By Mel Cooke, Freelance WriterWESTERN BUREAU:
AS KWAME Dawes introduced the first session of the Calabash International Literary Festival 2004 on Friday evening, the gods of literature reminded that keeping the annual event a week later than usual had not fooled them.
There was a spatter of raindrops on the roof of the tent by the sea at Jakes in Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth.
It proved to be libation rather than bad omen, though, as the heavy rain which had intruded on the festival for two years running did not pass Spanish Town, a deluge in Kingston giving the many city dwellers who made the trek a soppy pat on the back.
The spatter of raindrops on the tent could also have been approval for the four writers in the festival's first session, Owen 'Blacka' Ellis, Ishion Hutchinson, Veronica Salter and Rudolph Wallace, all participants in the one-year-old Calabash Writers' Workshop.
The material presented by the four, selected from 40 workshop participants, showed that it was a good year a very good year.
The gods may have provided the weather and the ambience, but it was the organisers who made the most of the gifts by positioning the new, permanent stage so that the writers presented their work with the sea as a backdrop by day and an inky night dotted by the occasional star, as well as the lights of a few dwellings on a bluff in the distance, by night.
And it was Owen 'Blacka' Ellis who first benefited from the transition between night and day, as he read 12 poems with an orange sun tearing itself away from a cloud to hang in the clear for a few minutes, before converging with the sea in nature's daily meeting.
"Poetry is kinda personal. If I sound kinda nervy, I am nervous," Ellis said, clad in all black, the frames of his glasses glinting over a similarly luminous smile.
Ellis started by coaching the audience in first the poem's refrain, many voices taking up on the 'tick tock', before he eased into the poem with 'bruck lock, kick off door', observing that some "live fast and die young/baby born wid ashes pon tongue."
The Akwaba Drum and Yeah Man, the latter aimed at a caricature of a macho man ('made like God, but bad like the devil'), preceded a trip into 'other realms' with Adam & Juliet. "Resting his face in her clouds, he trades peace for passion," Ellis read. "Lyrics!" someone shouted thrice at the end. Dinner/Come Eat continued in the same vein.
TOUCHING THE FUNNY BONE
Unsung Guitar was dedicated to his brother in New York and Touch Stone to Peter Tosh, Ellis giving the funny bone a glorious whack with Gateman, a riotous take on an overly strict employee. He ended with words on History Anansi Story, saying, "There is story in the song/and truth in the riddle," several voices taking up on the familiar ending 'Jack Mandora, me no choose none'.
Veronica Salter engaged the audience with the story of Calvin Morgan, a man satisfied with his life of apartment, car and a lover, 'Stacy'. "He had given up church years ago, when they had read his sister out of church for getting pregnant at 15. He figured no God would be that cruel" and his dreary, loveless, sexless life had changed when he met a customer at work and mentioned he had passport, visa and wanted to travel.
A detailed tale of a drug mule preparing to make a run followed, every realistic step from being masked and taken to the destination where he stripped naked and swallowed a record 40 pellets. The turn of the tale came with "it happened on the way to the airport." A detailed description of a man dying as a condom filled with cocaine burst in his stomach followed as well as the brutal recovery of the other 39 pellets by his handlers who slit open his stomach while he was still alive.
And Stacy, for whom he had requested a car as reward for this fatal run, was just waiting for his usual airport call ('so boring, so predictable') so that she could "take his car and go to Asylum for some real fun."
SELF-ACCEPTANCE
Poet Ishion Hutchinson opened with Virgin's Bath, continued with Sliced Mango then moved to Nana, a four-level poem which looked at one women's journey to self-acceptance which took her from Duckenfield and finally back home.
See God preceded Daughter Version, a trip into an encounter between a 'bad man' and a woman, who asks, "A yu name Rhygin?" He is not, but she grinds her buttocks on his crotch and says, "If yu a no Rhygin, yu still lucky."
Ma brought Ma Hattie singing Amazing Grace on the bus to Kingston from 'country' to the Treasure Beach stop and Ishion closed with Morning Mother, a beautiful poem which related early morning memories of his mother getting the house in order in the pre-dawn darkness. When he is finally up and drinking his tea, "I feel ashamed/like I have missed creation."
"I never cried for mother," Hutchinson concluded.
Rudolph Wallace read Ann-Marie In Agony, the product of an assignment from workshop tutor and Calabash founder Colin Channer to write about an "intense, romantic relationship."
"If there are children in the audience, now might be a good time for them to get an ice cream or something," Wallace said.
Forewarned was, in this case, not forearmed, as Wallace, in uncompromising Jamaican language, spun a gripping tale of forbidden love. The sexual component was strong from the get-go, with the boyfriend of one character's prowess being described as "t'ree weeks Donna no see him an' she still a walk funny."
