The Creature From the Black Lagoon is Your Father

Real vintage island music, not the tourist stuff, featuring Lord Melody, the Mighty Sparrow, and the appropriately named Brute Force Steel Band.

The Creature From the Black Lagoon Is Your Father - Lord Melody


From Cook Music's Calypso Jazz  sampler

So Much Things to Say: 100 Calabash Poets

Edited by Kwame Dawes and Colin Channer
Akashic Books

Each May for the past ten years, poets from all over the globe converge in Jamaica for the Calabash International Literary Festival. So Much Things to Say: 100 Calabash Poets brings together the work of poets known and unknown who have read at the Festival or are Calabash Writer’s Workshop Fellows. The 100 poems in this vibrant anthology are organized into sections by length, and inspired by the editors’ intention that the book be enjoyed in a flexible manner, I took great pleasure in sampling poems at random and finding breathtaking imagery, emotional tone, meaning, and joy in each piece.

The voices of the colonized, the war-torn, the oppressed, and the hopeful shine in this collection of poems that are political, visceral, inspired, sorrowful, courageous, and essentially, beautifully human. In Li-Young Lee’s “The Children’s Hour,” Lee captures all of the above. With armed soldiers at the door, an elder narrator advises the children in shape-shifting ("Sister, quick. Change into a penny.") and gives forbearance to survive the assault:

Don’t listen when they promise sugar.
Don’t come out until evening,
or when you hear our mother weeping to herself.

“10 Haiku” by Sonia Sanchez is a prime example of the fluid, timeless, earthy rhythm of many of the Calabash poems:

as you drummed
your hands kept
reaching for God

One of the longer poems, Tim Seibles' “The Last Poem About Race” is a departure from the more organic imagery and tackles the complexity of being mixed race personally, in relationship, and as a society:

I never want to think being American
is impossible, but the truth is

some silly mothafuckas still fly
Confederate flags and maybe it’s all
too much for any one man.

In his sparkling introduction, Kwame Dawes most perfectly and poetically sums up the spirit of the Calabash Festival: “At once you are in a timeless place in which the spoken word represents an incantatory ritual that creates and affirms community... Imagine stories dropping like seeds into the ground and growing rapidly and wildly all around you.”

Fortunately for those for whom an annual sojourn to Jamaica isn’t necessarily possible, that enchantment is immediately accessible in this collection. Indeed the story of the festival and of this anthology coming together in just one month is a testament to the magic that is spun at Calabash each year, and I prize my Advance Uncorrected Proof of So Much Things to Say like a collector’s item.

Review by Matsya Siosal

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

By Maryse Condé
University of Virginia Press

This fascinating novel, which won France's Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, offers readers a vivid re-imagining of the life of a historical figure mentioned only briefly in the transcripts of the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials: a slave woman of Caribbean origins, accused of practicing voodoo. Angela Davis, in her foreword to the current edition, asserts the importance of “the retelling of a history that is as much mine as it is hers,” a story of great significance to Black women who are “Tituba's cultural kin.” The first person narrative gives Tituba an opportunity to recount her life as she sees it, to overcome the silence imposed on her by official histories of the period. Maryse Condé, herself born in Guadeloupe, begins by evoking the beauties and horrors of the West Indies—of Barbados in particular—where Tituba is born to an Ashanti woman “as lithe and purple as the sugarcane flower,” who had been raped by a British sailor. Little Tituba flourishes at first in her island home, but her mother comes into conflict with their master and is hanged for striking a white man. At the age of seven, Tituba is taken in by old Mama Yaya and raised in the traditional healing ways inherited from African ancestors. The growing girl learns to respect everything in nature, to make the proper prayers and sacrifices, to devise “potions whose powers I strengthened with incantations,” and to communicate with the spirits, including her deceased mother.

The idyll in the wilderness ends abruptly when the adolescent Tituba falls in love with a merry rascal, a slave named John Indian. She soon moves to the capital, Bridgetown to be with him. John Indian jokingly calls her a witch, because of her special magical gifts, but others suspect her of commerce with the devil even though, as she protests, “Before setting foot inside this house I didn't know who Satan was!” In an interview published in the afterword to the present edition, Maryse Condé describes Tituba as “doing only good to her community” through her relations with “the invisible forces,” and therefore not a witch in the bad connotations of the term, but the bigoted people with whom she comes in contact—especially after she is sold along with John Indian to a Puritan minister, Samuel Parris—do not see her in a positive light.

One of the themes of the book is the unlikely (and, unfortunately, often temporary) alliances that can form between persons divided by race, class, or religion. When Parris moves with his household to Boston, a strong friendship develops between Tituba and Elizabeth Parris, the minister's wife, as well as with her child Betsey, It is one of the ironies of the novel that Tituba's efforts to amuse and aid the girls in her charge at Salem Village arouse the villagers' fears and turn them against her. The Caribbean folktales she tells about sorcerers and vampires titillate everyone and feed their fears of damnation and demonic possession. When Betsey tells her cousin Abigail about the secret magic rites Tituba has used to protect the frail little girl, the situation gets out of control. Condé locates the ultimate source of the hysteria that sweeps through the village as a combination of the repression of healthy sensual pleasures along with the accumulation of small-town jealousies and resentments among the populace, together with unacknowledged guilt at the mistreatment of Blacks and American Indians by the white settlers. The village girls accuse many local figures of magically tormenting them.

Arrested and interrogated in 1692, Tituba at first protests her innocence: she has done no wrong, has not hurt any of the afflicted children. Her husband John Indian advises her to play along with her accusers, to tell them what they want to hear. He even pretends to be possessed, himself. In a controversial sequence criticized by many reviewers, the novel's heroine encounters a character called Hester in prison, clearly based on the wholly fictional heroine of The Scarlet Letter. Certain historians have condemned this intrusion of Romantic literature into a historical novel, yet Condé in her interview defends it on two different grounds: a) that her work “is the opposite of a historical novel,” that her Tituba is an invented “female hero, ... a mock-epic character,” and b) that as a novelist, she felt “there was a link between Tituba and Nathaniel Hawthorne,” persons inhabiting the same region at times not too far apart for comparison. The conversation between the two prisoners gives Condé a chance to explore the social constraints on women and the difficult relations between men and women. Ann Armstrong Scarboro's afterword asserts that here Condé “parodies modern feminist discourse,” but it seems to me that Condé gets to play both sides against the middle in these passages by intermixing humorous and serious notes and leaving it up to the reader to decide how to interpret them.

While Tituba's testimony at trial is quoted from actual transcripts, the additional context Condé provides suggests that the accused woman is merely mouthing words that others are saying, going along with other people's superstitions. As a confessed witch she is sentenced to jail but escapes the death penalty. Thus she survives, while many of the people condemned for witchcraft are executed. The historical note to this edition of the novel states that in 1693 the slave Tituba was sold to pay her prison fees and the price of her chains. It is unclear what happened thereafter to the historical woman, but Condé chooses to have her Tituba purchased by Benjamin Cohen d'Azevedo, a Portuguese Jewish merchant whose wife had died. Benjamin and Tituba slowly become friends and eventually lovers. After a terrible house fire set by Puritan persecutors in which Benjamin's children are killed, he frees her and buys a ship passage back to Barbados for her. There she becomes involved with a group of maroons—wild Blacks who seem to be working towards freedom for the plantation slaves—but even there she finds betrayal and a revolt that fails. She is finally hanged by the British authorities. The epilogue finds the spirit of Tituba still active in the island, heroine of a popular song going about encouraging the slaves to fight for liberty.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a work I highly recommend to people interested in African-American and Caribbean literature, colonialism and post-colonialism, post-modernism and feminism, as well as to any reader interested in a colorful adventure tale. The additional scholarly materials provided in this edition make this book helpful even to readers familiar with the original French text.

Review by Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring