Lorna Goodison, poet-storyteller-visual artist, has spent a great deal of her adult life teaching literature in the US & Canada, but she has drawn on subtle seasonings of her memories & observations of growing up, and digging up the culture of Xamayca, to tell some riveting tales.

In a book of short stories, which has been out for a while, By Love Possessed:Stories, she explores the lives of working class men & women, their values, social exchanges, hopes, dreams, misdeeds, cross-purposes...
The men do not come off too magnanimously in her stories, whether from social conditions, ineptitude, some callousness, blinders, and all manner of perceived and challenging "hurts".
Goodison does paint some crisp portrayals, on the verge of satire, and perhaps universally unbalanced, but it can't be said that her characters, in this circumscribed world, don't seem recognizably "real".

Here's a decent Review of the Stories:

Caribbean Review of Books:
http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/28-november-2011/women-in-love

Interview:: Lorna Goodison on the craft of writing: "I know the language is true".
http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/17-august-2008/i-know-the-language -is-true

Lorna Goodison:
So whenever I write I know that the language is true, and I know that in myself. But when I read it to people and hear the response, they’re the sounding board, and that makes me very happy, because it validates the faith I have in the fact that my ear is still intact. I spend huge amounts of money on telephone calls, because I have to hear my siblings and my friends speaking Jamaican. I have to have that Jamaican voice in my ear all the time.

Edward Baugh (J'can poet & literary scholar): "one of Goodison’s achievements is that her poetry inscribes the Jamaican sensibility and culture on the text of the world".

About this time of year, we can only imagine that the organizers of the Calabash Literary Festival (now a biennial event) would have a rich mixture of literature and music on the programme.
Appreciating Calabash co-creator Justine Henzell's devotion to the seminal contribution to Jamaican film-making, provided by her father's The Harder They Come, it would be no surprise to see screened the film Better Mus' Come, which builds on Perry Henzell's groundations.

The director/photographer of Better Mus' Come, Storm Saulter, when interviewed by Global Voices, had some interesting comments about the role of "new media", skimpy budgets, photographic art and techniques in the advancing of Caribbean storytelling:

...new media is very experimental, it’s video art and kind of that blend between video art and proper filmmaking. And then transmedia is another thing, where you’re telling stories on multiple platforms. So you have a story where there’s episodes playing on television and then part of the story is not shown on television, so you have to join their online presence to see that. And then usually they build into the plot user-generated elements so it’s interactive. This is like the new, new wave of multi-tiered storytelling. And that’s a new world where Caribbean people really haven’t gotten a grasp on it yet, but with all these tools, you can tell multi-platform.

...new media I love video art. Art is at the forefront of everything. That’s the rawest of the raw and I wish the Caribbean had a big art-appreciating community.

Question: Who gets to decide what the narrative of Caribbean art or literature, for example, should be – and do we now have the same conundrum with Caribbean film? Does it always have to be gritty or conversely, sun, sea, sand and sex?

For Discussion, Read More @:

Global Voices Link:
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/09/27/jamaica-storm-saulter-on-film-new-media -in-the-caribbean

On the "Neutral" Political Nature of Better Mus' Come
I (Storm Saulter) was basically trying to show how people on either side of the political spectrum, especially at that time (1970s), were so die-hard that they would kill each other because they were aligned with different political parties. And I wanted to show how they were actually a part of the same system. They were just two pieces in the same machine. And one piece thinks it’s so different from the other piece but the machine works by having both pieces in tack.

caribBeing Link:
www.caribbeing.com/sweettalk/qa-storm-saulter-filmmaker

Better Mus Come Movie Trailer:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfKcGf_X8TQ


Though I appreciate films like A Clockwork Orange and those types of films that are very stylistic in their performance, I strive for very realistic performances. At the same time, I’m a cinematographer and that’s very much based on style, so I am interested in a stylization of something that is very raw.
--Storm Saulter

Better Mus' Come is a love story unfolding at one of the most violent moments in Jamaican history, when rival gangs were enlisted by warring political factions to disrupt the democratic process — and bloodshed was unleashed on the streets.

Media Reviews:
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20080611/ent/ent2.html

www.villagevoice.com/2013-03-13/film/epic-if-uneven-better-mus-come-pulls-you-in to-jamaica-s-1970s-turmoil/full