/ARTS WEEKLY/BOOKS-JAMAICA: Literary Festival Blossoms in Surprising Corner

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dionne Jackson Miller

MONTEGO BAY, May 27 2003 (IPS) - Few people would have thought that an international literary festival could thrive in a small fishing village on Jamaica’s south coast. New York-based Jamaican author Colin Channer was one of them.

Named after the Calabash, (a type of gourd traditionally used to make bowls and other household items), the open-air event completed its third successful staging last weekend, attracting hundreds of patrons from across Jamaica and overseas.

The festival is now recognised as an event that attracts the cream of literary society, ranging from award-winning Caribbean writers Trevor Rhone and Earl Lovelace, to acclaimed African-American writers and philosophers Sonia Sanchez and bell hooks.

The English-speaking Caribbean’s only literary festival has expanded to include publishing and writing workshops, along with a film series.

One of the most surprising and deeply appreciated aspects of Calabash is that authors agree to forego an appearance fee, receiving only airfare, accommodation and an honorarium for their performances and readings. That allows festival organisers to throw open their doors to the public free of cost.

The free and open nature of the festival was one of the attractions for bell hooks, writer, lecturer and Distinguished Professor of English at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

”What is the most exciting aspect of Calabash for me is the democratic nature: that anyone can come, nobody has to pay, anybody can just walk down that road and come here,” hooks told the audience, praising the fact that she could perform under what she called the ”tent of free speech” at a time when ”the ability to say what you want to say when you want to say it is under attack” (in the United States).

University lecturer Beverly Bryan has attended all three Calabash festivals and volunteers to host visiting performers and writers. She also loves the event’s ”egalitarian” nature.

”You can get internationally famous writers standing up in front of a mike followed by a housewife from Montego Bay,” Bryan says in an interview.

For Everton Sylvester, a Jamaican poet and teacher based at the City University of New York, reading at Calabash this year was an opportunity to come home after 15 years and be associated with a festival that he says is very well regarded in the literary community.

Sylvester writes poetry with clear Jamaican and Caribbean references, and performing in Calabash allowed him to savour, for the first time, an audience that deeply appreciated the cultural nuances of his work.

”Because I’ve always been writing for a non-Jamaican audience but my voice is clearly Jamaican, I have to always be sure that I am accessible to my audience, while at the same time being faithful to my voice, so it’s sometimes challenging,” he explains.

”What was different about (reading at Calabash) was that people here understood the finer things, the cultural references, and often those are wasted on a foreign audience.”

For acclaimed Caribbean playwright Trevor Rhone, who performed at Calabash last year, the open mike sessions provide an important venue for emerging literary voices.

”I hear new voices, I hear the voices of innocence, I hear new words and new thoughts, people trying to express self-expression, and I hear voices that are unsure and it’s this uncertainty and innocence that I enjoy,” he told IPS. ”I would very much love to be back here in 10 years just to watch how they move up their own ladder and how well the voices move into new arenas of self expression,” Rhone says.

Although the festival is now acclaimed as a venue for emerging and established voices to be heard, not everybody was originally sanguine about its survival, especially given its venue in Treasure Beach, a tiny fishing community now trying to establish itself as a destination for lovers of small-scale, community tourism.

Playwright Trevor Rhone admits, for instance, that he has found the response surprising.

”It says to me that the imagination is possibly the most amazing tool at our disposal, and how often it is not used in this society,” Rhone says. ”What I would term that happened here is an imaginative leap into absolute blackness.”

The choice of Treasure Beach, a community where crime is almost unheard of and friendly neighbourliness is still the order of the day, allows festival-goers to be exposed to a traditional way of life that has been lost in many areas of Jamaica, he adds.

Jason Henzell, operator of Calabash venue Jake’s Villas, says the event has grown from strength to strength in three years and benefits the community significantly by filling rooms and increasing business in the area’s restaurants and bars.

"This is a week-end for Treasure Beach to showcase what we have, people came from last year and brought their friends, and all the rooms were booked out three to four months in advance," he says.

He puts first-year attendance at 1,200-1,500 festival-goers, which grew to about 2,500 this year, despite heavy rains.

University lecturer Beverly Bryan, who has attended all three festivals, initially liked the choice of Treasure Beach as a location, but she was unsure that it would be appreciated by the wider public.

”I thought it was brilliant, because it was out of (the capital city) Kingston, but I didn’t think that it would necessarily work, because I didn’t think that enough people would travel 25 miles (off the main road) on a winding road … it surprised me, it’s gotten bigger,” Bryan says.

Founder and artistic director Colin Channer says that it took only imagination to see the possibilities of the festival.

”When we just started Calabash, the people I contacted didn’t have resistance, because I contacted people who had been percolating the same idea,” he says.

”There were many people who didn’t think it was possible, because they’d never seen anything like it, but that’s just a lack of imagination. When you think of what it takes to have a festival, you need a place, you need an audience, and you need talent. How hard is that? I am an author, so I know authors.”

Channer, who credits Programme Director Kwame Dawes for assembling the talent for the event, says the festival has established itself as a well-run, high-quality event, and that authors also buy into the wider Calabash vision.

”When authors come here, they realise they’re not just coming to a reading, they’re coming to be part of a process of transformation of the district, of a parish, of a country and a region,” Channer says.

The development of Calabash occurred at a time when appreciation for the literary arts has been growing, says Everton Sylvester.

”In the past 15 years, mostly because of slam poetry, there has been a heightened appreciation of poetry outside of academia, so Calabash developed not a response to, but inside of, and is a beneficiary of that phenomenon,” he adds.

But will the phenomenon that is the festival heed suggestions and move to a new, perhaps larger, venue next year? No, says Henzell. "Calabash is rooted here and will stay here," he insists.