Shiv­a­nee Ram­lochan

In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tor and po­et He­len Dray­ton launched her self-pub­lished his­tor­i­cal nov­el The Crys­tal Bird on April 22. Telling the sto­ry of a team of ar­chae­ol­o­gists who stum­ble across the an­cient civil­i­sa­tion of the Ashais, The Crys­tal Bird is de­scribed by Kirkus Re­views as a "unique, en­gag­ing sto­ry of star-crossed love, his­to­ry and myth­i­cal mag­ic."

The launch was held at Queen's Hall, St Ann's. Guests in­clud­ed new­ly-ap­point­ed Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Em­manuel George, the Niger­ian High Com­mis­sion­er Musa John Jen, Sen­a­tor Faris Al-Rawi and pres­i­dent of the Sen­ate Tim­o­thy Hamel-Smith.

In one of sev­er­al pref­aces to Dray­ton's ad­dress to the gath­er­ing, Prof Sel­wyn Ryan de­scribed the work as "a clash of civil­i­sa­tions, a con­tex­ting [sic] of two dif­fer­ent ways of see­ing the world." He read se­lec­tions from his favourite pas­sages, prais­ing Dray­ton for her metic­u­lous re­search and for cap­tur­ing both a sense of ar­chi­tec­tur­al grandeur along­side a beau­ti­ful­ly told love sto­ry.

In an­oth­er ad­dress, Dr Lennox Bernard drew par­al­lels be­tween three lev­els of the nov­el that sug­gest­ed its sim­i­lar­i­ty to Freudi­an the­o­ry: the con­struc­tion of the id, ego and su­per-ego. Bernard her­ald­ed The Crys­tal Bird as a "tex­tu­al con­flict be­tween Ju­daeo-Chris­t­ian ethics and a na­tivis­tic self," adding that from this "pos­i­tive con­fu­sion" great cre­ative ex­plo­ration is born. Bernard drew com­par­isons be­tween the "lyri­cal ro­man­ti­cism" and sen­su­al style of Dray­ton's writ­ing to Wil­son Har­ris' The Palace of the Pea­cock. Like the es­tab­lished, vet­er­an writ­ers of T&T and the Caribbean, Bernard ex­plained, Dray­ton is ask­ing through her work im­por­tant ques­tions of self-iden­ti­ty, seek­ing to give voice to the iden­ti­ty of an en­tire peo­ple.

Sen­a­tor Corinne Bap­tiste-McK­night de­liv­ered her per­son­al tes­ti­mo­ny of en­joy­ing the nov­el as a life­long read­er and self-pro­fessed "word junkie." She laud­ed the rich­ness of The Crys­tal Bird, telling the au­di­ence that "every line of this book strikes a chord." In her own as­sess­ment, en­tre­pre­neur Si­mone Jacelon cat­e­gorised the nov­el as "an ex­hil­a­rat­ing read, con­tain­ing serene paus­es in the right spaces for re­flec­tion." There was al­so a dra­mat­ic read­ing by pro­fes­sion­al or­a­tor Deb­o­rah Jean-Bap­tiste-Samuel, of one of the book's pas­sages.

In her ad­dress to the gath­er­ing, Dray­ton de­scribed The Crys­tal Bird as a work that was born out of love for his­to­ry, par­tic­u­lar­ly an­cient his­to­ry, as well as her com­mit­ment to ho­n­our­ing the en­vi­ron­ment.

"The more I re­searched the foot­prints of mankind," Dray­ton said, "the more I found my­self go­ing in­to bib­li­cal re­search," ex­plain­ing that the process of writ­ing the nov­el al­so be­came a spir­i­tu­al jour­ney.

If the nov­el is to have two over­ar­ch­ing mes­sages, Dray­ton said, they would be that, pri­mar­i­ly, his­to­ry is im­por­tant in the lives of all peo­ple, and sec­on­dar­i­ly, that the earth, with all its nat­ur­al trea­sures, is our lega­cy to the next gen­er­a­tion.

All pro­ceeds from sales of The Crys­tal Bird at the book launch were do­nat­ed to the not-for-prof­it NGO re­source man­age­ment agency Unit­ed Way T&T.