YLA in Black History Month with WritersMosaic
Brixton to Barbados
7-9pm, Thursday 19 October 2023 at the Nightingale Room, Grand Central, Brighton
As part of Black History Month, come and watch the fascinating 1981 BBC Arena film Brixton to Barbados, where Jamaican-born, London-based poet Linton Kwesi Johnson visited the Carifesta arts festival. Experience a wealth of Caribbean culture, from Trinidadian steel bands to Jamaican dub poetry, from Cuban Latin jazz to Surinamese mythical drama.
After the screening, the accompanying panel discussion features author Colin Grant, Arena editor Anthony Wall, poet Dorothea Smartt and our Roving Poet in Residence, Helen Thomas, who will also perform a new poem inspired by the film.
This event is in collaboration with WritersMosaic, a division of the Royal Literary Fund.
Thursday 19 October, 1900 - 2100
The Nightingale, 29-30 Surrey St, Brighton and Hove, Brighton BN1 3PA
Tickets: £5
‘Eruptions’
Ode to Shake Keane
Your Local Arena Roving Poet in Residence for our Black History Month community events, Helen Thomas, wrote these two new poems responding to the film. Her video readings of ‘Eruptions’, an ode to Shake Keane, and ‘Head Wrap’ were shown at the screening WritersMosaic and Speaky Spokey in Brighton, and you can watch her read it here, and read it yourself by clicking below.
‘Head Wrap’
“[A]n opportunity to showcase the depth and breadth of Caribbean arts on British television.”
Director Anthony Wall reflects on Brixton to Barbados
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 1981 Arena was invited to make a film about Carifesta, a pan-Caribbean celebration of the arts to be held in Barbados. It was a daunting task; I had a pretty good knowledge of reggae, calypso and salsa but little beyond that. We invited Linton Kwesi Johnson to present the film and be our guide to the riches that awaited us. This was to be the beginning of a great relationship between Arena and The Race Today Collective based on Railton Road in Brixton.
Brixton was still experiencing the repercussions of the uprising earlier in the year that had made headlines all over the world. Race Today had literally been at its epicentre. So, in discussion with LKJ and Darcus Howe, the decision was made to call the film Brixton To Barbados. The idea was to highlight the connections and parallels between the culture of the Caribbean and its diaspora in the UK with Brixton as a focus. But, even more this, was an opportunity to showcase the depth and breadth of Caribbean arts on British television.
There’s a tendency in the UK to think of the Caribbean in terms of the English-speaking islands, but of course the other colonial powers left their mark as well. And, like the British, the Spanish, the French and the Dutch brought in workers, indentured servants and administrators from their other colonies. Add the indigenous peoples who survived the arrival of the Europeans and the result is a unique diversity. Trinidad was Spanish, then French, then British before independence. Trinidad and Tobago are only twelve miles from the coast of Venezuela. The Caribbean has a 2,000-mile coastline in South and Central America and the coastal states enjoyed equal billing to the islands.
LKJ’s friendship with the great writers who were there provided the spine of the film. The incomparable Shake Keane performs his poetic memoir of the devastating volcano eruption in his native St Vincent, accompanying himself with his beautiful, melancholic fluegelhorn. Bruce St John is in conversation and Michael Smith’s fierce rendition of ‘Mi Cyaan Believe It’ is one of the film’s highlights. Michael’s participation led to another Arena/Race Today collaboration the following year with a film following his first visit to the UK and Brixton in particular – Upon Westminster Bridge, with LKJ and CLR James
Brixton To Barbados is not a political film but, inevitably, much of the art proceeds out of an uncoiling of a colonial past, Shake Keane adopts a world weary, sardonic take on a high English literary style. Theatre director Henk Tjon from Surinam creates a multi-coloured pageant, Rebirth. It brings together the five main ethnic groups of the vast state of Surinam which stretches from the sea deep into the Amazon rain forest. Michael Smith had a favourite expression, “Turn a negative into a positive”; is there a finer example of that than the Trinidad steel pan? Take an old, unwanted oil drum and turn it into an exquisite, unique musical instrument, presented at Carifesta by The Renegades Steel Pan Orchestra.
The Renegades sum up the film, their performance full of pure joy. With Brixton to Barbados, the idea was to introduce a UK television audience to the range and the sheer quality of the performances witnessed at the festival. Along with The Renegades, jazz/ salsa is served by Cuba’s greatest big band, Irakere, and soca by The Mighty Arrow from Montserrat. A blend of soul and calypso, Arrow adds another ingredient to soca, upping the ante with ‘Soca Rhumba’. The festival brought together the arts of so many islands, regions and communities, all distinct but all unmistakeably Caribbean and demonstrating that the region is as culturally rich as any other on the planet.
Anthony Wall, 11 October 2023
Director, Brixton to Barbados
Film cameraman: David Haylock; film editor: Gerry Pomeroy; producer: Alan Yentob
Biographies
Responding to the film
Colin Grant is the author of six books including 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, Bageye at the Wheel, was shortlisted for the 2013 Pen/Ackerley Prize and his history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a 2016 Sunday Times Book of the Year. Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and a 2019 Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. His latest memoir is I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be (Jonathan Cape). As a BBC producer, Grant wrote and directed several radio drama documentaries including A Fountain of Tears: The Murder of Federico Garcia Lorca; and A History of the N Word. Grant is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Director of WritersMosaic, an innovative online platform for new writing which is part of the Royal Literary Fund. He writes for various newspapers and journals including the Guardian, New Statesman, TLS, Granta and New York Review of Books.
Dorothea Smartt FRSL is a literary activist, poet and live artist. With two full poetry collections (Connecting Medium and Ship Shape, Peepal Tree Press), her more recent chapbook, Reader, I Married Him & Other Queer Goings-On, “is subversive...ultimately... about Black diasporic love.” Some of her latest journal and anthology publications include Wasafiri and The Chicago Review, the anniversary edition of The Fire People (Canongate, 2022), 100 Queer Poems (Penguin, 2022) and Part of a Story That Started Before Me: Poems about Black British History (Penguin, 2023). Dorothea is Programme Manager of INSCRIBE, a national Black & Asian writer development programme, where she mentors and coaches writers. She is also a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art. Her commissioned poems about London’s lost rivers are being installed on 18 ventilation columns across eight new public sites along the River Thames from now to the completion of the Thames Tideway Tunnel in 2025.
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.
Anthony Wall - see above