Have you read.....?

[letric]

Black Rock by Irish-Trinidadian, Amanda Smyth. It has been reported in the London Mission News (Volume 41 February 5 - March 5, 2009) about the launch of her first novel, Black Rock, at a reception held at the T&T High Commission, London. Ali Smith, describes the book as a

powerful cocktail of heat and beautiful coolness, written in a heady, mesmerising yet translucent prose which marks Smyth out as born novelist

[Falcon]

No sorry haven't read it.

[letric]

What I find fascinating is being Irish-Trinidadian?

[SeandSand]

I read "Bad Day at Black Rock".........I also saw the movie........It was a western.

[letric]

Other writers from the Caribbean, Edgar Mittelholzer, 'A Morning at the Office, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, C. L. R. James, Michael Anthony, E. R.Braithwaite, Neil Bissoondath, Andrew Salkey, Willie Chen, Earl Lovelace, there are others who have not been listed.

[letric]

For Andrew Salkey
(And in memory of Samuel Selvon)

A Death in the Family
i.m. Andrew Salkey, 1928-95)

Dear Andrew, I heard of your passing in passing,
tipping it a little in the flow of loss, we must wade through
and I apologise, as we do, for not being there;
we expected you back, not like this, to those interrupted
talks in Moscow Road, which would go better now
with the strain of travel and search for allies behind us; we'd be wiser
now - all those Jerusalems desecrated - glossing friendship
with no sparring for advantage, no fear of surrender.

You signed off your letters. Venceremos. I'd planned to answer
the last one with a quip, a bit of gossip, tales
of our slippage over here. Forgive me if is this sounds like a voice
grown distant; but thank you, Andrew Salkey, anthologist of wastes
and triumphs of our story. Ever frail but renewable, our barrier
against spoilers who make the earth more wretched, holds your text.

E. A. Markham, 1995

The Penguin Book of CARIBBEAN SHORT STORIES
Edited by E. A. Markham

[Wayne]

lectric,I am looking for a book called "The Life and Times of Boysie Singh".....have you heard of it?

[letric]

Enyaw, never heard of the book, however, if you do get it, let me know.

[Wayne]

lectric,there is a company in the UK that printed it,but now I cannot locate it.Maybe somebody
in Trinidad has the book.....its about the infamous criminal Boysie Singh....maybe in the Library?

[letric]

Enyaw...what is the lastest your search for the book on Boysie Singh?

[letric]

It's a frightful dump,

said about Hull, and others have tended to agree,
voting it Britain's worst town. But more upmarket places are not necessarily any better. Chichester
is full of arrogant, thick, ex-public school yobs, while Colchester, dares you to embrace
and enjoy it. Blackpool because the the sea is an open toilet, and its attractions nearly
all cheap, provincial and dire, the reason why the sea goes so far out in Blackpool is that it can't
face coming back in. Neasden is the eminently mockable epitome of suburban
futility, Fulham is full of pubs, convents, second-hand clothes shops, laundries,
and pawnbrokers.

[letric]

England's history is a vast and complicated story, made more
so since 1707 by the question of where English ends and
British begins. Due to its variety of human habitats,
England was, for many centuries, self-sufficient in the essentials
of life. Such variety within an small compass might explain why
there is no single English type, rather a whole range of
them, which has made for an independent-minded, versatile
and creative people, it is as English, for instance, to put on
a red coat and hunt foxes as it is to hold up a placard and block
the road in protest against bloodsports.

[letric]

Derek Walcott...What the Twilight Says (1998)

The West Indian mind historically hungover,
exhausted, prefers to take its revenge in nostalgia
to narrow its eyelids in a schizophrenic daydream
of an Eden that existed before its exile.

St Lucian poet and playwright

[letric]

The region has long been victim of that first
great book of magical realism, the Diary of
Christopher Columbus - transformative text in
which the very geography of the region was
fused with that of Asian world in the misnomer
West Indies.

Caryl Phillips (Reluctant Hero)

[letric]

I long for the night that fall blackly, suddenly,
without warning. I long for a violent shower of
rain at nights. I long to hear the tinny tattoo of
heavy raindrops on a roof, or the drops of rain
on the broad leaves of that wonderful plant, the
wild tannia.

Sir V. S. Naipaul (1932) Trinidadian-born British novelist.
(Letter to his father (1952)

[letric]

Who in the New World does not have a horror
of the past, whether his ancestor was a torturer or
victim? Who in the depth of conscience, is not
silently screaming for pardon or revenge?

Derek Walcott...What the Twilight Says (1998)





St Lucian poet and playwright

[letric]

I came from a place that likes grandeur; it likes
large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is
a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical
performance; it is a society of style.

Derek Walcott. Interview,
Writers at Work (1988)

[letric]

I see these islands , and I feel to bawl
area of darkness with V.S. Naipaul

Derek Walcott (Referring to
V.S. Naipaul.(1998)

Sir V. S. Naipaul (1932) Trinidadian-born British novelist.
(Letter to his father (1952)

[letric]

Who in the New World does not have a horror
of the past, whether his ancestor was a torturer or
victim? Who in the depth of conscience, is not
silently screaming for pardon or revenge?

How can I turn from Africa and live.

Derek Walcott In a Green Night,

Collected poems: 1948-84 (1986)

[letric]

A man is always resident in the castle of skin.
If the castle is deserted, then we know the Devil
has been at work.

George Lamming (b. 1927) Barbadian writer
The Pleasures of Exile.
(1960)

[letric]

What the Twilight Says (1998)


Break a vase, and the love that resembles the
fragments is stronger than that love which took
its symmetry for granted.
(Dissolving the Sigh of History
Guardian (16 December, 1992)

St Lucian poet and playwright]

[letric]

A man is always resident in the castle of skin.
If the castle is deserted, then we know the Devil
has been at work.

George Lamming (b. 1927) Barbadian writer
The Pleasures of Exile.
(1960)

Through nature one came to love the absence of
philosophy, and fatally, perhaps, the beauty of
certain degradations

[letric]

Caryl Phillips (Reluctant Hero)

Caryl Phillips
Born St. Kitts (13 March 1958)
brought up in Leeds, Yorkshire
Professor Yale University

[letric]

C. L. R. James (1901-89) Trinidadian writer,political theorist, and
educator. The Black Jacobins (1938)

The cruelties of property and privilege are always
more ferocious than revenges of poverty and
oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating
resented injustice, is the other merely a
momentary passion.

[letric]

Body line was not an accident, it was not an
accident, it was a temporary aberration. It
was the violence and ferocity of our age
expressing itself in cricket.

CLR James (1901-89)
Body-line is the style of bowling, first employed by
English cricketer Harold Larwood in 1932, in which the bowler aims
the ball hard and fast towards the body of the batsman.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)