January 24, 2017 issue
Authors' & Writers' Corner
Bernard Heydorn
It has been on my list for a while now but at last I ticked one more item off from my “bucket list” – an ocean cruise down through the Caribbean to the Grenadines. Over 12 days and nights, my wife and I took an ocean cruise from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to St. George’s, Grenada, visiting a string of islands along the way and back. Overall, we covered 3094 miles at sea and several hundred miles on land. Starting in Canada, we were in nine countries and used six different currencies.
From Fort Lauderdale, we spent one night at sea and pulled into Coco Cay in the Bahamas, an island owned and operated by the owners of the Cruise line. We had lived in the Bahamas previously and the beautiful clear
For nearly a century, starting in 1713, the Caribbean was the scene of an ownership struggle between Britain, Spain, Portugal and France. King sugar and spices were the major prizes. The harbour (Nelson’s Dockyard) was also used as a hurricane haven.
These days, Nelson’s Dockyard is frequented by yachts of the rich and famous. Inside the compound there are cannons of yesteryear. Several years ago I had a welder make a replica for me of one of the deck cannons used on Nelson’s flagship, The Victory. That cannon which has a striking resemblance to the original, now sits “guarding” the front of our house. The Museum has pictures and artifacts from the 18th and 19th centuries, with particular details of Lord Nelson’s life and accomplishments. I managed to get a picture of me taken in a cut out in Lord Nelson’s admiral outfit – very impressive if I may say so! Prince Charles reportedly visited Nelson’s Dockyard shortly before we were there.
From Antigua we sailed to Castries St. Lucia, a distance of 211 miles. This brought us face to face with a volcanic island. Soufriere on the island, is well known for its historic eruptions over the centuries. It greeted us with the smell of sulphur, or more familiarly, somewhat like the smell of rotten eggs!
St. Lucia is the second largest of the Lesser Antilles and Windward Islands with an area of 238 square miles. It has forested, rocky volcanic mountains, gentle valleys, banana plantations, and wide beaches. At Soufriere and the Sulphur Springs I saw the smouldering smoke from the fires that burned deep below. In the distance were the Mighty Pitons – twin mountain peaks. A number of passengers from our ship went for a sulphur (mud) bath at the hot springs which is supposed to restore your skin and improve your health.
The people spoke a French creole which was almost impossible for me to understand. They understood Caribbean (English creole) and English. St. Lucia became a British colony in 1803, and Josephine, Empress of France (born in Martinique), and wife of Napoleon, once lived there.
As we set off for Grenada, 132 miles away, I realized that we had been skirting the infamous Bermuda or Devil’s Triangle in which hundreds of ships and planes had disappeared without a trace! Our captain at times reported a depth of 18,000 feet in the deep blue inky Atlantic waters we were sailing over. It is a long way down to Davy Jones Locker. No wonder my father used to say “water got no back door”. Incidentally, the deepest Ocean is the Pacific 36,000 feet, and the Atlantic 24,000 feet, with Mount Everest, the highest mountain 29,000 feet.
I will now have to continue this Caribbean journey in another article to follow. If the creeks don’t rise and the sun still shines I’ll be talking to you.
By Romeo Kaseram
Earl Lovelace was born on July 13, 1935, in Toco, Trinidad, and moved at an early age to his grandparents’ home in Tobago with his mother, Jean Whatley Lovelace. Lovelace credits both his mother, and grandmother, Eva Whatley, of African and Amerindian ancestry as major influences during his youth. In Tobago, the young man attended the Scarborough Methodist Primary School. Later the family returned to Trinidad, setting up house in Belmont and then in Morvant in Port-of-Spain. During his high school years from 1948 to 1953, Lovelace attended Nelson Street Boys, a Roman Catholic school, followed by Ideal High School in Port-of-Spain, where he wrote his Cambridge School Certificate examinations. Lovelace considers himself an autodidact through his self-education; his love for reading started early in his childhood with mainly American and English literature, with him later admiring the writings of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.
Following high school, Lovelace worked at the Trinidad Guardian as a proof-reader from 1953 to 1954; this was followed with a two-year position at the Department of Forestry until 1956, and then another at the Ministry of Agriculture from 1956 to 1966. He began writing during his tenure as a forest ranger while stationed in the village of Valencia. Post secondary education followed with attendance at Howard University, Washington, DC, in the US from 1966 to 1967. He received a Master of Arts degree in English in 1974 from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where he was also a Visiting Novelist.
Lovelace taught at Federal City College, which is now the University of the District of Columbia, in Washington, DC, from 1971 to 1973. Later, he taught as a lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of the West Indies at St Augustine from 1977 to 1987. In 1980, Lovelace won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and spent a year as a visiting writer at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. From 1995 to 1996, Lovelace was a Writer-in-Residence in England, appointed by the London Arts Board, and later a visiting lecturer in the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College, Massachusetts from 1996 to 1997, and then a Distinguished Novelist in the Department of English at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington, from 1999 to 2004. In the years 1992, 1995, and 2006, he served as Trinidad and Tobago’s artistic director for Carifesta. He wrote newspaper columns, and contributed to periodicals as Voices, South, and Wasafiri. He was appointed to the Board of Governors of the University of Trinidad and Tobago in 2005, has been honoured with a conference at the University of the West Indies, and is president of the Association of Caribbean Writers.
Lovelace’s first novel, While Gods Are Falling (1965), won the British Petroleum Independence Literary Award. This novel was followed by The Schoolmaster (1968), which looked at the impact of the arrival of a new teacher in a remote community. The third novel, The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979), is regarded as his best work, which explores the rejuvenating effects of carnival on the inhabitants of a slum outside Port-of-Spain. In his The Wine of Astonishment (1982), Lovelace examines popular religion through the story of a member of the Baptist Church in a rural village. The novel Salt (1996) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) in 1997. This novel is set in Trinidad, and explores through the story of Alford George, a teacher turned politician, the legacy of colonialism and slavery, along with problems still faced by Trinidad and Tobago. Lovelace’s most recent work, Is Just a Movie (2012), won the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Among his plays are Jestina’s Calypso, which was produced in St Augustine, Trinidad, at the University of the West Indies in 1978; a 1987 adaptation of The Wine of Astonishment; The New Hardware Store, which was produced in 1980; an adaptation of The Dragon Can't Dance in 1986; The Reign of Anancy, performed in Port-of-Spain in 1989; and, Joebell and America, in 1999.
According to Susheila Nasta, writing for the British Council (Literature) in 2002, Lovelace’s “decision to live and work at home and to write in a popular idiom which derives from an indigenous calypsonian and carnivalesque tradition, is a feature which marks all of his published work”. She adds: “Like CLR James and Sam Selvon before him… Lovelace's work positions itself firmly amongst the lives and voices of ordinary people whether the focus is on the poverty-stricken ‘yard’ culture of Port-of-Spain or the religious shouter traditions of the rural population.” Nasta notes this is apparent in his early works such as While Gods Are Falling and The Schoolmaster, adding, “Lovelace's work has demonstrated from the outset an unwavering commitment to explore the complex political tensions at work in an island culture that has been born out of a history of slavery and indenture, to examine the ‘pitfalls’, as Frantz Fanon once famously put it, ‘of a national consciousness’”.
Nasta also notes Lovelace’s “fictional world is not of course without its contradictions; nor, indeed is his portrait of a newly independent society caught in the throes of resistance, revolution and acquiescence, a simplistic one”. However, she adds: “Yet his message is clear and it is an imaginative vision he has consistently sustained in different genres: ranging from his early fiction to his dramatic works such as Jestina’s Calypso (1984) as well as in the panoramic historical range of his award-winning novel, Salt (1996).”
Lovelace’s eminence is highlighted by the burgeoning number of awards and accolades he has received throughout his career. He received the British Petroleum Independence Literary Award in 1965; the Pegasus Literary Award for outstanding contributions to the arts in Trinidad and Tobago in 1966; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980; the Chaconia Medal (Gold) from the Trinidad and Tobago government in 1988; the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) in 1997; an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of the West Indies in 2002; the Grand Prize for Caribbean Literature in 2011; and in 2012 the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the NALIS Lifetime Literary Award, and the Caribbean-Canadian Literary Award.
Sources for this exploration: British Council and Wikipedia.