CALABASH DISPATCHES--SUNDAY

As if on cue, Sunday morning of Calabash arrived with overcast skies.  The sofa in the wide living room of the suite I was staying in was getting old already. I was waking up quite early each day because of the firm surface of my bed.  On the verandah, the sea is a few yards away, and it makes sense to sit there, and watch the light creep into the sky, and pray and think and make mental notes.  On Sunday morning, I could feel the muscles in my legs hurting. At first I wondered what had happened to me the day before—I had not been exercising at all, and yet my legs felt as if I had been doing extreme squats all night.  Then I realized how little I sat down on Saturday.

Beginning from 9:00 AM, I had been walking around, the festival campus, climbing up and down the stage, and just constantly moving without much of a break.  It made sense that my legs would feel tired.  My one brief sitting down moment was while I moderated a fascinating cluster of writers and artists in a discussion about Obama on the Saturday night. On the panel were Linton Kwesi Johnson—the Jamaican-born, Black British dub poet and reggae icon, Helon Habila, a gifted Nigerian novelist who belongs to what is now being touted as a new cluster of young titans in Nigerian literature, and Melvin Van Peebles, the legendary film maker, actor and author.  We were talking about the implications of Obama’s presidency and I was moderating.  The discussion was wide ranging, but my questions could have been more imaginative.  It is peculiar what happens to you a day after an interview.  You think of all the great questions you should have asked but didn’t.  Thankfully, the wit and intelligence of the panel was the grace I needed.  But I could tell that I was tired.

So on Sunday morning, the light rain was welcome.  I did not mind. I imagined a slow day of trudging through rain as we moved through the readings.

However, by the time the readings began at 10:00, the rain had stopped and the air was light and cool even as the sun began to suggest itself in the light.  The morning readings featured the 1959 classic, To Sir With Love by E. R Brathwaite—that one that was made into a famous film starring Sydney Potier.  Justine Henzell, one of the three Calabash organizers; Alwyn Scott, a gifted actor and an old high school friend of mine, Dr. Ragashanti Stewart, a brilliant scholar and radio personality with a genius for drawing our attention to the native intelligence of dancehall culture; and Kirsten Whittaker, a classically trained and experienced actor, were the readers. They read select passages from the novel, teasing the audience to buy the book and read the rest.  It is a fascinating work with an uncanny relevance to today’s culture—a kind of post-Obama culture in which there exists a genuine hopefulness about racial unity and respect.  The book actually sold well after the reading.

By early afternoon, two poets came on stage to read and they were a revelation.  Marylin Chin is a dynamo who understands the stage, the mic and the performance ethos.  She reads with burst of sound and energy that is utterly compelling and her wit, her laughter and the sharp beauty of her poems all combine to make a poetic moment when she is at the mic.  She was stoked for Calabash, having spent the last three days meeting other writers, enjoying the landscape and the people-scape and listening to other writers do their thing. But mostly, it was clear that she was listening to the audience, learning their rhythms, the way they responded to the writers.  And she stuck around for the open mic sessions, and it is clear that she came to the audience knowing something about it.

In many ways, her poems are about place and about the uniqueness of her idea of place and home.  It would seem, to the most superficial thinker, that such specificity—the world of an Asian woman living in Oregon, might seem almost exotic in the context of the really grounded space of Jamaica.  But Chin, it is clear, is smarter than that and she understood what the best writers understand, that people connect with the honesty of the specific.  Indeed, the universal is the enemy to understanding and human connection.  We connect to that which is familiar and what is familiar is the fact that things are intimately familiar to each of us, even when those things may be different for each person.  Of course, Jamaica,s understand migration, they understand complicated pasts and heritages, they understand the dilemma of fatherhood and absence and the triumph of motherhood and presence, and they understand race—complex race—mix-up and blenda, as we call that history of racial mixing that is rife with contradictions.

Standing on tiptoe and hurling her voice as if it was her body being tossed in a sacrificial dive off stage into a waiting audience, Chin gave a reading that would make anyone following her quite nervous about reading.

Robert Pinsky followed her and gave what may have been one of the best readings of the festival.  Pinsky understands the usefulness of banter—the way it opens an audience to trust a reader, the way it allows the poet to warm up to the task at hand.  We were outside, it was still silver grey with the residual moderate gloom of a post rain sky, and Pinsky connected this believably to the steel of a New Jersey landscape.  He made it all both familiar and alien, and in this he demonstrated his desire to connect, while never apologizing for his understanding of the idea of home as a defining force.  He referred to the brilliant conversation of the day before between Pico Iyer and Paul Holdengraber in which crudely put, the idea of rootlessness was celebrated as a kind of creative dis-ease and disquiet, Pinsky said he disagreed, and he spoke of the specificity of home, of place, of landscape and people, of culture, and spoke of it as something that has come to shape him.

In this gesture, Pinsky introduced himself and his art beautifully.  The poems were all full of wit, some pain, sharp intelligence and immediate accessibility.  And when he read the jazz shaped poem, “Ginza Samba” having self-deprecatingly rhapsodized about his love of the saxophone which he claims he would have been famous for except for that small matter of talent, the audience was fully with him.  Then he took us back home to New jersey with him, and tenderly described the idea of loss and regret and hope. It was a tour de force of a reading and the response of the audience was fittingly tremendous.  They also bought his books in decent numbers—The Figured Wheel moving the most units.

I suppose it seems crass to speak of matters of book sales at a festival, but for Calabash, the idea that books do sell in great numbers is central to why we regard the festival as a success.  For Jamaicans, books can be very expensive, and books have no obvious pragmatic value.  Yet the truth is that Calabash moves books in large numbers because people witness the incarnation of the book when they see and hear the writer reading from their work.  Books also mean something to publishers and writers who travel to Jamaica to read.  And at the end of the day, our festival is about the book—about its importance, and about the value that we must ascribe to the books.

Calabash ended with its usual rituals.  This year the Calabash acoustic ensemble performed the songs of Beres Hammond in their inimitable laid back style marked by witty banter, subtly complex arrangements and a generosity of spirit about the word.  A woman with one leg climbed on stage and danced while the band played, my history teacher from high school strolled across to the wings and began to move with intense focus and pleasure to the music, the audience—a full house so late in the afternoon, smiled, sang along and nodded to the tunes; and the team of blue shirted young boys from Treasure Beach walked through the audience with calabashes in hand asking for funds for the festival.  Then Aunty Gaye came on stage in her straw hat, gave her usual preamble that is always marked by some miracle of Christ around the festival, and then led the gathering in prayer.

It was not over for me, of course.  I had to run off to do several interviews, to have an extended meeting with some folks planning a tour in Jamaica, and then I made my way slowly back to the cottage where my mother was resting.

I did not mention my mother.  But my mother was at Calabash for the entire time.  She is struggling with her eyes, but she was there as our artist in residence, and she showed her paintings and enjoyed the event.  My brother and sisters came, so did my nieces, and so many friends.  Calabash is ultimately as intimate as that, and yet it represents a event shaped by the startling intelligence and insight of Colin Channer who simply has an understanding of what works and what is possible.  He is also someone who understands that vibe is something you have to work on.  When he took the stage just after midnight on Sunday morning, to match wits and knowledge of music with the great Mutaburaka, when he began his set on the sound system, tossing it track after track and then prancing around the stage, raising his hands, urging the audience on, and making us all believers in the moment, he turned what could have been an odd moment into a site of pure celebration.  Vibe is about mood and attitude, and more than anything else, we try to capture these things at Calabash.  Colin leads, and we find our special blend that will work with the mix so that the effect is just the right mix to make everyone feel at home, feel as if they have some ownership of the festival.

For the record, the sound clash ended in a draw.  This, too, seemed fitting.

We expect to be back next year.  We have booked writers already.  But we have so much work to do.  So much work to do to raise funds, to build our patronage base, to divert the darts and barbs of the naysayers and the political underminers, and we have to find ways to continue to give ourselves the flame that we need to bring more and more people to this festival.

On Sunday evening, while the sun was softly setting behind the scraggly hills of  St. Bess (I am not making any of this up), the interviewer asked me to pick one word to describe the festival.  I paused for longer than the cameraman would have wanted.  Then I thought, “Grace”.  That is it.  So I said “Grace”—that which we get but don’t deserve.  In many ways, Colin, Justine and I do not deserve to be a part of such a beautiful festival because we are flawed and we make mistakes; but we experience grace every year when people show up. Grace because it is an undeserving gift for Jamaica, a gift to itself, a gift that teaches us how to live by grace.  Grace, because the way the people arrive at the festival, many of them not knowing what to expect by trusting that it will be good, is all pure grace.  And grace because I am one of those people who Taurus Riley mocks as believing that I was born in iniquity, and that I can only find peace through the gift of grace.  I am oen of those people and do believe this—and so when, after the festival is over, I sit and reflect on how rich and beautiful it has been, I think of the things I should be grateful for.  A tad sentimental, yes, but that is all par for the course.