Calabash lends itself to those society columns of society sightings that still persist in Jamaican newspapers today. You know, Minister Lisa Hanna looking chic and summery in a breezy white blouse and sleek shin length black slacks; or youthful Minister Crawford going casual in jeans and a stylish shirt, his locks neatly pulled back enjoying an intense conversation with author and eminent scholar Orlando Patterson, white bush jacket and matching cargo shorts. That kind of thing. Not my speed. Truth is though, celebrity sightings at Calabash remind me of just how much of a cultural occasion it is. But more crucially, the fact that I hardly notice these folks as celebrities speaks to the atmosphere and mood of the festival--casual and focused on books and writers, and people become part of immunity without the rituals of hierarchy. Instead, the youth are congratulated for being there, the elders are honored, and poets become heroes. It is a good world.
My sightings are decidedly more personal and always gratifying. My teachers always seem to show up and it amuses my children to see these people in various poses as the ones who knew me when I was their age or younger. Mervyn Morris chilling with some roast corn--a great poet and professor who always encouraged my writing; Mrs. Sobers, known at Calabash as Dancehall Granny, who with her exuberant joy, her immaculately coifed greying Afro, and her dance moves, always encourages the audience by her capacity to live in the moment--she taught me history and what it means to engage the world.
Standing quietly beside a hibiscus edge viewing the passing crowd with his perpetually ironic smile is Bob-Semple, a Guyanese man who made literature such a passion for me in sixth form--He is one who, if he was so inclined (he is not) could take much of the credit for the direction of my life in English studies. His gift was to engender in me a love for the poetry of G.M. Hopkins. Mr. Bob-Semple, whose first name I have never learned because his surname is essentially a perfect full name is always at the Bash, always grinning, always generous with his compliments.
Carolyn Cooper who was my African Literature professor who laughingly points out that she was barely older than me when she taught me. Hugh Wright, in full summer whites, asking me to sign a book for his wife, "so I can win some brownie points," always thanks me for the festival and for giving he and his wife another occasion to enjoy together. Hugh takes photos for Calabash. He was my cricket coach. He saw me when I was most vulnerable and most elated.
Calabash is sometimes an unplanned reunion of beautiful people who have shaped me, school friends, fellow actors, church family, the successful, the struggling, the youthful, the aging, all gathering around this community of words. And for all the sweetness of reunions, there is the small sadness of absence. This year, I remembered that Perry Henzell was not with us--he has not been for a few years, but it felt more acute this year when my children asked me questions about him. And this year, my good friend, a theatre director and a woman committed to her work on health issues, Faith Hamer, was not strolling through the crowds grinning. At least, not in the flesh. My wife asked, "Does Faith have a sister?" I said, "I think so, why?" "I am sure I saw someone looking exactly like her a minute ago."
Saturday is the day when they all arrive and I am a home in their midst.
Our first Chatterbox for the festival was a conversation between me and Orlando Patterson took place on Saturday at noon, and it was a conversation I really was looking forward to having studied his fiction carefully and having come to respect his remarkable work as a scholar of slavery in its many forms. The conversation turned out to be one of those in which you learn something new, you get excited about things said, excited enough to think that out of this conversation, some really important new adventure in thinking and writing will take place. So here is what struck me most about Orlando Patterson's ideas, and the easy and engaging way he expressed his thoughts, the humor, the tough honesty and the thoughtful way in which he spoke with honesty about quite difficult subjects: Patterson's brilliance is strangely subtle and never self aggrandizing. It is solid.
Here is my paraphrase of Patterson on why he decided to focus on being an academic and give up his hopes of a career as a writer. It was not because he doubted his talent. It was because when he saw what it looked like at the top of the writing world, he realized that this business was not going to help him to care for his mother and his family. He described how George Lamming invited him to lunch one day in his apartment in London. At this time, Lamming was at the pinnacle of his fame as a West Indian author having published several books and having been celebrated as the great voice. Patterson described how far on the edges of North London Lamming lived in essentially a small bed-sit. It was a good lunch, but Patterson, then a young man, wondered, "This is it?" He did not regret his decision, and we have gained much for it, but he knew that once he embarked on sociology, his way of thinking and seeing the world would be flipped. The novelist is interested in looking at details and through such study allowing us to arrive at large conclusion. The sociologist is always interested in the big picture--details are only useful as patterns, fodder for some larger theory. His thinking changed. It had to. But we were fortunate to have several books "in the can", including his favorite, Die the Long Day, published in 1972, which he quipped, "Was written before Toni Morrison's Beloved".
Patterson on Jamaican slavery and its impact
Patterson always has a great deal to say about slavery--he understands it because he has studied so much. His interest grew out of his desire to understand Jamaican society and culture. His studies have allowed him to make some quite provocative declarations. One of them he spoke of at the festival was what he has concluded that all evidence points to the peculiar dirty fact about western society, which is that time after time, all great moments of success and wealth and power in western culture have happened during periods when it has practiced with abject inhumanity the enslavement of people. He also pointed out that the Transatlantic slave trade followed two basic patterns of operation--one more virulent than the other. The first was to rely on the reproduction of slaves for the continued supply of slave labor, an approach that demanded that women be well-treated and that slaves themselves be given greater nutrition and some protections.
The second was to rely on the importation of more slaves to replenish those who died. This approach allowed and sometimes encouraged incredible levels of brutality, a complete disregard for women, and a level of depravity that has not been matched by many other slave societies throughout history. In Jamaica, Patterson told us, the decision was made to use the latter system. Jamaica, he said, was the worst of all colonies in terms of its treatment of slaves. He said that this view had existed for years, but many doubted it, until people saw the recently published slave diaries by the Jamaican slave holder, Thomas Thistlewood, who, during the eighteenth century kept a detailed diary for forty years in which his total depravity is fully outlined.
From here, Patterson explained the Jamaican psyche, the fact that it has had to come through such brutality and trauma, the fact that the survival of Jamaicans has led to some positive qualities of daring, invention, and resilience, while, at the same time, it has produced a deep mistrust for authority and a capacity for violence. "A Jamaican farmer will thrive because he is independent and is working for himself. The thing about Jamaicans is that we don't like to work for people." The audience applauded this truth. Then Patterson continued wryly, "Now that is not a problem if you are a farmer planting your own corn, but it really is a problem when you are working in an office. You can't keep telling your boss where to get off." The audience nodded in recognition. It is the dilemma of Jamaican society.
I left this part of the conversation filled with that unsettling sensation I usually feel when I sense some art about to burst out of me. That feeling is satisfying, and yet fills me a strange sense of incompletion--a waiting. It will last until I write what has to be written.
Patterson on Toots and the Maytals
Near the end of the interview, Patterson, sensing that I was wrapping things up, decided that there was something he just had to say, something he had been filled with thoughts about since the night before when a panel of writers spoke about fifty years of Jamaican music and the importance of certain artists to that development. Patterson said he needed to say this, because while he admires Bob Marley, and Tosh, he felt that the person who few spoke of and the one he thinks as the individual who really gave Jamaican music and reggae music its most authentic voice was Toots Hibbert of the Maytals. Patterson spoke of how Toots always sang out of the Jamaican experience in terms of his language and idiom and he was the voice that came to shape reggae music. The audience applauded. It is true about Toots. A singer with a rich voice, a remarkable range and a style that reflects the essential elements of African retention, pocomania, revival, mayal, mento, folk songs, and as pure an indigenous sound as is at all possible in a society like Jamaica. In that declaration Patterson showed us something important about himself--his sense of himself as a roots person, a man from rural Jamaica, and yard man at heart. It was beautiful to hear this Harvard Professor invoke this side of him before an audience that appreciated the love and affection caught up in that expression.
It was most fitting that the next day, we all sat around and listened to four readers, a senior minister of government, the young Honorable Damion Crawford; a ranking sports official, Captain Horace Burrell, who heads the Jamaican Football Federation: Laura Henzell, a communications expert, a former editor and a member of the Calabash family; and Elise Kelly a popular radio media personality, all read long segments of Patterson's seminal work, The Children of Sisyphus, a work he wrote when he was just twenty three years old. It was story time for two thousand people, listening to voices enjoying his words with the sea waves crashing in the background.