Americas and Oceania Collections blog

Exploring the Library’s collections from the Americas and Oceania

29 January 2010

Hearing 'island' voices

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the latest ‘Poet in the City’ event, Island Voices. The evening was organised to celebrate poetry and writing from the Caribbean as well as by those of Caribbean descent living in the U. K. The evening’s readers covered a number of topics, cutting across individual experience, society and history as they went.

Roger Robinson (whose works include Suitcase and Suckle) deployed humour and satire to evoke life’s depth and texture, while Jacob Ross illustrated his skills as poet, playwright and author in a reading from his recent novel Pynter Bender (BL Shelfmark: Nov.2009/397). Ross’s work cuts across a similar path to Robinson’s but his discussions of love, loss and society have a more spiritual emphasis illustrated by his deployment of contemporised folk-lore to tell his stories. Continuing a theme of dealing with big issues through individual lives, Dorothea Smartt, reading from her latest Ship Shape, contemplated the slave trade and its harrowing life geographies through a fictional account of the life of a slave boy who arrived and quickly died in eighteenth century Lancaster.

It was Smartt’s readings that instigated this blog as their powerful narrative of a life spanning the globe highlighted to me the misnomer in the title of the event. For sure, all these poetic voices may, in one generation or another, have hailed from Caribbean islands but the emotive core of all of these works and the scope of many of their subjects are actually global in resonance and relevance.

Robinson and Ross spoke eloquently of emotions universal in their feel and Smartt invoked the centrality of the Caribbean to globalised trade and global history through her powerful prose. So, what we have, rather than voices existing in isolation, are examples of the current generation of a vibrant literary and oral tradition influenced by Caribbean locations but interconnected with European and global culture for centuries. This heritage is reflected in the British Library’s collections, which hold a wealth of items historical and contemporary illustrating the history, politics and culture of the many Caribbean societies. In this particular instance I should highlight our Sound Archive's holdings, which contain many Caribbean literary performances, as well, of course, as music from the region.

In closing, all of this talk of global networks and the importance of Caribbean culture and heritage, as well as the many tributes offered last night at Island Voices, brings me back to think about Haiti. On this I cannot better Carole’s thoughts and sentiments posted earlier but what I can say is that evenings such as this, which point out the globalised voice of the Caribbean, make me hope that we do not all forget about Haiti and the work to be done there once the cameras leave and news editors move on to the next big story.

(P. J. H.)

Comments

Thank you for your indepth review, and for highlighting the universality and connectiveness of our individual voices.

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