tend.

These women are deeply involved in the aptness of the design and construction of these related forms. Called enjarradora(s), broadly plasteress, in English, they work the "mud" (earth-mother-child re-union) and in its finishing gives to the whole the final shape, color (earth-tints from special sites), and decorative details, especially the orifices of doorways.
Madre Tierra within and without.

But, I digress...I thank you, gbb, for reviving , from your memory, what is lost in what remains.
Next time I pass the Great Bay Way, I will visit Mrs Maize, walk to the foothills, look towards the sea, feel the roll of the sand dunes, now in a state of triste and alert my nostrils to sniff for a molecule of Easter bun...in time.

Ever faithful to the Spirit of Place (genius loci) !

LINKS:
Hornos, Ovens & Fireplaces
www.sanco-bg.com/Horno.htm

Yes, Horno?
www.sucasamagazine.com/contents/Autumn07/departments/swdesign.html

About Outdoor Adobe Ovens
www.ehow.com/about_4687197_outdoor-adobe-ovens.html

You are correct in your assumption of phantom vestiges Zed. The dune in question was not solitary, but was part of a sand ridge that began behind the oven and stretched contiguously eastward to backseaside. Remnants of "the sandy hill" still remain as not all the sand was hauled away. My assumption is that a sunami may ahve entered via backseaside and left all the sand there, or violent upheaval lifted the land from the seafloor and left the sand as the sea retreated. Marine fossils are invariably found in the porous limestone hillside nearby.

I had the pleasure of meeting Miss Maizie not long ago and am sure she'd enjoy speaking with you. Seek out Maas Sam when next you are there. He's like an unofficial historian. Also Maas Benny who owns the shop on the beach in Great Bay. His mother was a big time baker back in the day, and her oven may still be standing.

I have heard and read of the numinous character of the South West and have always been intrigued by the subject. I recommend a book I read some years ago by Louis L'amour entitled "Haunted Mesa". It was quite the page turner.

Perhaps someday when "the caretaker" (turey?) finally has the TB musuem, you may consider donating one or two of these photos. Give thanks Zed. Wadada.

I was just thinking of the museum GBB. The current Caretaker, Ms C, is coming to TB soon. We have had people approach us for sale, but still hope to put the collection on display where the descendants can learn from it. Let us have more feedback from others to help us make a decision.

Z's work would be welcome in whatever setting happens. Each image deserves time to soak in.