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>>>COMPETITIONS, CONTESTS, etc

Books by authors from Jamaica and St Lucia make 2015 OCM Bocas Prize shortlist [3 pics: sounding, seven killings and dying to better]

From a longlist of nine books in the categories of poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction, the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature judges have chosen three genre winners. Announced last week Wednesday, April 1, 2015, these three books now form the shortlist for the final award. Sounding Ground, by the St Lucian writer Vladimir Lucien, is the poetry winner. Jamaican Marlon James’s novel A Brief History of Seven Killings is the winner in the fiction category, and fellow Jamaican Olive Senior’s Dying to Better Themselves was chosen from the non-fiction list.

Sounding Ground – Vladimir Lucien’s debut book – explores social and cultural boundaries in the poet’s home island, moving between considerations of bloodlines both familial and linguistic. “His poems have the kind of life-energy to be found hidden in any cubic metre of fertile soil,” write the prize judges. “His language makes inspired use of various kinds and registers of creole, which are always clearly distinguishable, and crucial to the purposes of the individual poem. In his hands, creole is a primary tool for enabling the local immediacy of a poem’s content to address much larger questions.”

Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings – not, despite the title, a small book – is an epic account of Jamaican society and politics in the 1970s, hinged on a failed assassination attempt on “the Singer” (Bob Marley). It encompasses local and international politics, violence and trauma, through a multiplicity of arresting voices. “To experience the visceral power of reading this novel,” write the judges, “is to see, smell, and feel what great literature can do. Like all great literature, it is both about a specific time and place and yet also universal.”

In her historical work Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal, Olive Senior creates her own kind of epic narrative, drawing on both official accounts and personal documents to capture the voices of the early 20th century Caribbean migrants to Panama who contributed mightily to one of the modern world’s great feats of engineering. The book “exemplifies both rigorous scholarship and literary sophistication”, write the judges, who note that Senior “elegantly achieves the requisite balance between the demands of factuality and the permissiveness of creativity, craftily deploying her creative writing skills to animate historical data”.

In the final round of judging, the three books will now vie for the overall award of US$10,000, to be presented on Saturday, May 2 during the 2015 NGC Bocas Lit Fest in Port of Spain.

In recent years, the prize was won by novelists Robert Antoni for As Flies to Whatless Boys (2014); Monique Roffey for Archipelago (2013); and Earl Lovelace for Is Just a Movie (2012). Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott was winner of the inaugural prize in 2011, for his poetry collection White Egrets.

The final cross-genre judging panel, headed by celebrated Barbadian writer Austin Clarke, will include literary agent Clare Alexander, poetry critic Laurence A Breiner, scholar Carolyn Cooper, and permanent prize vice-chair Marjorie Thorpe.

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Alecia McKenzie makes 2015 Commonwealth Short Story prize shortlist

Jamaican Alecia McKenzie has made the shortlist for the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her entry Cindy’s Class. The Prize attracted nearly 4,000 entries this year – a record number.

The judging panel, comprising six acclaimed writers – Leila Aboulela, Fred D’Aguiar, Marina Endicott, Witi Ihimaera, Bina Shah and chair Romesh Gunesekera – have chosen 22 stories from 11 countries around the world, reflecting the breadth and quality of writing in the Commonwealth today.

Alecia McKenzie, who calls Paris her home these days, is the author of Sweetheart (a Commonwealth Book Prize regional winner) and two short-story collections Stories from Yard, and Satellite City. McKenzie is also the founder and editor of the arts magazine SWAN, an online site that provides information about the arts, which you can visit at southernworldartsnews.blogspot.com

Bookends sends her hearty congratulations.

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Writer credits: Sharon Leach, Jacqueline Bishop

Poetry Month Feature:

Yemoja sits on my head: An interview with poet Opal Palmer Adisa [pics: opal (cut out), 4-headed]

April is recognised internationally as Poetry Month. Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, it is the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets celebrating poetry’s vital place in our culture. In recognition of the month, every Sunday in April

Bookends will celebrate the work of established Jamaican poets and their work in a series of interviews by author/poet/visual artist Jacqueline Bishop.

This week, the featured poet is Opal Palmer Adisa.

Opal, I really want to start off by thanking you for your most recent collection of poems, 4-Headed Woman, published by Tia Chucha Press, which I think is some of your strongest work to date. The poems are like pure fire and ice, and are sharp and clean. I guess my first question for you is: Can you explain the title of the collection for our readers?

As a woman, I feel as if I need at least four heads to function, and that is true for many women, as we juggle the various roles of being artist, first and foremost, then wife or partner in any domestic relationship, then professional – in my case teacher/professor – and then as mother – for me, it is mother to three and even though they are young adults and scattered, I am still on call constantly. So the title emanates from this reality, that in order for a woman in these contemporary times to be grounded, she must be in possession of at least four heads – possession is key, not just to have four heads, but be able to switch from one to the other with ease.

In these poems there are many instructions to women and girls, and you bring us, quite intimately, into the lives of women and girls. What would you hope men and boys take away from this collection of poems?

There are many men who say they admire strong women, but in reality the admiration appears, when probed deeply, to be from a distant nostalgic place…I don’t want to be admired as a strong woman because often what that means is that I am expected to handle everything, and I do, when I am really looking for partnership. I think this is true for many women who are capable, but we would like men and boys to respect our capabilities without thinking that makes us less desirable as mates or that means we can and should handle everything. I hope boys and men will love us skin-deep, and admire and respect how multi-faceted we often are, and how much we handle daily.

Many of the poems in the collection are very sensuous. There are many poems conflating food and flowers and the female body, for example. How deliberate was all of this on your part? What is the importance of sensuality (and the centrality of sexuality) to your work?

From the very beginning, sensuality and sexuality have been central to my work, to my life, to how I show up in the world. We are sensual beings and while these days vulgarity – men humping girls like dogs in carnivals and on the dance floor is normalised as entertainment or acceptable behaviour of liberation – is sometimes appropriated for sensuality, for me there is no comparison. Growing, preparing and eating food is one of the most sensuous acts, and I certainly believe my body, women’s bodies are delicious fruits that must be enjoyed, and therefore I was very deliberate about exploring and exposing this aspect of womanhood. Women were and many still are agrarians.

Apart from perhaps Lucille Clifton and Sharon Olds, I have never read poems so breathtakingly celebratory of menstruation, even with all the complications that menstruation can mean for some women. Why do you think that menstruation remains such a taboo subject in poetry? And was it difficult for you writing so many poems on this topic?

Menstruation is taboo because despite what many of us would like to believe, the notion of woman from the Bible still dominates our society as evil and dirty. Growing up in Jamaica this was the general belief and a woman’s power to bind a man. Many members of both genders believe this. I want to debunk this myth. I want all women and men to celebrate women’s monthly decision not to carry life, but instead to nurture the earth, themselves, existence. I had great fun writing these poems and interviewing other women to explore some of the taboos and their feelings about their menses, and also researching what has been written about this topic.

In the section entitled “A Certain Time of the Month” I was struck by the fact that over 6,000 women in Puerto Rico and Haiti were, to use your terms, “guinea pigs” in “experimental biology”. I wondered if you still believed that certain women’s bodies retain the role of “testing sites” for various ideas and corporations?

Yes! Yes! And yes! Black women, poor women, women who are marginalised – stipulations of IMF loans to developing countries – are all connected and we are given discarded birth control pills and others, insecticides that have been taken off the markets in the metropolis as harmful to humans and infants – and are still used as testing sites; that is the hegemony of dominance.

As much as I love these poems, Opal, I found that I was often confused as to who the first person narrators of many of these poems were. Was this deliberate on your part? If yes, where you trying to conflate the narrator and implicating the reader both at the same time?

We have been taught to write one way, and I am still fighting against that way, not simply out of rebellion, but because I don’t think the traditional narrative structures speak to the ethos of the Caribbean, and I am still searching to find a way to conflate and combine without being accused of switching back and forth mindlessly…it’s the same argument I have with the rigid tense structure – present, past and future – as so often our lives are, at any moment, rooted in all three zones. Anyway, I am/was experimenting with a narrative form that dances between first person and collective, which includes reader so that one is not merely a “reader,” but one is also reading/narrating one’s own story. Perhaps my reach is too ambitious and, too, I need to continue my search, my exploring of how to do this more effectively, seamlessly.

One of the things that struck me while reading your poems is the demands of motherhood on your life as a writer. Do you care to comment further on this?

I am a mother to three wonderful children – well, young adults – and we are very close and raised each other, and even though they are all independent, and live in Paris, southern and northern California, respectively, I have weekly, sometimes daily conversations with all three, who will still say, “Mommy, are you listening to me?”, who want my undivided attention, and we talk about everything under the sun from the intimate to the political – and it has always been like this, and then I also have a group of students from over the years, a few from the mid-Eighties who call me their mother and their children call me grandmother, and they also call and need to talk and want me to listen, and beg for advice… Yemoja sits on my head. Motherhood in all its forms has been and remains a big part of my life and does demand and infringe on my time.

I have to say I found the section “Graffiti Series” quite breathtaking. This is such a universal female experience, women talking to women, on bathroom walls. Can you explain to our readers how this series of poems came about and what you hope both women and men will get from this series of poems?

First, I have to say I have sneaked into a few men’s restrooms, but the writing there did not appear as detailed and revealing as in the women’s. This idea of these poems is old, well, since the Eighties when I was teaching at San Francisco State University and was swept away by the writings in the restroom, and thought about making a film, which I never did. Then I began copying some of what was written in my notebook. Later, late-Eighties, through the Nineties, while teaching at UC Berkeley, I began drafting poems based on some of the writings. I wrote a one-woman play, which I performed, and which I later expanded based on bathroom graffiti and which is the last poetic play in the collection. As I was writing these I imagined them being performed around college campuses, like the Vagina Monologues. I am still hoping someone will be interested in doing a movie with the poems. I was excited to learn last year when I was invited to the University of Puerto Rico to share my work that a student there either had done or was working on her MFA thesis on bathroom graffiti.

We tend to dismiss or underestimate the need for public discourse; that everyone wants/needs to be heard, that there are things women and men can discuss publicly, anonymously, that they don’t think they can privately, even with their most trusted friends. Bathroom and other graffiti sites create safe spaces for people to express their ideas without having to face the judgment, which is why the poems I included have multiple perspectives on the controversial issues.

You describe the last poem in your collection as “a poetic performance piece”. I think it would be better described as a tour-de-force or a pièce de résistance myself. Still, I found myself wondering, what made this work a poem instead of a play?

In the past I have taught a graduate course entitled Mixed Genre, and my premise is: these different genres are imposed, artificially, and sometimes are unnecessary, and I insist that students disband and collapse these boundaries. Two of the texts I use when I teach this course are: Jean Toomer’s Cane, which I love, love, love, and which was instrumental in setting me on the writing path, and Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite. The genesis of the play began as a series of poems that I then fused with “dialogue.” It is ostensibly a prose poem in dramatic form.

Finally, I know that in addition to being a writer you also have a practice of photography. Can you talk a little bit about your photographic works? What you find, for example, your main preoccupations in photography are? Is this similar to your writing preoccupations? I also had the thought as I read your bathroom graffiti piece that photographs of what is written in women’s bathrooms could make a really interesting photography project in and of itself, any chance of this?

Let me begin by saying I did take a number of photos of the graffiti the bathrooms but now cannot find them with my moves and transitory life these last five years, consolidating, shedding and literally having stuff in three different locations…What is where, I cannot say and ownership/possession is becoming less important. Okay, back to your question. I would say I have been seriously photographing since the mid-Eighties and I still love people and faces. I have at least three books I want to do on Jamaica: one for children, entitled Our Boonoonoos Children. (I have such a vast collection of children from all over Jamaica, no permissions, but such sweet shots… One on Rastafarians, from Bingis I attended, one just of market place and people.)

Then there are several books I could do of Brazil, my three trips, and living there for three months, same of Egypt, Spain, Morocco, Cuba, and Trinidad, amazing images of children, Carnival as well as Easter Sunday, also of Haiti, which I am working on now, and have been since the 2012 earthquake, and now too St Croix. I love candid faces, gestures, landscape, and since the early Nineties, I’ve been experimenting with words and images and more recently, changing the texture in photo-shop.

Plus, for the last three years I have been curating an annual Black History Exhibition in St Croix, which always includes photography.

I need a patron and assistance to complete these projects, and I will take a chauffeur and a housekeeper, too! I have been fortunate that my photos have been exhibited and a few published in journals, but I cannot keep up with my writing and mothering and teaching to get the photos out more, which is what I would like to do.

Excerpt from 4-Headed Woman (Tia Chucha), by Opal Palmer Adisa, (c) 2013. Published here with the author’s permission.

4-Headed Woman

somewhere

in the midst

of everything

buried between the garbage of roles

hidden among

the rubble of demands

is a headless life

probably my own

has anyone seen or

turned it into

the lost and found department

perhaps it was snatched

and gagged

by kidnappers

holding out for ransom

maybe

a pick-pocketer

grabbed it

assuming value

can do the mothering bit

but cannot do the wifing

poems must be written

who decides what’s easier

what falls by the way

in my imagings

me was always

at the centre

activities swirled

around me

not tornadic

me helter-skelter

clutching at air

this is my life

after all

Opal Palmer Adisa was born in 1954 in Jamaica, where she attended school. She is an award-winning poet, novelist, performance artist and educator who has been anthologised in over 100 publications. In 1970 she went to study at Hunter College in New York, and in 1979 moved to the San Francisco Bay area to pursue an MA in creative writing. Adisa has two master’s degrees from San Francisco State University, and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Her poetry collections include I Name Me Name, Eros Muse, Caribbean Passion, and Tamarind and Mango Women.

Jacqueline Bishop’s first novel is The River’s Song. She is also the author of two collections of poems, Fauna and Snapshots from Istanbul. Her non-fiction books are My Mother Who Is Me: Life Stories from Jamaican Women in New York and Writers Who Paint/Painters Who Write: Three Jamaican Artists. An accomplished visual artist with exhibitions in Belgium, Morocco, USA and Italy, she was a 2008-2009 Fulbright Fellow to Morocco; the 2009-2010 UNESCO/Fulbright Fellow; and is a full-time Master Teacher in the Liberal Studies Programme at New York University.

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Bookends serial:

The Wife [pic: wife]

20

I parked in the plaza’s underground parking garage, in the space allotted to me. The lanky young security guard who was patrolling saluted me and I smiled and waved. I was in an unusually good mood this morning and wouldn’t even allow the unbidden fleeting thought of Malcolm, the security guard I’d been on the verge of having an affair with when my marriage collapsed in on itself, sour my mood. I’d been waiting in the Burger King parking lot for him when Lucia had called me, in the throes of a mini emotional breakdown courtesy of the unresolved trauma of the stabbing of one of her classmates after assembly at school one day. I had rushed to be at Lucia’s side when she’d called me, hysterical from her aunt’s house where she wandered to after walking away from school without permission. Everything about that day induced bad memories, which is why I tried hard not to think about it and the memory of Malcolm, whom I’d never again spoken to after that day.

Today, though, as I said, I was feeling positive. Confident. I was making so many strides in my personal and professional life and I couldn’t help acknowledging it. I was moving on with my life after Robert. And the suspicion that he was already involved with another woman weirdly no longer sent me into a murderous rage. He was now some other woman’s problem. Let her deal with the fact that the man she was with would rather watch porn than actually make love to her.

I had nothing to be ashamed of. My professional life was also making a turnaround. In a few short months I’d changed professions; I quit the stagnation of the job I’d had for more than 12 years and was doing something completely outside of my comfort zone: salon manager. That took courage. Not only had I convinced my sister to forge ahead with her plans to open the salon when she’d come perilously close to calling the whole thing off, but I’d also convinced Max that I could effectively get the spa at the salon, which she’d been unsuccessful staffing, up and running. And I had succeeded. I’d hired a masseur, one with international accreditation, and opened the spa. Maxine had worried that some of the clients would object to a masseur – in particular, the men – but, so far, nobody had seemed to have any hang-ups. “I guess it’s because he isn’t gay,” Maxine had conceded, eyeing him critically from a distance. “Or, at least, he doesn’t look it. They don’t all have to be limp-wristed.”

A faint rumble momentarily startled me when I emerged at ground level. It was only thunder, I realised, relieved. The sky was foreboding; dark clouds were slowly gathering. There would be rain. But not even that could put a damper on my mood. I inhaled deeply, smelling the dankness of approaching rain. I could hear the staccato click of my kitten heels on the ground as I hurried to the shop. Unable to keep my mood bottled up, I started to hum a tune, some pop song that Evan and Lucia had sung along with, at the top of their lungs, when it came on the car radio this morning.

At the door I paused, sighed deeply, and thought about Brian the masseur. I didn’t know whether he was gay or not. I hoped he wasn’t, although the Christian charity in me accepted everybody, regardless of their sexual orientation. After all, who was I, of all people, to stand in judgment of anybody, really? The only people I wouldn’t accept, though, were paedophiles; they were just plain sick. Still, I found myself wondering about Brian’s sexuality. He hadn’t struck me as gay when I’d interviewed him. It was Max who’d introduced the idea in my mind.

In fact, he’d seemed quite the opposite. Not that you could tell by looking, these days. But what a waste of a man it would be if it turned out he was in fact gay. The truth was, I’d actually felt a spark of attraction as Brian and I had conversed in my office after the interview. We’d been, drinking lattes and eating cinnibuns from the deli next door. He had the build of an athlete – broad, well-defined shoulders and muscular thighs that moulded themselves to his jeans – and possessed the most kissable lips I’d ever seen on a man. (This observation had actually startled me. Why did I notice how kissable his lips were?) And I’d had to fight the urge to reach across the desk and rub his beautifully shaped shaved head. As he spoke my eyes had kept going to the diamond stud glinting in his ear and I’d found herself wishing I could close my lips around them while sucking on his earlobe.

He’d been educated in New York, where he’d lived since his parents had migrated with him and his brothers and sisters in the Eighties, during the time of the political upheavals in the island. Now he was back in the country of his birth, eager to work, and he was not asking to be paid a scandalous salary. Which had given me a moment’s pause. Only a moment, though. He came armed with references from a big Manhattan salon and one on the west coast where he’d worked for a while as a celebrity masseur to a few Hollywood stars.

So what was his deal? I suspected he was running from something – something in his personal life, perhaps. Maybe a bad break-up. He was single, and childless; I knew that much. So there was no baby-mama drama. And I didn’t get any criminal vibes from him. But when had that meant anything, really? The serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, according to his neighbours, had appeared to be an easygoing Everyman even while he’d been decapitating young boys in his basement and storing their heads in Mason jars in his refrigerator.

I had no background in HR, of course, but I knew references ought to be followed up; I’d done so for the other staff members. But I’d got a good feeling about him. By the time the interview was over, three hours later, I knew I would hire him. Maxine would perhaps have been suspicious of him and even insisted on calling his references, but she’d put me in charge and I had decided to go with my gut on this one. I was glad I did. Brian De la Grange was talented and word of his work had already begun to spread. Appointments were pouring in.

Still, this Brian was someone I wanted to know more about. In a personal way. I told myself it was because Robert was involved with another woman and I didn’t want to feel as though I was the loser in the battle of the exes. No, Brian, in addition to being physically the most beautiful man I’d seen in a while, was soft-spoken and respectful, and attractive, and even though there was a soft mist of sadness that settled around him, I wanted to get to know him. There, I’d said it; the first step was always admission, wasn’t it? I wanted to get to know him.

TO BE CONTINUED