Like most modern families these days, mine too has a mailing list. We are spread out so far across the globe, from Jamaica to New Zealand, that email is the easiest way to stay in touch. A round of emails passed around this list the other day; members of the family were sending congratulations to… [Read more…]
December 30, 2011
Perhaps the most dubious endorsement for Jamaica’s new Prime-Minister Elect, Portia Simpson-Miller, came from a woman who proudly declared, ‘All mi dog a seh Portia!’ Yes, apparently even her flea-bitten mongrel had fallen captive to the Portia Fever that was sweeping across the island, a fever which I confess I fell captive to… [Read more…]
December 16, 2011
Times like these are hard. Economic downturns. It means that my job at the university is to prepare students (some of them incredibly bright) for underemployment or unemployment. The concept of ‘professional’ degrees becomes a little bankrupt when there are no professions recruiting. So every year we will graduate new lawyers and pharmacists and accountants… [Read more…]
December 15, 2011
So my aunt who never calls, called yesterday to find out if I was alright. So did a few friends. They all wanted to know if I had survived Scotland’s first hurricane. If the church I live in was still standing. If the cat was dry. The truth is, I hadn’t known a ‘hurricane’ was… [Read more…]
December 13, 2011
This is overdue. Some weeks ago I went to the Philippines. It was incredible, if not rather familiar. Perhaps all these hot, postcolonial, poor countries are alike. And Manila, like Kingston, is a city that has grown around a large and over-polluted natural harbour. In other words, Manila even smells like Kingston. On my first… [Read more…]
December 9, 2011
(a rambling blog on Doctorates in Creative Writing, and Jamaica’s insistence on Sovereignty) So first of all, beg pardon for the long weeks of silence on this blog. It turned out to be – not a heavier semester than I had expected, but a more involved one. What with the head of Glasgow’s Creative Writing… [Read more…]
December 8, 2011
Carolyn Cooper can be none too pleased that two of her high profile guest lecturers at the University have now been incarcerated – Buju Banton and Vybz Kartel. Several of her detractors will now be walking about town with a smug and self-righteous grin, the words ‘mi did tell yu!’ ready to spring if and… [Read more…]
October 13, 2011
If it is a cliché for the writer, in one of his many acknowledgments over the course of a career, to give honour to his high school English teacher, it is only because such honour is always due, and is never enough anyway, and besides, all clichés are routed in truths. So that being said… [Read more…]
October 9, 2011
So last night I read in Brighton with Linton Kwesi Johnson –a man almost as humble as he is legendary. The first time I had a book launch in London, a kind of sad event to which barely a dozen people showed up, Linton was one of the few who bothered. He had come, (he… [Read more…]
October 4, 2011
Here in the UK it is black history month. Yes…it is different here. In the rest of the world the complaint is heard that it’s plain insulting to have assigned the shortest month – February – to black history. Well, in Britain we get a proper long month. Maybe there is more to be repentant… [Read more…]
January 6, 2012
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