On October 13, West Indians and scholars of Caribbean literature crowded into Books & Books, a bookstore in Coral Gables, for the event Nations and Imaginations: An Evening with the Bocas Lit Fest in Miami.
Nations and Imaginations was a reading by Earl Lovelace, Edwidge Danticat, Edward Baugh, Fred D'Aguiar and Lisa Allen-Agostini, and served to close the 31st Annual West Indian Literature Conference: Imagined Nations, which opened October 11 at the University of Miami. Lisa Allen-Agostini recounts the event.
For Nations and Imaginations, conference participants as well as members of the public sat and stood in Books & Books in a spacious room lined wall-to-wall with books. The host, Bocas programme director Nicholas Laughlin invited the audience to attend next year's Bocas Lit Fest in T&T in April, and then introduced all the writers before stepping aside for us to read. I opened the readings with an excerpt, from a novel in progress, describing my protagonist's first experience of a big soca fete.
Fred D'Aguiar came next, reading a handful of poems from his most recent collection Continental Shelf. D'Aguiar, a British-Guyanese writer who lived in Guyana until he was 12, explained especially for the benefit of the children in the audience some of the imagery in the poems-what a slate is, and that he had to tote buckets of water as a child.
Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat followed his reading with an excerpt from her 2010 book of essays Create Dangerously. The book won the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Nonfiction as well as other awards internationally, and the audience was treated to a section that poetically compares the Haitian death ritual of retirer d'en bas de l'eau to the descriptions of the 2010 earthquake moving land as if it were water and leaving countless dead.
Edward Baugh joked that the previous readers had left him a lot of time so he was going to take advantage of it, and he read a number of poems. Baugh, who was for 17 years the public orator of UWI, Mona, has not lost his impressive oratorical skill; he effortlessly code-switched between Jamaican patois and Standard English in his adroit poems about such subjects as being a poet-To the Editor Who Asked Me To Send Him Some of My Black Poems had the audience in stitches-and the nature of Caribbean politics, as in You Ever Notice How.
Celebrated Trinidadian author Earl Lovelace completed the line-up, reading an excerpt from his most recent work, Is Just a Movie, which won the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize. "He had to find a way for himself, to expose to her what he had in him and what she meant to him, how to let her see the space in his stomach, the melting in his heart, how to let her know that he knew and liked her smell and the curve and colour of her lips, her eyes and her smile and the feel of her soul," Lovelace read, and the audience was heard to sigh in appreciation.
