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...

 GOD GAVE NOAH THE RAINBOW SIGN A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, 2020 by Kim Johnson You can see it from the Fort, the slow coming of the rains. I welcome them, even though for millennia the idea of how the earth would be destroyed was a deluge. South Asians who endure the killer floods of monsoon season will no doubt differ, maybe even those Caribbean people who feel the wrath of hurricanes will dread the deluge. But to me it's just weather for leather, when the woman I love wll cuddle and keep me warm. Not surprisingly it was a Dutchman who painted its nightmare quality, because after all, they live below sea level. In 1525 Albrecht Durer illustrated the flood after - for the first time in Western art - a dream. A Nightmare by Albrecht Durer, 1525 “In the year 1525 between Wednesday and Thursday (7-8 June) after Whitsunday during the night I saw this appearance in my sleep, how many great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the earth about four miles away from me with a terr...

 REDEMPTION SONGS OF FREEDOM Raising the flag, August 31, 1962, Port of Spain. Photo courtesy of Government Information Services. August is the month of our greatest works in progress. It opens on Emancipation Day, August 1, and closes on Independence Day, August 31, which came out of the collapse of the West Indian Federation. Interestingly, our anthem followed the same trajectory, starting with British Guiana-born Pat Castagne’s song for the Federation which opened with: “Forged from the depths of slavery.” Jamaica abandoned that Federal experiment, followed by Trinidad & Tobago on Eric Williams famous mathematical advice: "One from ten equals nought". The dream of regional unity languished, and both countries rushed to independence. Jamaica got a Pentecostal-type anthem: “Eternal Father bless our land/Guard us with thy mighty hand.” And Castagne retooled his Federal song for an independent T&T, swapping “the depths of slavery” for “the love of liberty” but leaving...