Here Goes Link:
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/lifestyle/onhold/20060531T220000-0500_105834_OBS_ GIRLS_ANYTHING_BUT_BAD_AT_CALABASH_.asp

Hi Rebecca,

I have been trying to access the link for this article to no avail.Please help.

Sweetp.

The link seems to be down. I searched the site and couldn't find the article.

Anyone else?

If you google Treasure Beach Jamaica and click the news category you will get a few articles about the Calabash Festival.

Go to Fri 2 May Observer on-line and click the link in the box on upper right hand side/this link doesn't work.

The Girls Behaving Badly segment proved the biggest hit at Saturday's presentation of the Calabash International Literary Festival in Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth.
There were four women: Cheryl Boyce Taylor, Suheir Hammad, Ishle Yi Park and Tanya Stephens - all from diverse backgrounds with diverse experiences, which were highlighted through their words.
First up, Trinidad-born Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who has actually lived in New York since she was 13. Before a much more invigorated crowd, she spoke with a rather diluted Trinidadian accent.
She began with Arima, from which she read, Julie/the mango/split my lips in praise/i rise follow moon/to its fading light. Yearning followed, before she read from her new book, Convincing The Body.
Americanising, a poetic response to being teased about her accent during her first years in America, preceded Mango Pretty - her ode to "all the big and beautiful women in the house" - before Taylor closed with Tobago and Deh Accuse Meh.
Up next, Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian born to refugee parents in Amman, Jordan, who went to New York when she was five. Before she took to the stage, a recording of a conversation she had with her father was played, as well as the poem, Daddy's Song, giving a hint at her motivation for becoming a writer and a poet.
She then appeared, green sash around her waist touched by her long hair. When Hammad told of her experience at the airport, it was clear from the get-go that this would be a fun session.
In This Is Brooklyn, she read, If you tell the truth here/You have nothing to fear, delivering the lines with a fast-paced almost rapping cadence. A poem for her mother, who she said is in a competition with her father as to whom gets the most stage time, followed. Hammad riffed on the myriad racial and other codes of classification in the US in This Is To Certify That My Mother Is Now Natural, closing with the lines, Never can they certify/What they don't understand.
She had been striking chords with the audience since she began and hit harder with her last piece. Hammad stated that the only thing that kept her out of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 was a craving for Korean food, which took her elsewhere. A few days after the tragedy, she wrote First Writing Since, which was filled with vivid imagery of pain, loss, confusion and the comfort offered by total strangers, as well as the frustration suffered by the stereotypes about Middle Easterners and in some ways at no longer being considered quite as an American - which immediately followed.
Ishle Yi Park was hilarious from the moment she took the stage, introducing herself as "Ishle Yi Park. I'm not Ms Chin, I'm Ms Park", to laughter. A Korean/American with the stature and features to match, she was an impassioned ball of energy onstage, not only reciting her poetry but singing - a cappella, as well as with the aid of a guitar and rapping with the audience.
Her poems moved from the realm of family and the shame of growing up with fishmongers to snapshots of the lives of Koreans in New York. A sample of a Korean pop song was followed by Ski Sonnet, which was a love story, and Kunemo, a short story about the funny advice from an aunt on marriage, taken from her award-winning first book The Temperature of This Water.
The ribald P---y followed to general hilarity before she took up her guitar and closed with entertaining renditions of Bob Marley's Mellow Mood, Beres Hammond's Tempted To Touch and Tracy Chapman's Baby Can I Hold You [Sorry], the audience singing along and clapping in time all the way.
Jamaican DJ Tanya Stephens' set was disappointingly short. She delivered the only poem she had, questioning why the same people who sey God is in the sky/Ah di same people who have a problem when mi get high, and but King James/Not even one likkle verse from a woman/Not to worry/Behold/the chronicles of Tanya. She continued, singing, You keep looking up/Why don't you look around you/I am everywhere, over a pre-recorded track. Stephens then left the stage, but after the audience voiced its displeasure, she returned to do It's A Pity and What A Day, before Girls Behaving Badly came to an end
Calabash final
One of the most widely and wildly anticipated writers at the Calabash International Literary Festival, held last weekend in Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth, was Sonia Sanchez. This could be judged by the murmurs of excitement which ran through the crowd each time her name was mentioned even the day before.
With Puerto Rican-American Martin Espada, Sonia Sanchez was featured in the penultimate session of the festival last Sunday, which followed readings from the Jean Rhys novel, After Leaving Mr McKenzie on the occasion of its 75th anniversary.
Any number of emotions were expressed during the festival: anger, confusion, love, despair, regret, joy, even almost-despairing curiousity as the writers meditated on life, death and everything in-between. However, perhaps the most poignant moments came with Sonia Sanchez's presentation. She choked up and sobbed on more than one occasion and her emotions ran like ripples through an audience that hung on to every word.
She came to the stage dressed all in white, her greying dreadlocked hair a tidy mess, only to be faced with a problem. She was too short or the podium was too tall. Either way, MC and festival organizer Kwame Dawes made some rapid adjustments while wry amusement ran through the crowd. That done, Sonia Sanchez began to speak.
At first there was a litany of names, recited rhythmically and interspersed with clicks of the tongue, recited in a way that was almost mesmerising. The names were of some of the greatest rebels and thinkers over the ages and included Tupac Shakur, Malcolm Luther King, Pablo Neruda and Sitting Bull, people known and remembered for taking a stand, making a difference.
Then she told a story about a time she gave a speech at Medgar Evers College in New York. After the speech she was about to leave and says she was "told to stay by my ancestors." A teenaged girl asked how Sanchez survived Harlem while growing up and how she could do the same. "I demand that you stay alive,"said Sanchez, and this was the birth of a programme which is aimed at aiding at-risk teens and young adults to do just that.
The poem Peace followed, book-ended by the statement that their were 105 million war dead in the 20th century and the 21st is well on the way to passing that, and the story of a student called a terrorist by a teacher when he asked if they could discuss peace in class after the beginning of the war in Iraq. The rhythm and flow of the poem, complemented by sound effects, made for a truly compelling performance.
Poem for Some Women was based on the true story of a woman so badly in need of crack cocaine that she left her young girl at the crack house for seven days as payment, doing her best to ignore the child's heartrending cries as she left and the child's laments when the mother returned for her were heartbreaking.
The child eventually ran away.
There would be sobs as she told stories of forgiveness. Poem for My Father was about her forgiving the many women her father had. My Father's Voice was the tale of her gay brother, who reconciled with their father after years of bitterness between the two. Her father told her "It is so good to have a son", more than once after and more sobs accompanied her father finally saying "It is so good to have a daughter," after she read a book of her poetry to him. She had given it to him but he never read it and had her do so not long before he died.
She dedicated her last piece to author Toni Morrison, wrapping up an emotionally moving, sincere and very effective presentation.
As a light breeze wafted through the tent by the Caribbean Sea, the large crowd stared and listened attentively as the large, lightly-complexioned and salt and pepper-bearded man took the podium, most not knowing quite what to expect.
They need not have worried. Espada was fervent, witty and articulate as he voiced his opinions, feelings, politics, social conscience, regrets and joys to a receptive audience.

He immediately established a rapport, starting by saying "Buenas tardes," and going on to rhapsodise about the music of Puerto Rico and what he called 'a street of miracles,' in En la calle San Sebastian.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Espada's amazement and the disappointment he felt on his first visit to Puerto Rico, where he noticed how the people there treasured American things (such as the soda Coca-Cola) while not noticing the joys of their tropical paradise (symbolised by the milk from coconuts) is detailed in Coca-Cola and Coco Frio.
He evoked laughter with his 'compulsory' - for a Puerto Rican "cockroach poem" My Cockroach Lover. He slaps himself awake after one such insect tenderly declares its love for him and lies awake, heartbroken and staring at the dark, because I realised this was a dream/And so that meant/the cockroach/did not really love me.
Espada also spoke of famed Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey, whom he met at Salkey's home in Massachusetts - which was surrounded by sheep - and read his elegy to the deceased writer. The elegy mentioned Salkey's battle with diabetes, his poetry about Chile and Jamaica, the aforementioned sheep and ended with the words Your beard still sprouts from my jaw./Because of you,/Chile is a bird pressed flat in my book, Jamaica/a brown hand gathering stones on the beach/for snapping at the noses of gargantuan conquerors./For you, I savour the burst of air/in the word companero.
Espada spoke of the poor and oppressed in Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands in which pro-independence marchers in Puerto Rico were massacred, focusing on a woman who lost her lover during the terrible events. United States' hypocrisy, and dare one say it, imperialism - and what many consider to be the direct results of the same also came in for the lash of his tongue. He spoke about the first 9-11 the September 11, 1973 coup in Chile by eventual dictator Augusto Pinochet, a coup he described as "orchestrated and sponsored" by the United States in City of Glass. In fact, that poem was also an elegy to the famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, whose work was banned in Chile subsequent to the coup and whose life Espada lectures on.
He closed to a standing ovation after what he called poem for hope.