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What is a Caribbean Children’s Book Classic? – A Memetic Perspective

2010-09-06T05:31:04Z

A while back, I saw Geoffrey Philp’s request, put out to his readers, inviting interested persons to join in a discussion on the question of what constitutes a Caribbean classic. When I expressed my interest in adding to the dialogue I assumed that the topic was of great importance to me, and naturally, it is. From a young age, I have used literature to maneuver shifting intersections of identity. My discovery of Caribbean literature has been the crossroads that brought me to the landscape I was looking for: my own Caribbean landscape.

As an avid reader, I have consumed and digested the substance of World Classics: those literary works that are internationally known, cross-culturally referenced, universally approved, that feed the human appetite for unanimity and lastingness. However, the more I thought about how to formulate my answer, how to approach this question of what constitutes a Caribbean classic, the more I realized that, in light of the historically adultist nature of the Caribbean literary establishment, it is just as – if not even more – imperative that I address myself to a somewhat similar question, one that actually concerns me even more. This question is that of what constitutes a Caribbean children’s classic. Anyone who knows me or reads my blog, knows that I am a passionate advocate for Caribbean children’s and young adult literature. It should come as no surprise then that my contribution must necessarily take on this angle.

A written Caribbean children’s classic is something that we are still waiting for. If we think of the Caribbean literary establishment as a young family (relatively speaking,) then a Caribbean children’s classic is the yet-to-be-conceived brainchild, the babe-in-arms that will make of Caribbean literature a valiant household name, that will complete the ‘family’ of the Caribbean literary establishment and confer upon it final moral respectability and ecological validity so to speak. After all, what is a family without children? Such conditions when they exist in the human context are called ‘infertility,’ or to use the old biblical turn of phrase, ‘barrenness.’ Meanwhile, the willingly childless family has often been seen as unnatural. It is the same with literature. Politically speaking, Caribbean literature has suffered not so much from infertility and barrenness as from the philosophical and moral embarrassment of cultural heirlessness. This is entirely and undoubtedly due to the absence of printed/written Caribbean children’s classics, as I will now attempt to argue.

Just as the human child, when it is conceived and delivered into the world, is the link between old and new generations, classic children’s books are, by virtue of being children’s books, the link between old and new generations of readers and writers. Children’s literature, we can readily agree, is the darling of belles-lettres. Children’s books delight and charm us in ways our adult reading material cannot. They are the stuff of sweet childhood memories, and if a particular story makes an impression on enough children in a given generation, then the experience of being charmed by the story becomes a collective one, a collective memory shared by members of a particular generation. It is this collective memory of an impressive, culturally significant children’s book that moves adults to buy the book for their own children, and those children when they become adults give the book to their children and so forth. And so the timeless quality of a classic children’s book is perpetuated. In the (Anglophonic) Caribbean literary establishment, sad to say, no such classic children’s books exist.

The transmission of a classic children’s book from one generation to another is a rite of passage by which children of the new generation come into a specific literary-cultural inheritance, namely, the one received, experienced, and passed on by the previous generation. In classic children’s books and in the repetitive act, the symbolic gesture of passing those books on to successive generations of children, is the power of the memetic. It is a memetic rite that gives unto the child the cultural maps and artifacts of collective memory. When a child reads a classic children’s book, a memetic imprint is made on the child’s subconsciousness. That imprint is just enough to point the child toward a specific literary-cultural inheritance, or in other words, a specific heritage.

Moreover, when you, as an adult, give a child a classic children’s book, you are giving them an artifact of collective memory, you are making sure that the child participates in the same construction and construct of collective memory you participated in, the collective memory that was likewise constructed for you by generations of child-adults that came before you. A non-classic children’s book does not do this because it is not memetic in the historical sense; it is not naturally selected to survive simultaneously in people’s individual and collective memories.

The imprint, during childhood, of heritage through the literary-cultural meme of the children’s classic sets up the conditions for, and often the nature of, the individual’s lifelong cultural engagement. Throughout the rest of the individual’s life, everything that he or she recognizes as ‘culture’ (and by extension, as ‘literature’) will be influenced by the imprint, by the things he or she read as a child in European fairy tales and ‘Mother Goose’ books for example. The individual will instinctively search, even fight, for this interpretation, this experience of culture (and literature) for the rest of his or her life, as it will seem his or her rightful inheritance, the vague but familiar promise of his or her childhood. It will not matter if, as has been the case for Caribbean people, the cultural-literary inheritance is derived from literally unknown sources, from foreign histories which the inheritor/individual has no direct knowledge or experience of. Because the imprint of heritage through the literary-cultural meme of the children’s classic occurs in childhood, and is made on the child’s subconscious, it will be difficult to interrupt or change the process of memetic transmission (and thus proliferation) of the foreign memes (symbols, artifacts and values) when the child becomes an adult. Difficult, but not, as we have seen, impossible.

Of course, it would make more and complete sense for Caribbean children to inherit the memes of Caribbean culture in the first place, the artifacts of Caribbean collective memory(ies,) but I would argue that for this to occur on conscious, subconscious and self-conscious levels, the power of the memetic would have to come into play. Specifically, the memetic power of Caribbean children’s classics is needed, these still-to-be-written Caribbean children’s books being, as I have indicated, the presently lacking links (intergenerational memetic conduits) between old and new generations of Caribbean readers and writers.

A written Caribbean children’s classic is something that we are still waiting for. I have now double-emphasized the word ‘written’ because I think historians and ordinary people will agree that classic Caribbean stories, traditionally told to children, have already been produced and proliferated in the oral mode. Here I refer specifically to the orally-transmitted Anansi stories and other folk lore that were a staple feature of Caribbean childhoods up until the recent decade or two. The last generation of Caribbean writers relied on the oral storytelling tradition to come into their literary-cultural inheritance, to unearth the cultural maps and artifacts of collective memory. Indeed, the de-emphasis in recent times of oral storytelling as a strong fixture of Caribbean childhoods, may be the direct cause of the “dying artform” of Caribbean writing that people like Sacha Fortune talk about.

The appetite for writing and the propensity for a literary career are developed in childhood, or at least before the end of it. Generally speaking, Modern-day Caribbean parents do not really tell their children oral folk stories anymore, so that our oral children’s classics are being lost. Given the many forces that have historically discouraged Caribbean children’s and young people’s access to and enthusiasm for Caribbean literature, it is no wonder Caribbean writing has suffered and is suffering. I am submitting to the reader of this essay, that a written Caribbean children’s classic or classics, the printed re-interpretation(s) of the oral Caribbean children’s classics of the past, are needed to heal the family of the Caribbean literary establishment and restore the reproductive, memetic process of cultural inheritance currently being undermined by the decline of orality in Caribbean cultures. But first Caribbean children’s classics must be written and naturalized into Caribbean populations.

People wonder why Caribbean youth love to consume so much foreign culture – books, televisions, music- and why they do not know about their own history and about the great Caribbean literature of the past (and indeed, the present.) Others see Caribbean writing as a dying artform and wonder why this is so. Again, I would answer that an important link is missing. Classic Caribbean children’s books are that link, books that linger in the collective memories of Caribbean child-adults and that are passed on from generation to generation.

In conclusion, a Caribbean children’s classic will be a written book, which will almost universally charm the current generation of Caribbean children. The Caribbean children’s classic we are waiting for may or may not penned by a Caribbean author, although my intuition is that it will, and indeed that it should, be penned by a Caribbean person.

Importantly, the book will be Pan-Caribbean in nature; it will have universal appeal to many, if not all, types of children throughout the Caribbean. This will require a bold attempt spanning languages and conquering regional publishing restrictions. Moreover, a Caribbean children’s classic, digested under the right conditions during childhood, will work with subtle force to inspire a significant portion of each generation of Caribbean children to become writers.

This darling of a book will be imprinted upon the collective memory of the current generation of Caribbean children and when they grow up they will buy or pass on the book for their own children. This process of literary inheritance and cultural proliferation will go on and on indefinitely. But you can’t have proliferation without the seed. You can’t come into your inheritance without a bequest. Hopefully, those seeds are being planted even now and that bequest is coming soon. But like any life cycle, like any process of inheritance, any process of conception, there must be certain death. There is some dying to some things that Caribbean people, Caribbean writers especially, have to do, particularly if we want to produce a Caribbean children’s classic any time soon. I, for one, am working on it.

About the Author:

Summer Edward is a twenty-something year old writer and Caribbean children’s literature scholar who currently attends the University of Pennsylvania where she is a Masters student in the Reading, Writing, Literacy programme. She is the Founder and Managing Editor of Anansesem, the Caribbean children’s literature ezine. Summer’s poetry and art have appeared in Philadelphia Stories, The Columbia Review, tongues of the ocean, St. Somewhere, and recently, BIM: Arts for The twenty-First Century. Summer was recently named a recipient of a Roothbert Fellowship.

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Fresh Stuff From Alexandros Vasmoulakis in Shenzhen, China

2010-09-06T03:26:24Z

Fears rise as EU nations aim to raise borrowing

2010-09-05T23:25:49Z

"Butterfly," by Chinua Achebe

2010-09-05T23:25:45Z

Image copyright (©) and picture credit Speed is violence Power is violence Weight is violence The butterfly seeks safety in lightness In weightless, undulating flight But at a crossroads where mottled light From trees falls on a brash new highway Our convergent territories meet I come power-packed enough for two And the gentle butterfly offers Itself in bright yellow sacrifice Upon my hard

Sunday Sociology Song – Consumerism and Alienation

2010-09-05T23:25:44Z

The Clash, Lost in The Supermarket:

See also Antonio Casilli on Russian music, and Denis Colombi on Eminem.

Fresh Stuff From mobstr

2010-09-05T21:38:50Z

Royal Dutch Shell and the dark arts

2010-09-05T17:46:41Z

Drzach & Suchy's Shadow Clouds

2010-09-05T15:56:30Z

panoptICONS - An Introduction

2010-09-05T15:56:31Z

panoptICONS Utrecht 2010 from Helden on Vimeo.

"panoptICONS addresses the fact that we are constantly being watched by surveillance cameras in city centres. The surveillance camera seems to have become a real pest that feeds on our privacy. To represent this, camera birds - city birds with cameras instead of heads - were placed throughout the city centre of Utrecht where they feed on the presence of people. In addition, a camera bird in captivity was displayed to show the feeding process and to make the everyday breach of our privacy more personal and tangible."

Shit We're Diggin: Risto-Jussi Isopahkala's Logo Tourist Paris

2010-09-05T15:56:31Z

Artist Statement:

Logo Touris mixes iconic landmarks and commercial logos. It features logos from the hundred most valuable brands.

The spectacle of advertising and popular culture creates secondary realities which we can share with others. Common literacy creates common identity. Rules of communication are determined by commercial media.

Iconic landmarks are symbols of local identity. How does this conflict with commercial brands appearing cloned around the globe? Post-Fordistic theory of all things starting to remind one another unpersonally and unhistorically, doesn't strictly speaking apply to monumental architecture, which symbolizes values that are not generally considered as merchandise. For tourists these are nevertheless consumable commodities, available to outsiders as well. Stereotypes of cities, such as Paris, can be transferred and consumed everywhere. Identity is comprised of consuming. Resembling worm hole theory, consumption spectacle creates portals between collateral realities.

FIRST LOOK: A Teaser For Os Gemeos' Animated "Snow Show"

2010-09-05T15:56:31Z

Fresh Stuff From Anthony Lister in Brisbane

2010-09-05T15:56:31Z

Timeline of the Christchurch Earthquake

2010-09-05T15:35:31Z

Mapping Quakes in Canterbury

New Zealand's Sciblogs has used Google Maps to create a storyboard of seismic activity for the Christchurch earthquake and its aftershocks. The data for the maps comes from New Zealand's GeoNet data portal.

Each map represents one hour. The circles on the maps represent seismic events and the larger the circle, the higher the quake’s magnitude. A reader of the blog has also uploaded images of the maps to Picasa to create an animation of the earthquake and its aftershocks.

GeoNet has created its own map of the Christchurch earthquake that shows instrument recordings of the earthquake and felt reports submitted by the public from different localities around New Zealand.

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Parish priest heckled over support for Shell

2010-09-05T17:46:41Z

Shell criticised over gifts to schools

2010-09-05T17:46:41Z

In My Own Words: C.M. Clark

2010-09-05T12:15:30Z

C is for Cat: The Poetics of Embedment

Sometimes poetry begins for me with a cat sleeping at my shoulder. Something about that vibration plowing in and out with the breathing, up one furrow, down another. Someone once said “verse” begins with the plowed line, the seeded line: along one row, then the deliberate deliberated “turn” onto another.

I have had too many years of breaking down poems and poetry, snapping that loose thread that holds the seamed cloth and pulling until knit and purl unravel into wavy yarn, like tangled wet hair, no longer pliant, no longer young.

Poems are my high school sweethearts, just me and the words holding hands in the hallways. Then, there is no moment more exciting than the one ready to uncork, the next word appearing unwilled, just stunning chance at work. The days and months turn of their own accord. I meet you at the bus stop in the Fall. We hurry aboard, impatient to press against each other, wool to wool, those chillying days. We ride our bikes the long miles in the Spring, sometimes never arriving, distracted by the lure of daffodils aiming skyward, tangents along a line. Then the prom, and the unimaginable, unanticipated day after – postpartum blues in an off-kilter key. There’ll be others, we know. But then, there was only the silence, table for one, there, on the blank page.
I don’t hate poetry, but I don’t always love it, either. Maybe poems now are my mature relationships, the willingness to choose this, choose you – over and over. We are the trajectories of our choices. We can amble like a sine curve, or meander randomly, hoping, knowing daffodils will wait at the path’s turn to fallow field. But barefoot footprints leave no mark. Nothing to mourn, nothing to say.

There was one boy who especially liked the daffodils. Since they only bloomed briefly, the window of opportunity was small, especially after a colder than usual Winter, and forecasts for a shorter than normal Spring. How that boy reveled in all that yellow! For him, even the oncoming of everything green was eclipsed. I don’t know if that field still exists. Maybe it was just some poem, after all.
Now in the Spring I wait for the frogs to start crooning. They are my new boyfriends, maybe even my prince among them. I found my poem this year among the mangrove roots, tangled like wire, like old fishing lines, like lines deleted from erased stanzas.

“F is for Frog”

The frogs were out tonight in full chest, the buffos and the croakies bask
and buzz in the hollows, camouflaged in canal bank boudoirs, slim
and complicated with water weeds, grass

cuttings and spring pollen. Frog song trails

like a lariat snaking, lashes
out toward neighboring boglands and those
closer to the bay, outshining

by virtue of their affinity to salt.

Fascinating this glamorous rumbling in the mangrove, and flexing
their thickened throats, the call comes
for a compatible partner in these early nights of not yet

spring. Dry spring looming and pulsing frogs.

Rainclouds still dry as dust. Will
one more spring find me? Is it
possible? I still know the knife surface stir,

that stir, that stir that swells, the upswell

of clamor in this dry intermission, where everything’s
denied, but nothing’s
desired. That’s the dust

of midlife, the lily’s sonorous dust, the frog throat rasp

the dust of dry, scraped calluses,
petrifying biopsies of old skin
samples, my own dry fading. Out beyond

invisible evening, abandoned nests give way,

some fiberglass threads caught
in the branches, tracing slivers of violet sky. And
the angled silence. Why do people die in the spring?

How can they?

Is it a sightless stare,
a last squat thrust toward life, or
pouring out what’s left, emptying

the glass of seed, chewed rind? I finger aromas

of dry old pages, dusty
words, where there had been books
once. But now the frogs are awake

and alert. And they won’t stop, or be stopped. Neither fish
nor fowl, they blink
without mercy.

Who says cats are fickle? This cat sits by my shoulder until I make a move. She is loyal to the purr, fierce-knit in the face of my doubt. She keeps her claws sheathed, pats me with her pads. But the claws are there. Unseen, unspoken, embedded within the purr, but present like the one verb that makes the poem pop.I guess there’s the lesson – Lick your fur to lie flat, wake up when food appears and keep a sharp eye for lizards. They’re tasty, but hide in unsavory corners.

C.M. Clark’s poetry has appeared in a variety of publications, including Gulf Stream magazine, the Florida Center for the Literary Arts anthology Write Here, and she is a frequent contributor to the online journal, Asili. She has also been involved in a number of multimedia collaborations with other artists, including “COMPLEMENT/Art Basel,” a video project, as well as “Now Taste This,” an annual event pairing poets and local gourmet chefs. Her work has been published in the recent collection The Blue Hour, and in the artbook Pillow Talk, a joint project with painter Georges LeBar. For several years running, she has appeared at the Miami Book Fair International as part of the Write Out Loud reading series. Clark lives in Miami, Florida, with her husband.

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How Global is your Social Network?

2010-09-05T15:35:31Z

Twittermap.tv

How global is your social circle? Using twittermap.tv you can get the answer to this question by visualising the locations of your Twitter followers on a Google Map.

And this is only one of the features of twittermap.tv.

To see where your followers are on a Google Map you just need to enter your Twitter user name. Your location is then shown on the map with a map marker. Your followers are displayed on the map using their profile pictures.

As well as visualising the locations of your followers you can view all the tweets sent from different locations. For example, you can view all the tweets sent from New York. You can also use twittermap.tv to find all the Twitter users at a location.

Finally, you can search twittermap.tv for all tweets about a specific term. The tweets about that subject are then shown on the map and in the map sidebar. A really nice touch in this visualisation of tweets is that if one of the tweets is in reply to another user a polyline is drawn between the two users.

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Kiosk Culture by DK Osseo-Asare

2010-09-05T12:20:09Z

TED Fellow and blogger DK Osseo-Asare founder of the Low Design Office speaks to Beyond Profit:

Photo courtesy of low design office

One area where Osseo-Asare hopes to use collaborative architecture is through the “kiosk culture” of Ghana. Informal shacks and buildings made of reused materials line Ghanaian streets, home to microenterprises and microindustry. While these buildings are technically illegal, they are an integral part of Ghanaian culture and daily life. “People expect ubiquitous micro-enterprise, [like] the ability to buy water or mobile phone credits from a vendor at virtually any point in the city,” Osseo-Asare says. Why then, are city planners trying to wipe out such structures, and replace them with factories?
“Kiosk culture is an existing model for survival in the city that can also become a bottom-up strategy for advancing local fabrication and sustainability,” Osseo-Asare says. Instead of eradicating kiosk culture in the growing city of Tema, Ghana, he and his team are working to build stronger, more environmentally friendly microstructures. Their first project is “bamboo lifecycling”: growing bamboo in an urban setting, and using it to build temporary and mobile infrastructures. After use, discarded building materials can be used as low-cost and low-impact cooking fuel.

More here

Soporific Sunday: the interlull grinds on

2010-09-05T12:00:59Z

Morning, arse fans. Assume the position and prepare yourselves for a stunning array of news stories that might even make you slightly moist with excitement.

Oh, wait, etc.

No, I'm afraid that won't be happening today. The interlull is most definitely upon us, and it means that proper football stories are few and far between. However, there are some interesting things popping up on NewsNow; according to the Islington Gazette, in what must be scoop of the century, Theo Walcott is not worried about his world cup place and is just thinking about Saturday's trip to Stoke, while the Sunday Sun, in Sunderland, reports yesterday's 2-0 win for Arsenal over the Black Cats.

Perhaps NewsNow is as sick of the interlull as the rest of us and is randomly inserting old news stories into today's feed because the dearth of worthy news just looks so sad.

There are a couple of things maybe, sort of, kinda, well, no, they're not really worth talking about, but in the absence of anything else, I'm afraid it's all you're going to get.

Firstly, our old chum Emmanuel Adebayor has been talking about us again. Is it me or doth the lady protest too much (yes, I know the analogy is rather upsetting when you think of Adebayor as a lady)? Why can't he just shut up and get on with things? Anyone would think he felt a little jilted. His latest comments, coming shortly after he tried his best to engineer a move away from City towards the end of the transfer window, are the usual shite about how City are a bigger club than Arsenal, how they're going to eclipse us, blah blah blah. I'm really not sure who he thinks these comments are aimed at; all right thinking Arsenal fans must surely just think he's a cunt, and you'd have thought City fans would feel more than a little patronised by someone that fairly obviously doesn't want to be at their club (given their resources, you'd think they'd have been happy to let him go and find another better mercenary willing to take the dosh as well; I don't suppose there's much love lost between City fans and Adebayor, but I don't follow them that closely).

To be fair to Adebayor, he did use a particularly revolting turn of phrase. Speaking about the reasons for his infamous length-of-the-field goal celebration, for which he got into trouble last season, he said:

It’s because I showed the fans my hunger, passion and I showed my love for the club, Ultimately, the fans just want to see that and feel it inside their bodies.

*shudder*

And speaking of fans that should perhaps feel patronised by players that don't want to be at their club, the Daily Mail is reporting quotes from Cesc Fabregas (they don't say when or where he made them) in which he said that Arsenal made him stay at the club after Barcelona did all they could to sign him. That part of what he said was even in quotes, so I can only assume they didn't make it up. Apparently he also said that there was no reason he couldn't play in the same midfield as Xavi and Iniesta, however that bit wasn't in quote marks, so I can't be entirely sure whether he actually said it.

Seriously though, despite what I said about City supporters and their relationship with Adebayor after his comments, my considered reaction to this story is: meh. We're going to have to put up with this kind of shit stirring. Whether it's true or not, I don't know. I doubt it, but even if it is, so what? Cesc, Barcelona, Xavi, Iniesta, Darren Dein, and The Daily Mail, are all going to have to get used to the idea that we said no to the transfer, and as much as they might try to stir it up, that situation isn't going to change until at least next summer, at which time, he'll either stay, or he'll go. It'll be that exciting.

In terms of 'news' that's about it. There still don't seem to be any reports of Arsenal players that have been maimed during this most evil of interlulls, but I'm sure they're just late coming in. I'm going to go and drink coffee and decide what to do with this most unsporting of Sundays.

Until next time, arse mates.

Fernando Botero in the Caribbean by Jacqueline Sample

2010-09-05T12:15:30Z

Fernando Botero in the Caribbean: Adam and Eve for St. Martin’s Nativity; “Colombia’s pain” at Dominican Rep. National Gallery

The cover design of Nativity/Nativité/Natividad, a new poetry book out of St. Martin, appears to be asking us to enter the epic poem through a portal of two towering sculptures by Fernando Botero.

The images that dominate the cover are of the colossal Adán and Eva bronze statues, measuring 222x110x63 and 226x90x75, housed at the Museo de Antioquia in Medellin, the Colombian city where the great artist was born in 1932.

House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP) published Nativity, a trilingual volume by Lasana M. Sekou in 2010. It might be the first book published in the Caribbean with cover art by the acclaimed painter and sculptor. Botero has been called a most “Beloved artist of the Americas” and as one of the world’s most successful contemporary artists, his iconic paintings sell for millions of dollars. (Artcity 21)

The “presence” of Botero’s work in St. Martin—standing relief on the book cover of a St. Martin/Caribbean literary text—probably should not be taken lightly.

“We all expand through this connectivity,” said Laura Richardson, director of the island’s important Roland Richardson Gallery. To the art director there is an essential connection between publisher, author, an artist’s work in relation to the book’s presentation, and the cultural consciousness of an “emerging nation” like St. Martin.

Regionally, the Botero images on a Caribbean book could stir conscious and subconscious questions, discussions, and casual comments about “what is art.” In St. Martin, recognizing beauty or emotional power in the masterpieces, can cause some to find new meaning in the exciting promise and serious production of the native art scene.

If the book in any way increases the amount of people who would see the art, especially in the home, then the Botero pieces could also relate to the value of art, to greater appreciation for and comparison with the works of the island’s own great painters, Roland Richardson and Cynric Griffith to name some.

Imagine that by “taking in” artistic images, while handling and consuming a cultural creation or product like Nativity, wider interest could be generated in art. In this regard, the art of an artist of the magnitude of Botero, viewed from the forum of a book cover, could also inspire further wonder and excellence in producing art in St. Martin, in the Caribbean. All of this while representing artistic and cultural identities that will last beyond the “don’t player-hate” mediocrity competing for prominence in our times.

HNP has placed work by outstanding artists on and in a number of its books. The mastery of Roland Richardson and the late Romare Bearden; the nouveau art genius of Cozbi Sanchez and Ras Mosera; the avant-garde and multimedia art of Drisana Jack and Angelo Rombley, tell of a few artists whose works have represented an essential art link between publisher, author, artist, book, and the cultural and creative consciousness of reader or nation. The cover of Nativity continues building this gallery of “connectivity.”

While HNP was wrapping up the “use permission” protocol with the Museo de Antioquia for the Adam and Eve images, the Dominican Republic had already cleared the way for the maestro’s work to be in that Caribbean country – launching the UNESCO designation of Santo Domingo as the American Capital of Culture for 2010.

This would be the first major solo exhibition by Botero in the Caribbean. I specify solo because of group shows at the University of Puerto Rico in 1970, and recently at FIART in the Dominican Republic. And I am mindful not to say the Caribbean “region” as that would include parts of Colombia and Botero’s early history at Tolu. Of course there are art experts far more knowledgeable than I who claim Botero as “one of Latin America’s, or the Caribbean’s – depending on which geography you follow, most famous artists.” (CAW magazine; Latin American Art)

The exhibition – “Fernando Botero: el dolor de Colombia” (Fernando Botero: Colombia’s Pain) – was on view at the National Gallery of Fine Arts in the historical capital from February 4 until April 4, 2010. The 25 oil paintings, 36 drawings, and 6 water colors were reviewed as the “artist’s denunciation of the history of violence in the last few decades in Colombia.” (listindiario.com; repeatingislands.com).

Botero is known for speaking his mind and for his generosity, which can be robust as his gorgeously fat paintings and sculptures. His “Boisterous, Provocative Artwork” (Chicago Sun Times.com) can be elegantly playful as The dancers, which by the way is mentioned, “todas gorditas gorditas,” in Nativity (p. 133). Botero’s art can be powerfully iconic as the paintings of the Abu Ghraib tortures that caused uproar in the USA and that in 2006 were said to evoke “images of Christian martyrs.” (nytimes.com)

The exhibition of Fernando Botero in the Caribbean in 2010, is an art happening. Whether on a book’s cover, in a national gallery, or through news of the exhibit, it should stimulate some aspect of the human relationship to art. An aspect of that relationship is how people come to know each other across borders through art.

In polyglot St. Martin, while discussing the Botero images and the French translation of Nativity alongside its new English original and Spanish translation, Frantz Gumbs observed that, “the size of countries and territories does not prevent the networking and exchange among cultures, cultural works, and artists in the pursuit of excellence and coexistence.” (thedailyherald.com) Gumbs is president of the Collectivity of St. Martin, a colony of France. The Southern part of the island is a territory of the Netherlands. Sekou and his work advocate “independence and unification” for both parts of his St. Martin nation. (mtmkobbe.blogspot.com)

We may quicker understand great art on display in a gallery or in a museum, but what might art do for literature? According to literary critic Fabian Badejo, Nativity/Nativité/Natividad is a revolutionary text, written in the canto general style of the Americas. Botero’s Adam and Eve may be just the illustrative match to help light up new meaning about what this poetry is attempting to say … and what can be done with poetry, or any other genre of the arts, for life’s sake.

Photo source: Fernando Botero, Colombian artist. (wikipedia.com)

Contact
Jacqueline Sample
nehesi@sintmaarten.net
Ed. Note: Jacqueline Sample is a former president of Black Dimensions in Art, Inc. New York; and president of House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP).

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Linguistic Innovation

2010-09-05T06:20:42Z

A long-standing interest in linguistically innovative poetry has me thinking about interesting new ways (new to me) to cross borders and histories. To understand, especially, the labor of Afro-modernity through the embodied poetics of “dialect.” For now, a mere hint of a suggestion. A juxtaposition.

Paul Laurence Dunbar
Louise Bennett
Amos Tutuola

How might these three be considered through the lens of linguistic innovation as theorists of Afro-modernity? Perhaps a class on the Aesthetics of Afro-modernity. Yes, I like this.

Apart from these three, who else would be/should be on the list?

Shell sees projects in Qatar help end drop in output

2010-09-05T00:37:53Z

The Visual Du Jour – Labor Day Edition

2010-09-05T00:37:47Z

Via the Economic Policy Institute:

As the EPI people note:

“This erosion of wage growth will only compound the deterioration of incomes and living standards that occurred over the course of the 2000-07 business cycle. Productivity growth far outpaced compensation in the 2000-07 business cycle, especially during that cycle’s recovery (2002-07). Economists generally assume that faster productivity growth generates higher living standards through increased average compensation, but from 1995 to 2007, the disconnect between productivity and compensation growth was dramatic, particularly during the 2002-07 recovery. From 2002 to 2007, productivity grew 11.0%, but the hourly compensation of the typical high-school- and college-educated worker actually fell. In other words, the disconnect between pay and productivity in the years leading up to the current downturn encompassed a broad swath of the workforce, with neither the median high school graduate nor the median college graduate capturing the benefit of the economy’s productivity growth.”

In other words the recession is only amplifying a preexisting trend in wage erosion that has been going on for long before 2008. It is the result of 30 years of economic policy.

Dimensions of Stratification – Broadband Edition

2010-09-05T00:37:47Z

Compare and contrast:

File that as illustrations of the digital divide and how costly poverty is for the poor. Unsurprisingly, what is happening is not new. Years back, when getting landlines for phones in the Global South was too expensive and cumbersome, people quickly got into cheap mobile phones. This will be the same here. If getting broadband is too expensive, expect an explosion of mobile broadband.

“The ITU estimates that fixed broadband penetration is below 1% in many of the world’s poorest countries, whilst access costs can be more than 100% of monthly average incomes.

By contrast, in the world’s most developed economies, around 30% of people have access to broadband at a cost of less than 1% of their income.

“We have big disparities,” said Dr Toure.

As a result, in many poorer countries cheaper mobile communications have become the dominant way of accessing information.

Innovative projects have been set up to deliver healthcare and other key services such as banking via mobile and text message.

The ITU estimates that there are currently 5 billion mobile subscribers in the world.

However, the number of subscribers can be misleading as some people have more than one phone.

(…)

Even so, Dr Toure said that he believed there would be “global connectivity by 2012″ with everyone in the world able to access mobile communications. But access to broadband, remained key, he said.

“We are no longer talking about the digital divide in terms of telephony. We are trying to avoid a broadband divide.”

Mobile broadband was part of the solution he said, but the radio spectrum used for services was ultimately a finite resource.

“Fixed broadband will continue to be meaningful because of the bandwidth capabilities that it gives you,” he said.

Dr Toure is trying to encourage all countries to have a framework that enshrines broadband as a public service to which every citizen should have access.

Currently more than 30 countries have agreed.

“Access to broadband – access to information – should be a universal human right,” he said.”

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