From the monthly archives:

September 2008

A Little Respect

18 September 2008

Received the following by email.  It’s from Terneille Burrows (TaDa).  Quite frankly, I was thrilled to get it. Those of us who work in the Department of Culture have made similar points in boardrooms and accountants’ offices, but the attitudes about ourselves and our artists persist. I’m not going to say more — I’m just [...]

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Nah, ya see …

12 September 2008

It isn’t a frivolous thing to protest against the way in which people expect to view Africa (and the rest of the third world for that matter, where skins are dark and palm trees feather the skyline).  I know Hurricane Ike was a bastard, and ripped up the southern Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos [...]

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ARC Review #3 – Aya, Abouet

11 September 2008

Country: Ivory Coast Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa Author: Marguerite Abouet (& Clement Oubrerie) Review: Yes, yes, another coming of age novel. But I had to think about this one, because (a) it’s not All About Me, and (b) it’s a graphic novel. It’s about three young women in the Ivory Coast Côte d’Ivoire of the [...]

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ARC Review #2 – Purple Hibiscus, Adichie

7 September 2008

Country:  Nigeria, West Africa Author:  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  Review:  Perhaps it’s typical of novels from the African and Caribbean diaspora, but I find often that authors’ first novels are coming-of-age stories.   (It’s one of the things that’s turned me off reading novels from my own region, and equally, what’s stopped me writing The Big One.) [...]

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Update on Africa Reading Challenge

7 September 2008

No, I haven’t forgotten it.  Have you? Here’s my update.  I took books, as I said, to Guyana to read.  That was optimistic; I didn’t get the chance while on the ground, though I did read small bits of Purple Hibiscus in the bath once or twice.  I also didn’t get the chance to attend [...]

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Another View of CARIFESTA

5 September 2008

Alissa Trotz makes some salient points (hey, Alissa!!) In the Diaspora : Stabroek News In a presentation made at the Caricom Heads of Govern-ment Conference in July, Barbadian novelist George Lamming took Guyanese President Bharrat Jagdeo to task for the following comment “…and now we come to the lighter side, CARIFESTA in Guyana.” There is [...]

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An answer, maybe, to Rick

5 September 2008

Guyana Providence Stadium: Guyana – Rambler on the benefits of Carifesta So please, El Presidente could you arrange just one more week of freeness, dancing and drinking? You know as a Moscow trained economist that this splurge of government spending, (you take $500 million of taxpayer’s money out of the economy and send it right [...]

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Hurricane update

5 September 2008

Hanna has passed without incident, as expected.  Ike has weakened and has shifted a little so that the eye is no longer heading for New Providence but further south.  We don’t know what will happen, but there it is. We’re keeping our eyes on the storm.  We’ll feel it by Monday.

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Hanna, Ike, Josephine

4 September 2008

Guyana doesn’t get hurricanes. We do. I’m sitting here, a tropical storm watch active for the area, while three storms line up and take aim on us.   Of them, the one that worries me the most is Ike — a decent Cat Four hurricane currently heading straight for Nassau.  I’ll keep you posted. Cheers.

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CARIFESTA X Update – Moving Forward

3 September 2008

I’m sitting in Nassau now, with life half back to normal, the desk suitably christened with the muttered invective and laughter that it takes to get me through a bureaucratic day, with CARIFESTA X behind and CARIFESTA XI straight ahead, a target whose bullseye we Bahamians ought to shoot. We’ve had four years to prepare, [...]

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