Images from the recently concluded Calabash Literary Festival can be viewed in two sequential albums at the Photo Gallery

• ZED 2014 Calabash 1

• ZED 2014 Calabash 2

Considered by many long-term attendees as one of the most successful & inspired Calabash Festivals in its stellar history, sharing readings (pronouncements) by such eminences as Jamaica's Poet Laureate Mervyn Morris, craft-conscious novelists & story tellers with Caribbean heritages, headed-up by Zadie Smith & Jamaica Kincaid, and a diversity of poets from whom the masterful poet/artistic director, Kwame Dawes, had to narrow down to a cascade including Velma Pollard, Millicent A. A. Graham…& so forth.
The wrap-up party was the rousing musical rhythms of the Calabash Acoustic Ensemble, paying tribute to the glorious Judy Mowatt!


Zadie Smith: On Reading & Writing & Themes
• Writing is my way of expressing – and thereby eliminating – all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

• It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is ‘faith.’

• I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.

• Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.



Salman Rushdie on Sources for the Writing Life & Artistic Expression
• The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

• A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

• A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and its the balance of that that’s difficult to achieve.

• All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.

• It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

• Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.

• What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second their imagination, and third their industry.


Philosophical Musings: From Some Novels of Jamaica Kincaid
• “The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but they are of real use, I have kept them.”
(from The Autobiography of My Mother)

• “It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life, from its very beginning, is a mystery to you.”
(from The Autobiography of My Mother)

• “In a daydream I used to have, all these places were points of happiness to me; all these places were lifeboats to my small drowning soul, for I would imagine myself entering and leaving them, and just that – entering and leaving over and over again – would see me through a bad feeling I did not have a name for it,
I only knew it felt a little like sadness but heavier than that.”
(from Lucy)

• “But there was no pretending: I was not the sort of person who counted blessings; I was the sort of person for whom there could never be enough blessings.”
(from Lucy)


Poetic Sensibilities In The Novels Of Wilson Harris
•Heartland (1964)

• The solid morning mist began to disintegrate and dark shoulders of rock appeared in the water giving the illusion of swimmers, reaching from bank to bank, dispersing from themselves wreaths of snakes with imperceptible strokes…
(Opening lines of the novel)

• Heartland is a fiction, I feel, of inexplicable truth. Stevenson seeks to see through the violence of centuries. He is confused and skeptical. Nothing he thinks or says can be taken for granted, He mourns for the woman whom he loves. He is aware of himself like a clock of death that holds “diminutive hands” that are his.
(Wilson Harris)

• I can only say that all intuitions are partial and that they give way to unforeseen impulses but that they retain a shared foundation – diminishing perhaps, growing perhaps – that I have called “the mystery of inner space.” “Absence” and “presence” are shared beneath the apparent loss of a guiding “author” who returns – in a changed form – later...I feel all this brings us closer to a creativity that could alter...the outcome of writing through a variant symbiosis.
(Wilson Harris)



The Unseen Things

Hope is in the tender hands that hold you.
Hope is in the embrace of the loving.
Hope is in flesh touching flesh
to remind us of our human selves.
Hope is in the gentle nod of recognition,
hope is in the limping body still pushing
against the pain, the discomfort, still
laughing from so deep down it feels
like the rush of alcohol in the head,
the full abandonment of all fear.
Hope is in the freedom to say
I long to be touched by a lover,
I long to feel the rush of desire
satisfied; hope is to embrace hunger
and find comfort in the sharing of needs.
Hope is in the hands we grasp,
the prayers we whisper,
the amen, the amen, the amen.
––Kwame Dawes

susumba (Solanum torvum)…in Jamaica, there is a berry by this name, also known as "gully beans", it is usually cooked in a dish along with saltfish and ackee.

Susumba, the magazine of News, Interviews and Reviews from the Caribbean Arts, Music, Theatre & Film Scene gave some of the most honest reporting "feel" for the tone of the 2014 Globalishus Calabash Fest.

Here's Their Review:
http://www.susumba.com/books/reviews/calabash-2014-delicious-literary-fest

& The Impossibly Packed Line-Up…Lest We Forget!
http://www.susumba.com/books/news/calabash-2014-unleashes-globalishus-line

Salman Rushdie: 'We're hardwired to desire stories' (from the Calabash Interview)

http://www.susumba.com/books/interviews/were-hardwired-desire-stories-salman-rus hdie-calabash-2014