Santimanitay

 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...

INTRODUCTION - A LOVE STORY Once, a long time ago, I asked a woman, Why d'you dance? She replied:  To escape death . On another occasion many years later I told another woman after knowing her for two days: I love you. Sometimes, three words can contain a whole book. Bele on stage, by Kim The collection of essays of which this is the first was originally conceived as simply  Ways of Hearing,  which were my considerations on the music and orature of the Caribbean. It was also a tribute to John Berger's seminal  Ways of Seeing by way of differentiating my New World civilization from the Old one Berger scrutinized so acutely.  The investigation led me into labyrinths where I essayed many unsatisfactory beginnings, until in 2017 I was introduced to my third, guiding meditation after a visiting researcher from the US requested an interview. She wanted to talk about something to do with steelbands. That's the only thing it seems people want to interview me about, whic...