Breaking into the literary world while living and working in the Caribbean can be increasingly a difficult task. But the NGC Bocas Lit Fest's New Talent Showcase, held on the first three days of the festival, helps emerging young writers by featuring them and their work in a 45-minute showcase to friends, family, fans, prospective publishers and the public.
This year's all-female cast of emerging writers included Bahamian Sonia Farmer and Trinidadians Danielle Boodoo-Fortun� and Shivanee Ramlochan.
Farmer, who is also an entrepreneur book printer, read from a fascinating new collection of poetry where she reimagines the life and motivations of the 18th-century Caribbean pirate Ann Bonny. Farmer told the audience that she was especially interested in Bonny because of her determination to live a life outside the very narrow constraints of 18th-century female life. She used the sea thrillingly in her collection, with moving metaphors of tides, drownings and sand to describe Bonny's impulses to rebel against patriarchal authority, first her father, then her husband, and finally the pirate whose mistress she became, Calico Jack.
Boodoo-Fortun� is also a poet, and read from what she called her "bush poems, because they're all written in the bush somewhere in Trinidad," she told the audience with a half-smile. Her collection was very different from Farmer's, yet they shared an obsession with woman as shape-shifter; these bush poems were full of dreamy, violent women struggling through the jungles of conversation or relational forests. The themes of elemental femininity also percolate to her paintings and drawings, Boodoo-Fortun� admitted to interviewer and Bocas programme director Nicholas Laughlin. "I am constantly meeting the creature of myself," she said.
Ramlochan, who writes for the Sunday Arts Section, is a poet and fiction writer, and chose to read one short story called An MA in Cultural Fiction as well as several poems, some of which helped her to be shortlisted for the 2012 Small Axe Competition. As a popular book reviewer and literary blogger, Ramlochan is perhaps the most self-aware and articulate about the symbiotic relationship between writers and readers.
"We're weaker every day as writers when we turn even one reader away, through condescension or furthering a sense of the divide," she said in an e-mail interview. "We need each other, readers and writers alike, to share stories, and to have them heard."