YLA at Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival
Caribbean Nights: Poetry
8.00-10.00pm, Thursday 18 April 2024 at the Watershed (Cinema 3), Canons Road, Bristol
Back in the 1980s the UK had little idea of the wealth of poetry coming from the Caribbean. In 1986, the BBC’s thought-provoking Arena film Caribbean Nights: Poetry changed all that. Featuring Trinidadian intellectual Darcus Howe chairing an illuminating discussion with St Lucian poet Derek Walcott (1992 Nobel Prize for Literature), pioneering British-Jamaican reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and emerging British-Guyanese poet Fred D’Aguiar, there are also clips of, among others, the electrifying Jamaican dub poet Michael Smith and innovative Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite, who championed using Caribbean English in poetry.
Come and watch Caribbean Nights: Poetry which, even now, feels fresh in its insights. Afterwards, poet and editor Rishi Dastidar, 2023 TS Eliot Prize winner Anthony Joseph and Louisa Adjoa Parker will talk to noted Bristol academic Madhu Krishnan about the vital need for diverse poetry in our everyday lives, before Helen Thomas reads a new poem inspired by the film.
Your Local Arena is a unique project featuring iconic films from the archives of BBC TV’s Arena, the pioneering cultural documentary series. It includes new poems inspired by the Arena films and panel talks to explore the continuing relevance of the Arena archives today. The Your Local Arena concept was developed by Lucy Hannah and Speaking Volumes, with Arena’s award-winning director/editor Anthony Wall as creative consultant, and funded by Arts Council England.
‘Learning to Love the Dark’
Your Local Arena Roving Poet in Residence, Helen Thomas, wrote this new poem in response to the film. She performed ‘Learning to Love the Dark’ at the screening and panel event at Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival. You can watch her read it here, and read it yourself by clicking below. Scroll down to find out more about Helen.
“(A) vibrant, passionate exchange of fiercely held convictions and beliefs”
Producer Anthony Wall reflects on Caribbean Nights.
Anthony Wall spent his early years in the east end of London. He studied at King’s College Cambridge. In 1974 he joined BBC radio as a studio manager. The same year he became the rock critic of the Morning Star and was the first journalist to interview Bob Marley for a national newspaper. Wall moved into television in 1978 and soon joined Arena, becoming one of the core directors/producers (1978-85) and then Series Editor from 1985 to 2018. He has won three BAFTAs, with numerous nominations and other awards from all over the world. His project Night and Day – The Arena Time Machine, a 24-hour evocation of a single day in the life of the planet, made entirely from the Arena archive, screened at the 2019 San Francisco Film Festival, where Wall and Arena received the Mel Novikoff Award, one of the festival’s highest honours, for their ‘contribution to cinema’.
In 1986, Caribbean culture was thin on the ground, to say the least, on British television. Caribbean Nights was Arena’s attempt to draw attention to what everyone was missing. It began with a five-hour themed Saturday night on BBC Two, with films and discussions from all over the region and a different film each night over the following week, including the first feature documentary on Bob Marley. Here are a few words on its genesis.
We had developed a relationship with Linton Kwesi Johnson and Darcus Howe through two films we’d made together a few years previously. Arena: Brixton to Barbados was a documentary about Carifesta in Barbados in 1981, Linton wrote and presented it and I directed it.
The festival was an eye opener for me, its richness and variety were dazzling: Irakere from Cuba; The Renegades Steel Orchestra from Trinidad; Arrow from Montserrat; Rebirth, a stunning multicultural theatre company from Surinam; and, of course, the writers. Linton introduced me to many of them, including Mervyn Morris, Shake Keane and a young poet from Jamaica, Michael Smith.
Michael Smith was part of the new movement of dub poetry, as it became known, or reggae poetry, as Linton preferred to call it. Linton had pioneered the form in Britain, with Mutabaruka and Oku Onuora doing something similar in Jamaica. Michael was clearly an exceptional talent, his poetry was startlingly original, assured and performed with mesmerising power. For Brixton to Barbados he declaimed his already classic ‘Me Cyaan Believe It’.
The following year, he came to Britain and we made a film here. Arena: Upon Westminster Bridge provided the thematic basis for the poetry section of Caribbean Nights. C. L. R. James was living in Brixton at the top of the house of the Race Today Collective on the corner of Railton and, fortuitously, Shakespeare Roads. There C. L. R .would hold court and offer his inimitable knowledge and wisdom. He greatly admired Linton’s poetry and political stand but he was also renowned for his love of the classic works of English Literature. Michael made it clear those works said nothing positive to him. C. L. R. singled out Shelley and Keats and proposed that, while their literary language could not have been more different to that of the reggae poets, their revolutionary sentiments were identical. Michael was persuaded.
Upon Westminster Bridge, through Michael, C. L. R. and Linton, explores the correspondences and differences between historic English literature and this new poetry expressed in the language of reggae DJs and everyday Jamaican speech. That dialectic became the basis of the studio discussion, with Derek Walcott, who wholeheartedly embraced the grand literary tradition, Linton and the young Fred D’Aguiar. The result, judiciously supervised by Darcus, is a vibrant, passionate exchange of fiercely held convictions and beliefs and a demonstration of the unique, extraordinary breadth of Caribbean poetry.
Anthony Wall 6 May 2020
Biographies
Responding to the film
Rishi Dastidar is a fellow of The Complete Works, and a consulting editor at The Rialto magazine. A poem from his debut Ticker-tape (Nine Arches Press) was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2018. A second book, Saffron Jack (Nine Arches Press), was published in 2020. He is editor of The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century (Nine Arches Press), and also co-editor of Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (Corsair). His third collection, Neptune’s Projects, is published by Nine Arches Press and was longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2023.. He also reviews poetry for The Guardian (UK) and is chair of Wasafiri.
Dr Anthony Joseph F.R.S.L. is an award-winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. His 2022 collection Sonnets for Albert won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Poetry. He is the author of four previous poetry collections and three novels. His 2018 novel Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction. In 2019, he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. His most recent fiction is the experimental novel The Frequency of Magic. As a musician, he has released eight critically acclaimed albums, and in 2020 received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Composers Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kings College, London.
Louisa Adjoa Parker is an RSA Fellow, a writer and poet of English-Ghanaian heritage who lives in southwest England. Her first poetry collections were published by Cinnamon Press, and her third, How to wear a skin, was published by Indigo Dreams. Her debut short story collection, Stay with me, was published in 2020 by Colenso Books. Her poetry pamphlet, She can still sing, was published by Flipped Eye in June 2021, and she has a coastal memoir forthcoming with Little Toller Books.
Louisa’s poetry and prose has been widely published. She has been highly commended by the Forward Prize; twice shortlisted by the Bridport Prize; and her grief poem, Kindness, was commended by the National Poetry Competition 2019. She has performed her work in the south west and beyond and has run many writing workshops.
Louisa has written extensively about ethnically diverse history and rural racism, and as well as writing, is co-director of The Inclusion Agency, which provides Equality, Diversity and Inclusion consultancy. She is a sought-after speaker and trainer on rural racism, Black history, embracing difference, and mental health
Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures at the University of Bristol. She is author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (2014), Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel (2018) and Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (2018). She is currently working on a five-year project funded by the ERC titled 'Literary Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa: Commons, Publics and Networks of Practice'.
Helen Thomas is a writer of Sierra Leonean and Irish heritage who was born in London. She moved to Cornwall over twenty years ago after receiving her DPhil in English Literature. In 2020, she distributed Black Agents Provocateurs: 250 Years of Black British Writing, History and Law, 1770-2020 as a free, 500-page e-book to celebrate Black History Month, and in 2022 she published 1562, a volume of poetry voicing the fictional lives of six black women from six ports in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Britain. Since then Helen has been experimenting with poetry and poetic plays, writing work that fuses literary genres and highlights the experience of black migrants in Britain as well as their contributions to British culture. In 2023, she was commissioned to co-create a play with young people in Plymouth as part of the With Flying Colours and Beyond Face Theatre Company partnership. She is currently working on two poetic plays and a new collection of poems.