An Exemplary Resignation: Colin Channer and Calabash:

“… from my perspective, the ultimate task of the architect is to dream. Otherwise nothing happens.”
–Colin Channer channeling Oscar Niemeyer (Brazilian Architect-1907-1912)

http://anniepaul.net/tag/calabash-literary-festival

...in Jamaica, certainly not least, the final critical ingredient is music. Calabash features nightly reggae concerts and DJ sets, and concludes with a world-class acoustic performance. Dawes says any literary event in the birthplace of reggae has to showcase that legacy.

NPR Link:
www.npr.org/2012/07/05/154508127/jamaica-does-literary-fest-with-a-caribbean-twi st

We haven' t seen the published full program of the Calabash-ment yet, but we imagine that Justine, Kwame and their team are working feverishly to put together an exciting complement of poets, novelists, musical themes...

The ending concert of the Calabash is always a treat, with the Calabash Acoustic Ensemble (once composed of Wayne Armond, Ibo Cooper, Steve Golding & Seretse Small) spilling out riddim highs.
If that portion of the schedule is not set in stone, wouldn't it be nice as cream to have our popular Tessanne Chung, the recent winner of the Voice Competition, in the whole-wide USA, performing the range of song interpretations that she has become known for.

If we were to offer a suggestion/request for Tessanne--out of the blue--it might be a Bob Dylan (poet-songwriter) cover, To Ramona. This isn't so far-fetched a notion, since there once was a reggae album of Dylan covers (Is It Rolling Bob? A Reggae Tribute to Bob Dylan}

YouTube: "To Ramona"-Sinéad Lohan
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nHwILs8bdo

Justine & Kwame--who are the hot new Jamaican autors on your radar screen for this years Calabash? How about Stephanie Saulter's dystopic novel: Gemsigns?

YardEdge Interview:
www.yardedge.net/books/jamaican-author-stephanie-saulter-talks-about-her-new-boo k-gemsigns

"Gemsigns–Strange Horizons Review:
www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2013/11/gemsigns_by_ste.shtml

Until we hear more about the line-up for the 2014 Calabash Fest, we could do worse than turning to our Island's version of the Noir Series of capital cities around the world: Kingston Noir (edited by Colin Channer)

There is something unaccountable about Kingston’s most macabre and absurd occurrences. It is not so much that the city’s streets are baffling, exactly—at least not to those who live there. But episodes erupt all the time that render Kingston a baroque and startling place.
Several of the stories in Kingston Noir succeed brilliantly in reproducing the simultaneously estranging and horrifying effects of urban violence in Jamaica. And there is something appropriately unsettling about the differences between the stories, collected and edited by Colin Channer, such that the sense of being dislodged somewhere puzzlingly dissimilar from the place one began sometimes mimics the feeling of moving through Kingston.
But Kingston Noir is also patchy, uneven in a way that leaves lingering questions about the project’s intentions: What Kingston, exactly, is being evoked here? Is there something like a unifying principle to the collection that helps to locate and capture Kingston, circa now, as a particular geographical space?

In one sense, the unifying principle offered by Akashic Press, the publisher of the collection, is a generic one. Kingston Noir is the latest in a long-running and popular city noir series coming out of this small (but tallawah) Brooklyn press. The point of a series such as Akashic’s urban noir is to collate as well as reinvent, the challenge being to collect a diverse set of landscapes under a single rubric, forging an imaginative connection amongst Baltimore, Havana, and Brooklyn—to name just three of the several dozen cities Akashic Noir has touched down in so far. This unifying project wouldn’t suffice if every city’s noir looked the same. And so, clearly the fun of the series is, however partially, to reinvent the genre, to infuse familiar conventions with the specificity of a particular space.

Some stories in Kingston Noir do this immediately. The story that opens the collection, Kwame Dawes’s “My Lord,” transports classic figures from film noir—the femme fatale, the lonesome private eye—to the Jamaican landscape in a way that opens up the genre while attending to its conventions.

And Marcia Douglas’s “One-Girl Half Way Tree Concert” muddles to interesting effect the ghost story with the noir tale: her heroine surely has a woeful backstory that leads her to the famous Kingston traffic intersection where she alone can detect the slave executions that took place there a century or so prior. In Douglas’s story, noir is implied, a trace rather than a set of fundamentals. But in several other stories, the equation noir = violence suffices. Rather than leaving this collection with a sense of Kingston’s noir, it is possible to leave with a longing for something the collection did not necessarily promise: contemporary stories about Jamaicans that do not involve violence, loss, and destruction.

This both is and is not the collection’s fault. Colin Channer and Akashic Books cannot be blamed for the dearth of black urban dwellers in contemporary literary fiction, for a reader’s hunger for more of them. But the fact that so many of the characters in this collection seemed, somehow, to want more from their stories, more than the plotting or the surviving of catastrophe, suggests some glitch in the project’s frame, perhaps an insufficient working-through of the series’ directive for the purposes of these writers and this city.
In his introduction, Channer describes the shared interests of the writers he gathered here as “a fascination with the city’s turbulent dynamics, with the way its boundaries of color, class, race, gender, ideology, and sexual privilege crisscross like storm-tangled power-lines”. Maybe these load-bearing concepts are too blunt to suggest something like an ethos of the city. How might it have been possible for Channer to be both grander and less grandiose in his vision, at least as he describes it here? How to aspire for some collective spirit that was more than a set of subject positions in some uncertain relation to each other? (For, in which city are identities not turbulent and dynamic?)...

Chris Abani once wrote an elliptical essay about a city, titled “Lagos: A Pilgrimage in Notations.” “We are always listening to the city inside us,” he writes.
As a totality, it may not be possible to find that psychic city in Kingston Noir. But traversing this collection as if going “down the road,” with all the abrupt stops, shifts, and turns that Jamaicanism implies, does offer a way of connecting, piece by piece, story by story, to fragments of the city tucked away in consciousness and memory.
It is a city rarely encountered in fiction; this collection satisfies a need and makes one hungry for more.
––Nadia Ellis (Professor of Literature @ U of California-Berkley)

If Interested Read More @:
http://smallaxe.net/wordpress3/reviews/2013/05/27/kingston-piece-by-piece/#more- 249