Kamil Ali

glanced left and right and gasped. They had fallen asleep between two concrete tombs. A quick glance upward made her shiver.
A menacing gargoyle glared down at her from the top of a large black marble tombstone. The ugly wrought iron creature stooped on its perch with its toes hanging over the edge. The gargoyle, with wings spread wide, cast a foreboding shadow over her. Fear sent a sliver of ice through her heart. She flipped onto her all fours to flee from the eerie surroundings. She recoiled in pain when the crown of her head bumped into an invisible wall. After a moment of stunned paralysis, she attempted escape in the other directions without success. Moira’s heart dropped. The rectangular grave did not want her to leave!
Avoiding the slightest glance in the direction of the statue, she stood up at the opposite side and stretched at full length to test the height of the unseen barrier. She slumped to the ground in defeat. The grave had imprisoned her.
A weight at the back of her neck and on her chest made her look down. A pendant dangled from a thick rope chain around her neck. A beam of moonlight lasted long enough for her to glimpse a lady’s face carved out of a purplish-blue stone. A crown on the woman’s head held a large gemstone of the same color. Moonlight gleamed off the cut edges of the precious stone.
When the cloud swallowed the moon again, she dropped the pendant. Using every ounce of effort, she tried to reconstruct her movements over the past twenty-four hours.
She searched for answers to pressing questions. How had she ended up in her current situation? Why had Gnashen disappeared? Who put the chain and pendant on her? Whose grave had she awoken on?
Thick darkening clouds that covered the entire sky, signaled a brewing rainstorm. Moira shivered and hugged herself against a misty drizzle and increasing high wind.
In less than a minute, gale force winds howled and circled around the cemetery, sucking the water laden fall leaves from the ground and churned them into the shape of a twister.
The air streams pulled her pendant straight up and twisted the necklace to form a noose around her neck. She tiptoed to avoid blacking out when the chain tightened on her jugular veins and threatened to block oxygen enriched blood from reaching her brain. Tears flowed down her cheeks from eyes on the verge of popping out of their sockets.
She pressed hard against the invisible wall opposite the gargoyle when claps of thunder sent ominous warning after each streak lightning’s needlepoint electrocution of Earth.
The storm’s continuous rumblings formed a low pitched tonal backdrop for the streak lightning’s spectacular display of brilliant flashes every two seconds and the accompanying drum solo of the thunder.
The deafening storm drew closer. Moira cringed when lightning’s static electricity chiseled a deep groove into the earth in a straight line toward her. When it reached the perimeter of the grave that held her captive, it stopped and sucked up every sound and movement around her.
Moira closed her eyes and braced herself for an assault in the still dead air. Her ears rang loud in the sudden graveyard silence.
After an unbearable minute, she surveyed the immediate surroundings through a tiny slit in her eyelids.
A soft moonbeam spotlighted the gargoyle and tombstone. Moira strained her eyes to read the inscription on the headstone. Unable to read it from that distance, she inched closer to make out the larger letters and numbers.
Her heart skipped a beat when she read the name and the living years of the grave’s occupant. This information piqued her curiosity and forced her closer to read the smaller writing etched into the marble. She reeled back after reading the eulogy.
“Oh, my gosh Buddy!” She trembled like a leaf.
“You promised to wait for me, Moira.” The gargoyle’s eyes glowed red when the words emanated from its unmoving beak. “You betrayed me, Moira.” Its wings twitched. “With my best friend, Moira.” Its sharp long claws tapped on the headstone.
“They told me you had died, Buddy.” She remained on her knees and stared up at the gargoyle.
“Who told you, Moira?” The gargoyle stretched its long neck down toward her. “Who, Moira!” He screamed the words at her.
“When Gnashen returned from his tour of duty, he told me you had died as a traitor.” She spoke in a pleading manner. “He said they couldn’t find your body parts because you had died like a treacherous dog in the enemy camp.” She started to sob. “He said your information to the enemy caused many of your comrades to die.” She hung her head low and shook it. “I thought you had snapped, since it went against your character.”
“Too late for that now, Moira.” He screamed at her. “My parents brought me back and buried me without telling you.” He took a deep breath and spoke in a steady voice. “You hurt them, Moira. They never want to see you again.” He lowered his voice. “I don’t ever want to see you again.”
Moira stared at the ground, ashamed of her failure to defend the boy she had loved since childhood.
“Did he tell you that I bought that necklace and pendant as a good luck charm for you? That he stole them when he killed me?” The gargoyle sniffed and continued. “You married the man who slaughtered me and my entire group, Moira.” The creature used its large wings to fly into the darkness.
“Where are you going, Buddy?” She called out to him. “Please don’t leave me here alone.”
“I’ll be back.” The gargoyle disappeared into the night.
A short while later, it returned with Gnashen hanging from it long sharp claws.
“Confess you yellow belly rat!” The gargoyle dropped him beside Moira. “Tell her the truth.”
Gnashen fell to Moira’s feet and confessed the truth. She stepped back in scorn.
“I reside in the crown jewel, Moira.” Buddy softened his tone. “You can keep me by your heart or discard me.”
“I love you, Buddy.” Moira touched the pendant. “Until my last breath.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “I’m so sorry my darling.”
The sky cleared and the cloudy night disappeared in a glorious display of bright warm sunshine.
The cemetery faded away and Moira awoke on her bed with the sun streaming into her eyes. She touched the chain that Gnashen had placed around her neck. He had unwittingly brought her Buddy back to her. She kissed the sparkling gem.
“Good Morning, sunshine.” Gnashen entered the bedroom with a huge grin. He carried a large tray that emanated the sweet aroma of brewed coffee and scrambled eggs.
“I’m not hungry, Gnashen.” She hopped off the bed and entered the closet to select her clothing. “Get dressed.” She called from the walk-in closet. “We’re going to the police station for you to make your confession.”
She heard the tray drop to the floor but did not care about stains on the carpet. She reached into her secret compartment and pulled her little handgun out of its holster. After releasing the safety catch, she waited for the inevitable.

By Romeo Kaseram

Derek Alton Walcott was born on January 23, 1930 in Castries, Saint Lucia, to father Warwick and Alix ‘Maarlin’ Walcott. Siblings were twin brother Roderick, and sister, Pamela. The family was of African, Dutch and English ancestry. Mother Alix was a teacher devoted to the arts, instilling in her children her love of language, often reciting poetry, and reading out loud from the classics and the works of Shakespeare. His father was a painter and poet, who passed away at the age of 31. The family was part of a minority Methodist community.
In 1948, Walcott published his first poem, titled 1944, in a local St Lucian newspaper. As a teenager, he self-published a collection of 25 poems with financial help from his mother. At age 20 his play Henri Christophe was produced by an arts guild of which he was a co-founder. Following his early education in St Lucia, he travelled to the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica, where he studied literature, and then later to New York during the first half of the 1950s.
He moved to Trinidad around the middle of this decade. Described as his second home, Port-of-Spain became the stage for many of his most important works. Here he founded his repertory company, the Little Carib Theatre Workshop, which later became the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in the late 1960s. He served as founder director of the TTW from 1959 to 1971. He wrote over 20 plays in his career as a playwright.
Among his works of poetry are: The Castaway and Other Poems (1965), Another Life (1973), Sea Grapes (1976), The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), The Fortunate Traveller (1981), Omeros (1990), The Prodigal (2004), and White Egrets (2014). Among his plays are: Wine of the Country (1953), Ione (1957), Drums and Colours: An Epic Drama (1958), Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958), Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967), The Joker of Seville (1974), O Babylon! (1976), Pantomime (1978), The Haitian Earth (1984), Steel (1991), Moon-Child (2011), and O Starry Starry Night (2014). Among his books are The Poet in the Theatre (1990), The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (1993), and What the Twilight Says (1998).
In his 1970 essay, What the Twilight Says: An Overture, Walcott looks at art and theatre while reflecting on the Caribbean as a colonised space. As Wikipedia notes, Walcott “…discusses the problems for an artist of a region with little in the way of truly indigenous forms, and with little national or nationalist identity. He states: ‘We are all strangers here... Our bodies think in one language and move in another’. The epistemological effects of colonisation inform plays such as Ti-Jean and his Brothers. Mi-Jean, one of the eponymous brothers, is shown to have much information, but to truly know nothing. Every line Mi-Jean recites is rote knowledge gained from the coloniser; he is unable to synthesise it or apply it to his life as a colonised person.”
Walcott notes, growing up in a Caribbean culture: “What we were deprived of was also our privilege. There was a great joy in making a world that so far, up to then, had been undefined... My generation of West Indian writers has felt such a powerful elation at having the privilege of writing about places and people for the first time and, simultaneously, having behind them the tradition of knowing how well it can be done – by a Defoe, a Dickens, a Richardson.”
Additionally, “Walcott identified as ‘absolutely a Caribbean writer’, a pioneer, helping to make sense of the legacy of deep colonial damage. In such poems as The Castaway (1965) and in the play Pantomime (1978), he uses the metaphors of shipwreck and Crusoe to describe the culture and what is required of artists after colonialism and slavery: both the freedom and the challenge to begin again, salvage the best of other cultures and make something new. These images recur in later works as well. He writes, ‘If we continue to sulk and say, Look at what the slave-owner did, and so forth, we will never mature. While we sit moping or writing morose poems and novels that glorify a non-existent past, then time passes us by.”
Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, with the Swedish Academy citing the “great luminosity” of his writings. Commenting on Omeros, the Academy said: “[It is] …a majestic Caribbean epos in 64 chapters – ‘I sang our wide country, the Caribbean Sea’. This is a work of incomparable ambitiousness, in which Walcott weaves his many strands into a whole. Its weft is a rich one, deriving from the poet’s wide-ranging contacts with literature, history and reality. We find Homer, Poe, Mayakovsky and Melville, allusions are made to Brodsky (‘the parentheses of palms / shielding a candle's tongue’), and he quotes the Beatles' Yesterday. Walcott’s metaphors and images are numerous, and often striking – ‘And beyond them, like dominoes / with lights for holes, the black skyscrapers of Boston’. He captures white seagulls against a blue sky in the image ‘Gulls chalk the blue enamel’. His poetry acquires at one and the same time singular lustre and great force.”
Speaking to the Paris Review in 1985, Walcott said: “I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer. The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.”
Walcott died on March 17 this year in Cap Estate, Saint Lucia.
In paying tribute to the poet, the Trinidad Express editorialised: “A literary giant whose works vividly expressed the joys, pains and energy of life in this corner of the world, Mr Walcott held a commanding position as the poet laureate of the West Indies. There was never a doubt about his dedication to the region. Throughout his career, apart from brief academic and theatrical stints abroad, Mr Walcott lived and worked in the Caribbean, never giving in to the lure of greener pastures in Europe or North America. St Lucia was the place of his birth and it was there, at his home in Cap Estate, that he drew his last breath. In fact, for the most part his writing was inspired by the lush, verdant terrain of his homeland.”
It added: “Employing the English exalted by the British, he took the Caribbean to the world, stunning the literary world with West Indian mastery of the English form. The power of Walcott’s poetry left no doubt about the capacity and capabilities within these old colonies of the European empires. As Frank Worrell had done in cricket and V. S. Naipaul in novels, Walcott transformed the standard for poetry in the English language.”

Sources for this exploration include: Trinidad and Tobago Guardian; Trinidad Express; Wikipedia; and the official website of the Nobel Prize, www.nobelprize.org.

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