Posts

The Labyrinth of Love 02

Image
Seeing is Believing One afternoon at a friend's home long ago but not so far way, I stumbled into a startling revelation. I was twenty-few, a law-school dropout, and my friend a final-year sociology student living with her mother and three younger siblings in the Diego Martin suburbs.  Clowning around in my friend's shared bedroom I tried on her sister's long-discarded pair of eyeglasses that were lying around. They had no arms and had to be worn like goggles - held up by a strip of dirty elastic encircling your head and affixed to the frame with tiny safety pins. I closed my eyes, balanced the contraption on the bridge of my nose and pulled the elastic around my head and, opened my eyes to peer out. Immediately I experienced a sudden jolt.  WTF! Everything was suddenly and shockingly shiny. In the split second my eyes were closed to settle the specs on my nose, the world had been scrubbed and polished. Colours were made brighter, things jumped out at me like they had only ...
Post a Comment
Read more

COBO CYAR EAT SPONGE CAKE

Image
"Patience" by Malika Green. During my lockdown trip to Eddy Bowen's retreat in Sans Souci in 2021, I noticed that the cobos there always chose, when they had a choice, to perch on dead trees. It reminded me to wonder why his logo for the TT Film Festival years ago was a cobo. Weeks later at Las Cuevas I spotted them doing the same thing. Why? wondered my partner in crime, and the answer that struck me I passed on: Cobo cyar eat sponge cake. It reminded me of an anecdote an architect once told me. He had designed a house on a large plot of hilly forested land on which stood a beautiful poui tree. Or maybe it was an immortelle, I can’t remember the precise species, just that it was a beautiful flowering tree. So he designed this house in such a way that it would have a view of, and be seen against the background of the tree. Perhaps the driveway would be flecked with yellow splashes. "Yellow Flower Road" by Kim Johnson. And the first thing the crew hired to constr...
2 comments
Read more

KJ's WAYS OF BEING (Part 9)

Image
 PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM Samuel Selvon by  Jayesh Sivan I see him one January evening quarter-century ago, four months before his death in 1994. He is only 70 but shuffles into the room slowly. It is a small seminar space in the Creative Arts Centre of the University of the West Indies, an old wooden building whose floorboards creak. He is medium height but appears taller because he is thin. He sports jeans and sandals. His neat beard and ponytail are silver, and his eyes are sad and ancient as if they have seen too much, including his own impending death. Once seated he fidgets with the books on the table before him while novelist Earl Lovelace introduces him as "a beleiver in Trinidad". Lovelace says that Selvon's work proclaimed and affirmed the lives and dreams of ordinary people. "I dunno what else to say," admits Lovelace. "Go on, go on, it sounding good," prompts Selvon, forcing a smile. But Lovelace is dry. He squeezes out the "idea" that ...
Post a Comment
Read more

KJ's WAYS OF BEING (Part 2)

Image
 TOCO TALES Round two years ago, as Covid lockdown eased into June and our St. James rumshops were busying themselves once again, we returned to Toco, fleeing to the artist Eddy Bowen’s retreat in Sans Souci for a last few days of peace. I pulled over between Rampanalgas and Cumana, by the same bridge bridge where, a century ago, Toco travellers broke their fast before footing it to Sangre Grande. I n ’88 my father leased one of the two Breakfast River Estate houses, and there the family passed almost every weekend for the last year and a half of his life. I hadn’t vacationed in Toco since childhood when we spent a week or two annually in this or that house. Patience Bay near the lighthouse was a regular. The drive was interminable, my sister and I and the dog were nauseous and we'd have to stop to vomit. "We reach yet?" we would pester my father until he pointed out a mango tree on a bend indicating the village was only a five-minute eternity away. The bedraggled, old tr...
Post a Comment
Read more