The first day of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest 2013, April 25, turned out to be a metaphor for how much T&T folk and Caribbean people in general cope with painful situations by using humour.
The day began at 9 am in the Old Fire Station adjacent to the National Library with Writers vs Politicians–more of a tongue-in-cheek tribute than a discussion. Four prominent figures on T&T's political landscape–two former government ministers on opposite sides of the fence, one respected lawyer and political critic and one fiery journalist–read satirical passages of work from authors who'd all immortalised the vagaries of Caribbean politics in fiction.
The passages all described horrific, completely believable political dramas that could only happen in the West Indies–a journalist inexplicably slapped by the Comrade Vice-President of the Republic, a sly minister giving his diffident cabinet "classified" information about the cartel about to overrun the country. But each excerpt was written, and read, with such blistering irony that the crowded room was almost always filled with chuckles from both the audience and readers.
"Ralph Maraj was the best, the most dramatic," I was told when I slipped in, late. He'd read a riot scene from John Hearne's 1955 Voices Under the Window, which tells the story of a middle-class lawyer, political activist and committed nationalist intellectual. Paula Gopee-Scoon also read, this time from a more contemporary text about the same pre-independence period in the West Indies, Monique Roffey's novel The White Woman on the Green Bicycle. But Martin Daly's reading from Austin Clarke's The Prime Minister was quite good, prefaced as it was by his self-deprecating humour after he climbed the rather high stage. "The knees only work when All Stars on the road," he quipped.
Both he and journalist Sunity Maharaj, who read a short story entitled I Don't Take Messages From Dead People by Guyanese writer Pauline Melville, seemed to restrain laughter as they read. "Leave the country," Maharaj intoned as the voice of the grandmother who
advises her journalist grandson after his worrying encounter with the Comrade Vice-President of the Republic. But the fictional grandson plans an elaborate ruse to redeem himself. After he is successful and crowing about his promotion to the Comrade VP's personal adviser, his grandmother has one last piece of advice: "Leave the country," Maharaj read, to resounding applause.
This satirical duel between writers and politicians–the writers won–was followed by a short talk entitled Father Figures, featuring UK writers Hannah Lowe and Colin Grant, who both explore complex relationships with their Jamaican fathers in their most recent books. Grant's memoir, Bageye at the Wheel, gives a snapshot of his childhood with a mother who seems to have struggled to ensure that her children did better than she did and a difficult father who inspired his children to devise several ways to off him, without success.
"It got so bad at one point that eventually I was afraid that my father would die before I had a chance to kill him," Grant told the audience before his reading.
Chick is Lowe's poetry collection about her gambler father, a way to reimagine much of the mystery of his life that he took with him to his grave.
Both writers discussed anecdotes of life with their fathers to preface their readings. While Lowe's poetry is largely introspective and sometimes visceral, her memories of her father were witty and tender. Grant's prose, on the other hand, depended much more on the absurdity of everyday life. He read a passage describing the family's attempt to get Grant and his brother to a scholarship exam, potentially the beginning of a new life for them. But their unreliable Mini won't start until Bageye, their father, orchestrates a dramatic push downhill.
"In his own way, my father did try to look after me however he could," Grant said. "I owe my education to ganja. But ultimately, as George Lamming has said, it was my mother who fathered me."