The stellar team that brought Jamaica ten years of excellent programing, quality literary offerings and professional and efficient organization with the Calabash International Literary Festival, is back at it again.

Jubilation! 50 represents a return of the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust on the world literary scene.

GQ Magazine UK has already listed the festival in the Top 100 things to do in the world in 2012.

Between May 25-27, Jakes Resort in Treasure Beach in St. Elizabeth will be abuzz with international literary figures, live music, seminars, great food and one of the best views available in Jamaica.

Jubilation! 50 will celebrate Jamaica’s fiftieth anniversary of independence with the same formulae of earthy, inspirational, daring and diverse programming that made The Wall Street Journal report in June 2010 “Calabash is, in a nutshell, all that’s right with Jamaica”.

“Is Calabash back?” asks festival programmer and award winning poet, Kwame Dawes, “Well, the spirit of Calabash is back, the standards and values of Calabash are back, the experience of great writing, great music and great vibes is back.”

According to festival organizers Kwame Dawes and Justine Henzell, Jubilation! 50 is merely a continuation of the mission of the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust, the governing entity that brought ten years of Calabash to Jamaica. “We wanted to continue our mission in a focused and selective way, and Jubilation! 50 does exactly that,” said Justine Henzell. She quickly reeled off a list of some of the women featured at this year’s festival, and it is clear that the festival has not lost its knack of attracting renowned authors from around the world.

“Acclaimed novelists Chimamanda Adichie from Nigeria and Maaza Mengiste from Ethiopia, poets such as Carolyn Forche and Elizabeth Alexander from the US, the award winning sisters Sadie and Melissa Jones from the UK, Jamaica’s Olive Senior and on and on."

“We have sought to bring writers with a strong connection to Jamaica to help us commemorate our fiftieth anniversary through the arts. We have programmed quite a celebration and the tagline for JUBILATION! 50 says it all, we simply Love Jamaica” said Kwame Dawes.

JUBILATION! 50 is proudly endorsed by the Jamaica Tourist Board. “The Jamaica Tourist Board has been associated with the Calabash Festival since its inception,” said Director of Tourism John Lynch.
“It is an association which we treasure. Jamaica is blessed with literary talent and is an inspiration to the creativity of the human mind. We are thrilled with the return of the festival as Jubilation! 50”.

More information on the programme will be released in coming weeks and the website http://www.calabashfestival.org and Facebook page are great resource for all things related to the Festival.

LINK:
http://repeatingislands.com

Have you wondered how the writers have been selected for the Calabash over the years? This is not a complaint...the lineup has been stellar with no less than two Nobel Prize winners in Literature gracing our stages and shores.
We've noted linkages to British "Commonwealth" associations and to certain publishing houses which embrace these authors.
But, when Colin and Kwame and Justine get together with their colleagues do they take into consideration the recommendations and suggestions from street-corner or out at the crossroads?

In the news recently, the death of the poet, Adrienne Rich was announced.

The New York Times describes her as "one of the most influential and widely read writers of the feminist movement, took on sexism and racial oppression in her poems....a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century... Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined."

Diving Into the Wreck

I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently about the wreck
we dive into the hold. ...
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
--Adrienne Rich

A QUOTE by Adrienne Rich:
Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy...Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard.

As far as the Calabash is concerned, we figure from the official Calabash Fest site that the "30 Writers" for this year's convocation are set in stone. Fancifully, we would like to nominate Adrienne Rich's life partner for consideration, the Jamaican author Michelle Cliff...if she were willing and able to attend.

What caught the eye of anyone with merely a whiff of Jamaicana in their souls are some of the titles of Ms Cliff's endeavours:
The novel, Abeng...short stories, Bodies of Water...prose poetry, The Land of Look Behind and Claiming and Identity They Taught Me to Despise.

Michelle Cliff has written:...To write a complete Caribbean woman, or man for that matter, demands of us retracing the African past of ourselves, reclaiming as our own, and as our subject, a history sunk under the sea, or scattered as potash in the canefields, or gone to bush, or trapped in a class system notable for its rigidity and absolute dependence on color stratification. Or a past bleached from our minds.
It means finding the artforms of those of our ancestors and speaking in the patois forbidden us. It means realizing our knowledge will always be wanting. It means also, I think, mixing in the forms taught us by the oppressor, undermining his language and co-opting his style, and turning it to our purpose.

Like Toni Morrison, Michelle Cliff attempts a kind of 'literary archaeology' in her writing; she is concerned, in other words, with dis-covering if not 'what really happened', then, at least, what might have happened.
Admitting she is 'attracted to places where things are buried,' Cliff pays heed to not only the historically visible and vocal, but to the absences and silences of history as well.
Discarded and buried shards are recovered from the 'midden' of official history, and, through imagination, are pieced together into narrative.

Adrienne Rich::NY Times LINK:
www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/books/adrienne-rich-feminist-poet-and-author-dies-at- 82.html

Michelle Cliff::Emory University LINK:
www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Cliff.html

Happy Birthday to the French poet, Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), who wrote:

You must let your poems ride their luck
On the back of the sharp morning air
Touched with the fragrance of mint and thyme ...
And everything else is Literature.

Hail to thee...Oh Calabash!...Much respect is due.

“Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.”
—John Edgar Wideman

NY Times Archival LINK:
www.nytimes.com/2003/06/03/books/poetry-reggae-and-rain-on-a-jamaican-beach-a-li terary-festival-defies-nature.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

After three days (of the Calabash Fest), a lesson was learned: The Caribbean is not just a pretty turquoise thing to swim in, but the medium of suffering, slavery, ancestry, patriarchy, sex, myth and exile.

Since we don't, at this time, know the complete line-up of writers for the Calabash, are we permitted to include our own roster until something firmer comes along?
If so, would it be appropriate to consider the 77-year old Canadian (born Prince Edward Island) poet, Mark Strand, who wrote:
"Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf."


from Mark Strand's Almost Invisible: Poems

“Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined
future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or
a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced
that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was
charged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and
one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-
loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the
high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so
many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies
in the perfumed heat of summer night.”

Nice, nuh?

Carolyn Forché (2012 Calabash Fest contributor) has said:
"No one is a great poet because she is a miserable drunk. No one is a great poet because he has had a nervous breakdown. Suffering, however, can be experienced as a curse or a blessing; the luckiest is the one who can experience it as a blessing."