A Caribbean Journey

Screened online 13-17 October 2020 in collaboration with Writing on the Wall, Liverpool

The PEN Pinter Prize is awarded annually to a writer who, in the words of Nobel Literature Prize winner Harold Pinter, casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’. This year, that writer is Linton Kwesi Johnson. Over thirty years earlier, Arena’s Caribbean Journey featuring the reggae poet’s journey back to Jamaica showed his commitment to telling the real story of Britain’s colonial and postcolonial history. Echoing the experiences of thousands of Caribbean people who came to the UK, the film strikes a chord in today’s turbulent times. As PEN Pinter Prize judge Max Porter says of LKJ, ‘He has been fearless, and relentless, but tragically his message is now more important than ever, given the Windrush scandal and the ongoing systemic demonisation of the immigrant population and racial minorities in the UK.’

For Black History Month, Writing on the Wall presented this film with iconic reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson from the BBC’s Arena archives. Here, you can still watch poet and old friend of LKJ SuAndi introduce a response from newer generations: poets Karen McCarthy Woolf, Ashleigh Nugent and Levi Tafari, who explore their own links to Jamaica and black Britain. Award-winning author Olive Senior talks about her life and work and acclaimed historian Colin Grant reads from his book Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation. And the Bocas Lit Fest’s Prize-winning poets Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné and Vladimir Lucien take inspiration to write new poems. Together these different generations of authors show the depth and breadth of the Caribbean contribution to culture then and now.

RESPONDING TO Caribbean Journey

Introduced by internationally recognised poet SuAndi, watch prize-winning poet Karen McCarthy Woolf, rising star Ashleigh Nugent and Levi Tafari, Liverpool’s own lauded reggae poet, respond to the Arena film.

INSPIRED BY ARENA’S Caribbean Journey

New Poetry by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné and Vladimir Lucien

Listen to and read specially commissioned poems from two well-known poets from the region, inspired by the film.

Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné

‘No Word for Light’

Read the poem

Vladimir Lucien

‘Daub and Wattle’

Read the poem

An Interview with Olive Senior

Homecoming: A Reading from Colin Grant

*ARENA*: A CARIBBEAN JOURNEY

Linton Kwesi Johnson visits his childhood home in Jamaica for Arena: Caribbean Nights
(Director: Anthony Wall, 1986)

In 1986, Arena presented Caribbean Nights, a themed Saturday evening of television followed by a series of films throughout the following week on the same subject. Arena had pioneered the format of the ‘Night’ the year before with Blues Night, presented by BB King. Its success paved the way for the same amount of airtime to be given to the Caribbean.

The object was to celebrate Caribbean art and culture, explore its origins and bring it, in all its richness and variety, to a British audience. Reggae had broken through, thanks largely but not only to the massive impact made by Bob Marley, and the Notting Hill Carnival had become an institution but, in 1986, despite the scale of the Caribbean presence in Britain, its culture was under-represented in the media, to say the least. The poignant enthusiasm of Lord Kitchener’s calypso, ‘London is the place for me’, which he sings in front of the recently arrived Windrush in the now iconic 1948 newsreel proved all too optimistic.

From the mid to late 1970s new voices were demanding to be heard, not least that of Linton Kwesi Johnson. His revolutionary reggae poetry was a fierce and unequivocal critique of the prejudice and oppression that black people had had to endure in the mother country, for which they had such hopes.

In Caribbean Journey, LKJ presents a sketch of the relations between the Caribbean and Britain from the beginning colonisation and slavery to the transmission year of 1986. He lays down the themes and issues that would underlie the following night of films and talk. His own experience made him perfectly equipped; he was born and spent his childhood in rural Jamaica.

He revisits Chapelton, his first home, and then goes to the small farm where he’d lived with his grandmother. The distance between the dusty roads, fields of sugar cane, banana trees and yams was as far as could be imagined from the south London he would move to. And yet, there in Chapelton, on the green, is the war memorial to the local servicemen who had fought alongside British troops in both World Wars. It’s identical to any memorial you might find in any English village.

At his school LKJ meets one of the teachers. They talk about the kind of history and literature he would have been taught — British history and little of his own. LKJ brings the story back to Britain and shows the increasing importance of Caribbean culture to this country. The film features a beautiful art installation chronicling black people’s journeys across generations here in the UK. The Specials’ performance rounds things off, making it clear that this Caribbean contribution has taken root, is here to stay and to grow.

Anthony Wall

29 September 2020

Biographies

Responding to the film

SuAndi is an internationally recognised poet and performance artist. Her one-woman show The Story of M is now on the A Level syllabus. She is a popular conference speaker on the positioning of black lives and culture. Her libretto for Mary Seacole the opera was seen by a sell-out audience over seven days at Convent Garden. In recent years, as the freelance Cultural Director of National Black Arts Alliance, SuAndi has worked to preserve the history of the pre- and post-war African and Caribbean communities in Manchester. The moving memories and histories of these families have been collected into the works Afro Solo UK and Strength of our Mothers. In 1999 SuAndi was awarded an OBE for her contribution to the black arts sector. She has also received honorary degrees from Lancaster University and Manchester Metropolitan University for her work in literature and the arts in general.

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf's first poetry collection, An Aviary of Small Birds, was shortlisted for the Forward and Jerwood Prizes. Her second, Seasonal Disturbances is a ‘witty and nuanced’ (BBC Arts) take on nature, migration, the city and the sacred and was written while she was Writer in Residence at the UK’s National Maritime Museum. It is shortlisted for the inaugural Laurel Prize which recognises new books of ecological poetry. Recent highlights of Karen’s work include multi-authored adaptations of Virgina Woolf’s Orlando (nominated for a BBC Audio Award); Homer’s Odyssey for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week and a poetry/documentary piece tracing her family heritage in Jamaica for BBC Radio 3’s Between the Ears. Her work has been translated into Turkish, Swedish, Italian and Spanish. This year Karen was selected as a Fulbright postdoctoral scholar and writer-in-residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ashleigh Nugent is a writer and performer with over twenty years’ experience. His latest work, Locks, is a semi-autobiographical, coming of age novel set in a Jamaican prison. Locks, due to be published in summer 2020, won the 2013 Commonword Memoir Competition and has had excerpts published by Writing on the Wall and in bido lito magazine. Ashleigh’s one-man-show, based on Locks, has won support from SLATE / Eclipse Theatre, and won a bursary from Live Theatre, Newcastle. The show has received rave audience reviews following showings in theatres and prisons throughout the UK. Ashleigh’s other published work includes poems, articles, and academic writing. Ashleigh is also a director at RiseUp CiC, where he uses his own life experience, writing, and performance to support prisoners and inspire change.

Levi Tafari is a crucial, poetic, consciousness raiser and urban griot. Born and raised in Liverpool by his Jamaican parents, Levi’s work is rhythmic and lyrical. In the past he has teamed up with reggae, soul and funk fusion bands, most notably The Ministry of Love. He has also spent two seasons as poet in residence with The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Levi has published four collections of his poetry and his work has been included in many anthologies. Dubpoetry, the title of his first book, is a term coined by him. He has written plays which have been performed at Liverpool’s Unity, Everyman and Playhouse Theatres as well as at the Blackheath Theatre, Stafford. Levi also works in education, running creative writing workshops in prisons, schools and universities. He has toured extensively in the UK and abroad – tapping into the common cultural links that extend across the Black Atlantic, from the African coast to the Caribbean and the Americas.

Commissioned poets

Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and visual artist from Trinidad and Tobago. Her poetry has been featured in publications such as Poetry London, The Rialto, Prairie Schooner, POETRY, Small Axe, Bim: Arts for the 21st Century and The Asian American Literary Review, as well as in anthologies such as Coming Up Hot: Eight Poets from the Caribbean and Thicker than Water, both published by Peekash Press. Danielle was named winner of the 2013 Small Axe Literary Competition, the 2015 Hollick-Arvon Caribbean Writers’ Prize and the 2016 Wasafiri New Writing Prize. Her first collection of poems, Doe Songs (Peepal Tree Press, 2018) was awarded the 2019 Bocas OCM Prize in Poetry.

Photo credit: ZEE Zaipur Literary Festival

Vladimir Lucien is a writer, actor and critic from St. Lucia. His debut collection of poetry, Sounding Ground (Peepal Tree Press, 2014), won the 2015 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and was hailed by poet Kamau Brathwaite as ‘a sign of the start of a new tradition in the anglophone Caribbean’. Lucien is also co-editor of Sent Lisi: Poems and Art of St. Lucia and the screenwriter of the 2012 documentary, The Merikins. Several of Lucien’s poems have been translated into other languages including Dutch, Mandarin, Italian and French. His criticism and essays have also been published widely in journals such as the PN Review, Asymptote and Poetry International. Hailed by CBC books in 2017 as a ‘young black writer to watch’, Lucien’s is an important voice in his generation of writers.

Interviews and readings

Colin Grant is an author, historian and Associate Fellow at the Centre for Caribbean Studies. His books include: Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and a group biography of the Wailers, I&I, The Natural Mystics. His memoir of growing up in a Caribbean family in 1970s Luton, Bageye at the Wheel, was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN Ackerley Prize. Grant’s history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year in 2016. As a producer for the BBC, Grant wrote and directed several radio drama documentaries including African Man of Letters: The Life of Ignatius Sancho and A Fountain of Tears: The Murder of Federico Garcia Lorca. Grant also writes for a number of newspapers and journals including the Guardian, TLS and New York Review of Books. Grant’s latest book is Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation.

Olive Senior is the prizewinning author of 18 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and children’s literature. Her work is taught internationally and has been widely translated. She is a winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature among others, and has been shortlisted for Canada’s Governor-General’s award for poetry. A Jamaican by birth, she now lives in Toronto but returns frequently to the Caribbean, which remains central to her work. A book of her Pandemic Poems which she has been sharing on social media will be published later this year.