Shiv­a­nee Ram­lochan

When An­tho­ny Joseph re­flect­ed af­ter­wards on the work he shared at the Read­er's Book­shop, St James, on Feb­ru­ary 16, right in the wake of Car­ni­val, he said he was grate­ful for the in­ten­si­ty of the event. Via Skype from Lon­don, he de­scribed read­ing his fic­tion and po­et­ry to a packed house that in­clud­ed at­ten­dees such as Ma­ri­na Sa­landy-Brown, founder and di­rec­tor of the NGC Bo­cas Lit Fest; au­thor Earl Lovelace; and one of Joseph's self-avowed per­son­al all-time he­roes, David Rud­der.

At the read­ing, Joseph read ex­ten­sive­ly from his re­cent­ly-fin­ished sec­ond nov­el, Kitch: A Frag­ment­ed, Fic­tion­al Bi­og­ra­phy of the Ca­lyp­son­ian Lord Kitch­en­er, which rep­re­sents the ba­sis of his doc­tor­al stud­ies in cre­ative and life writ­ing at Gold­smiths Col­lege, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don. The writer is Trinidad-born and has lived in Eng­land since his ear­ly 20s; Salt Pub­lish­ing is­sued his de­but nov­el, The African Ori­gins of UFOs, in 2006.

While "grow­ing up in Trinidad in the 1970s and 80s," Joseph said, "Kitch­en­er was a ma­jor part of the cul­ture, the fab­ric of the coun­try." While in Lon­don he ex­pe­ri­enced the vet­er­an ca­lyp­son­ian's death in Trinidad in 2000; it hit Joseph at his emo­tion­al cen­tre. De­spite Kitch­en­er hav­ing been in­volved in the lo­cal mu­sic in­dus­try for around 60 years, Joseph not­ed there has been no sem­i­nal pub­lished work about this cul­tur­al icon. It was here that the gen­e­sis for writ­ing the book be­gan, a cre­ative project that would span more than a decade of Joseph's life.

The re­search­ing and writ­ing process be­hind Kitch, Joseph said, fol­lowed a unique tack, in that he sought to ap­proach it with "the spir­it of ca­lyp­so" and the ways in which ca­lyp­so­ni­ans have lived. The no­tion of so­bri­quet was im­por­tant to es­tab­lish­ing Lord Kitch­en­er as a re­al fig­ure with a fic­tion­alised, imag­ined life–yet a life of imag­i­na­tion that is root­ed, the writer em­pha­sised, in many events that did ac­tu­al­ly hap­pen.

"Who Kitch­en­er was as a per­son, and who he was on stage...those are two com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent peo­ple," Joseph said, ex­plain­ing why it was so im­por­tant to cap­ture the sense of that du­al­i­ty in his writ­ing.Giv­en the lack of pub­lished work on Ald­wyn "Lord Kitch­en­er" Roberts, much of Joseph's re­search took an oral slant, in the form of sev­er­al in­ter­views on the mul­ti­ple facets of Kitch­en­er's life. In ad­di­tion to this, he did a sig­nif­i­cant amount of news­pa­per re­search, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the Trinidad Guardian archives of the 1940s and '50s. "A lot of Kitch­en­er's life is in his mu­sic," Joseph said, "so I did a lot of lis­ten­ing, too."

There is a def­i­nite bal­ance to the art of the fic­tion­al bi­og­ra­phy, Joseph said, be­cause "want­i­ng to get every lit­tle de­tail 'right' means that you can be­come ob­ses­sive. In or­der to cre­ate a char­ac­ter that's liv­ing, you have to em­bell­ish." Writ­ing about Kitch­en­er as au­then­ti­cal­ly as he could meant that Joseph stuck faith­ful­ly to a ma­jor­i­ty of ac­tu­al events in the ca­lyp­son­ian's life, then added flour­ish­es of de­tail to help pro­pel the sto­ry along, and to fill in the un­avoid­able gaps.

The au­thor of sev­er­al col­lec­tions of po­et­ry, the most re­cent of which is Rub­ber Or­ches­tras (Salt Mod­ern Po­ets se­ries, 2011), Joseph ad­mit­ted to the po­et­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties at the heart of the nov­el. Teach­ing fic­tion writ­ing at Birk­beck Col­lege in Lon­don, he said, has helped to so­lid­i­fy and strength­en the es­sen­tial dif­fer­ences in writ­ing prose and po­et­ry."I am a po­et," Joseph said, con­firm­ing that the nov­el it­self is ground­ed in a sort of po­et­ic prose, one which con­sid­ers the way lan­guage works on the page.In ad­di­tion to be­ing a nov­el­ist and a po­et, Joseph is al­so as a mu­si­cian–he head­lines his own mu­si­cal group, the Spasm Band, with which he has re­leased three al­bums. This mu­si­cal back­ground sig­ni­fies a cer­tain kin­ship with Kitch­en­er that Joseph val­ues.

"I can talk about mu­si­cian­ship, of mu­si­cal val­ues and el­e­ments" with­out hav­ing to in­vent any ex­per­tise in that area, he said.On the lives of ca­lyp­so­ni­ans, Joseph con­clud­ed, "They're show­men, they prop­a­gate their own leg­end."It is his hope that with the fu­ture pub­li­ca­tion of Kitch, his work in doc­u­ment­ing and ho­n­our­ing the life of Lord Kitch­en­er will take cen­tre stage as both an archive and a trib­ute.