Sunday Arts Section book writer Shivanee Ramlochand, who is part of the team behind the annual NGC Bocas Lit Fest, gives her take on this year’s festival.
This year at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, it was a good time to be a woman writer. For the first time since the festival’s inception in 2011, the OCM Bocas Prize shortlist featured a full line-up of works by women: US Virgin Islander Tiphanie Yanique for poetry, and Jamaicans Jacqueline Bishop and Olive Senior for non-fiction and fiction, respectively.
Senior, who’s long been a Caribbean classroom staple, took home the US $10,000 prize for her newest collection of short fiction, The Pain Tree.
In the Code Burt Awards honouring young adult writing, a similar clean-sweep of women’s names dominated the winners’ row: Trinidadian Tamika Gibson earned the CAN $10,000 purse for her manuscript, De Rightest Place, with Bermudan Florenz Webbe Maxwell and Trinidadian Danielle McClean receiving second and third place prizes, respectively.
While the spoils for the first place winners of both the OCM Bocas and Code Burt awards are the largest, cash awards go to each of the six recipients, affording them financial recognition for their work. One might argue that to be called a “woman writer” at all is a political act of obsolescence.
However, in a book industry that’s produced five Derek Walcotts; Earl Lovelaces; Edward Kamau Brathwaites; Wilson Harrises and George Lammings for every one Lorna Goodison, the distinction of woman writer feels like a necessary one.
Idle nomenclature isn’t a part of Bocas’ bag: this year’s main festival, celebrated from April 23- May 1, included serious strides in diversifying an already broad spectrum of programming. Bocas prides itself on being a forum for “books, writers, writing, and ideas”, and the offerings ranged well beyond the ambit of printed matter on paper.
CineLit, a fully-fledged Latin American and Spanish film festival, ran throughout Bocas for the first time this year, bringing cinematic interpretations of classic writers such as Gabriel García Márquez; Pablo Neruda and Julio Cortázar to life. A partnership with numerous diplomatic missions based in T&T, CineLit brought films fuelled by the literary to the front and centre consciousness of the Bocas stage.
If you were at the National Library or Bocas’ satellite event locations, including the Big Black Box, for any of the festival days, odds are good that you saw Black Indian masqueraders. Midnight Robbers; duelling extempo calypsonians: these and other performative storytellers made their mark at Bocas 2016, proving that our republic’s rootedness in traditional oral and folkloric renditions persists.
Calypso’s laurels were praised in particular, with a festival tribute in celebration of Sparrow’s 50th anniversary of Jean and Dinah, one that hosted a celebrity-tiered platform of performances and readings. Calypso has long been T&T’s outstanding vehicle of social and political consciousness; Bocas’ recognition of that highlights a need for similar engagement at every cultural gala in the region.
What persisted, too, were new ways of imagining the Caribbean in writing and ideas, alongside the venerated canon. The launch of a third title in the Peekash Press anthology series, New Worlds, Old Ways, heralded a necessary push in how we view the Caribbean and the stories we, as its citizens, have the capacity to tell. At its launch at De Nu Pub on April 28, the anthology’s editor Karen Lord praised the promising, ambitious forays of its 11 contributors to plumb the depths of the fantastic, dystopic and imaginary in their prose.
There will always be new ways to write into, against and alongside the canon, even when that canon’s been alive (or dead) for 400 years. The year 2016 marked the 400th or quatercentenary death anniversaries of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and at the Big Black Box on April 29, Shakespeare came alive beneath the mics of eight T&T writers who had a great deal to say about the Bard.
Visiting Bocas writers are peering outside the expanses of the festival itself: this year saw an official visit to the Port-of-Spain Prison by former incarcerated US poet and memoirist, Reginald Dwayne Betts. His workshop for inmates prompted them to consider their circumstances beyond the walls behind which they’re barred: a handier or more durable metaphor for the goals of Bocas cannot be clearer.
Shivanee Ramlochan is the official blogger and social media manager of the NGC Bocas Lit Fest.