Lisa Allen-Agos­ti­ni

On Sat­ur­day, Po­et Lau­re­ate of Port-of-Spain An­son Gon­za­lez left T&T for what might be the last time. An­son, who is now in his 70s, has been crit­i­cal­ly ill for the past few years; he and his wife Sylvia have moved to Wales, where their daugh­ters live. They left with a bang, not a whim­per. On the morn­ing of the day the movers were com­ing to pick up their box­es, the Gon­za­lezes host­ed a small crowd of friends and neigh­bours at the un­veil­ing of a blue plaque to ho­n­our their home, Sap­phire House.

The house at the cor­ner of Sap­phire Dri­ve and Tiara Boule­vard in Di­a­mond Vale was where An­son and Sylvia not on­ly raised their chil­dren but raised a whole cul­ture of po­et­ry and lit­er­a­ture in Trinidad.It was there he pro­duced the jour­nal The New Voic­es from 1973-1993. He al­so pub­lished books by po­ets such as Jen­nifer Rahim and Paula Obe.

As Cyn­thia James wrote in the jour­nal Post­colo­nial Text:The ef­fort of An­son Gon­za­lez at sus­tain­ing the Trinidad and To­ba­go lit­er­ary jour­nal, The New Voic­es, through­out its ex­is­tence from 1973-1993 is a West In­di­an leg­end.

As Gon­za­lez him­self tes­ti­fies in the pref­ace of In My Own Words, In My Own Jour­nal (2007), '[n]ot on­ly did I scout the con­tri­bu­tions, but I se­lect­ed, edit­ed, type­set, print­ed, col­lat­ed, bound, and trimmed the units (sic). Then I pack­aged and/or de­liv­ered the is­sues. At the same time I held down a full-time job, did post grad­u­ate stud­ies, tried to keep fit, and ful­filled my fam­i­ly and spir­i­tu­al oblig­a­tions'. The jour­nal, though based in Trinidad, is di­as­poric and pan-Caribbean, for among its pages one can find not on­ly the ear­ly work of well-known Caribbean writ­ers such as Dionne Brand (Cana­da and Trinidad), Ka­mau Brath­waite (Bar­ba­dos, UK and USA), and Ian Mc Don­ald (Guyana, UK and Trinidad), but al­so a fair col­lec­tion of Caribbean let­ters by con­trib­u­tors bet­ter known in lit­er­ary schol­ar­ship and edit­ing cir­cles, such as Ken­neth Ram­c­hand, Rein­hard Sander, Stew­art Brown, Gor­don Rohlehr, and Je­re­my Poynt­ing. (Cre­ative and Cul­tur­al Iden­ti­ty in the Work of An­son Gon­za­lez (Trinidad and To­ba­go): A Study of Pros­e­leela, Chela Quest, and Cross­roads of Dream as Spir­i­tu­al and Lit­er­ary Au­to­bi­og­ra­phy, Post­colo­nial Text Vol 4, No 4)

Al­though I've writ­ten since I was a lit­tle girl and al­ways con­sid­ered my­self a writer be­fore any­thing else, it was re­al­ly through An­son that I find my­self 20-some­thing years lat­er a pub­lished au­thor and ed­i­tor. When I was a teenag­er I won the now-de­funct Cli­co Schools Po­et­ry Prize, a prize that An­son start­ed and nur­tured. Win­ning the prize got my pic­ture on the front page of the Guardian, and my win­ning po­em was pub­lished in The New Voic­es.From there, I got the at­ten­tion of Dr Mar­garet Watts, a po­et her­self, who men­tored me and en­cour­aged me, fa­cil­i­tat­ing the launch of my self-pub­lished book of po­ems Some­thing to Say, when I was 18. Through Mar­garet I met oth­er writ­ers–like Alan Tang, who helped with that book too. It is safe to say that with­out that prize I would nev­er have se­ri­ous­ly con­sid­ered be­com­ing a pro­fes­sion­al writer. (So if you hate my writ­ing and think me a hack, you have An­son to blame.)

At the un­veil­ing of the plaque, on March 27, those in the gath­er­ing were in­vit­ed to share brief plau­dits and mem­o­ries of Sap­phire House and An­son. Jen­nifer Rahim spoke, say­ing it was through The New Voic­es she had been first giv­en a lit­er­ary award. Jen­nifer is now the au­thor of sev­er­al books of po­et­ry and has been giv­en the Casa de las Amer­i­c­as prize for her po­et­ry. She teach­es lit­er­a­ture at UWI. An­oth­er of An­son's prot�g�es, Paula Obe, is not on­ly a pub­lished au­thor, hav­ing col­lec­tions is­sued by in­ter­na­tion­al pub­lish­ers, but she is al­so a pub­lish­er her­self. Paula start­ed the women's po­et­ry per­for­mance col­lec­tive Ten Sis­ters, which would go on to tour the coun­try and even­tu­al­ly pro­duce a CD of po­et­ry.

At the gath­er­ing at Sap­phire House, two teach­ers spoke about the val­ue of Po­et­ry Day, ob­served on Oc­to­ber 15, which An­son in­tro­duced and pushed. An­son was al­so a founder of the Writ­ers Union, which still ex­ists and still works for T&T writ­ers. Late last year An­son co-edit­ed the col­lec­tion 100 Po­ems from Trinidad & To­ba­go, pub­lished by Cane Ar­row Press. It was a mas­sive un­der­tak­ing, in­clud­ing po­et­ry from the 1930s to to­day. An­son Gon­za­lez is a man whose lega­cy is near­ly be­yond com­pre­hen­sion. So much of our lit­er­ary life in con­tem­po­rary T&T is owed to what he has done; he de­serves our high­est na­tion­al ho­n­our.