From Global Voices:

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for the first round of microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own.

C’mon Caribbean, let’s get ourselves a piece of this pie.

So preoccupied was I with yesterday’s move over to Tobago that I barely noticed that it was also Indian Arrival Day, which I marked last year with this entry, along with a photo of a West Indian Travel Permit belonging to my grandfather, whose personal history was the subject of the post.

This year, in belated commemoration of the occasion and of my grandparents’ mixed marriage, I offer this photo of my grandparents, Morton Dean and Petronella (née Quarless) Gangar, which hangs on the wall of my uncle’s house here in Tobago.

It occurs to me that this is my maiden voyage on the fast ferry to Tobago (I don’t get over to the sister island nearly enough). It’s quite spacious and comfortable, and the decor has a sort of mildly faded, early ’80s vibe. The the ride is fairly smooth (at least for now). Not bad for TT$215 (US$34) round trip (including car).

We’re already what seems like four or five miles out of port, and I still have internet connectivity from my EVDO modem — interested to see how long it will last.

The T&T Express - the ferry that plies the route between Trinidad and Tobago

Apologies for the break in transmission. I returned to Trinidad from Jamaica only on Monday, and today (Wednesday), I find myself on the port at Port of Spain, waiting to drive my car on to the ferry to Tobago (pictured above), where I’ll be headquartered for the next 17 days.

I still have grand plans, however, of blogging about the final day of Calabash, which Nicholas has of course already done over at Antilles, and the final Calabash photoset is here.

Calabash in the rain

“I thought the hurricane season started on June 1st,” quipped Richard Philcox, the husband and translator of Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, as he read from his wife’s biography against a a backdrop of rain and crashing waves yesterday evening. Condé passed duties over to Philcox after giving the audience a short introduction and a demonstration in a heavy French accent of why she shouldn’t try to read aloud in English. She was correct: Philcox did far greater justice to two elegant excerpts from her biography, which Condé said said she wrote partly in response to the portrayal of the French Caribbean experience in works like Joseph Zobel’s Sugar Cane Alley. Michael Ondaatje followed with readings from his biography, his novel Anil’s Ghost and his latest work, Divisadero; then Caryl Phillips took the stage with an excerpt from Dancing in the Dark and an essay called “Growing Pains”.

Nicholas has more details at Antilles of both this outstanding session and the entertaining open mike that followed, where our Trinidadian friend Muhammad Muwakil easily earned himself the title of crowd favourite.

Muhammad Muwakil brought the house down during the open mike session

Our caretakers Polly and Graham (who told us he spent many hours just sitting and watching Alex Haley — who is said to have written part of Roots in a cottage not far from here — write) are now in the kitchen cooking up yet another fabulous breakfast. I saw what looked like a bowl of fresh ackee last night in the fridge, so I’m hoping that ackee and saltfish — my favourite Jamaican dish — is on the menu. Then we’re off to see Cindy Breakspeare and others perform excerpts from Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur. And yes, you did read that right.

And oh, the photos are here.

Technorati Tags: calabash literary festival, calabash07, jamaica, caribbean, literature

The bookstore at Calabash

Here at villa Lyric shooting the breeze with Nicholas and the Lyric posse and Kei Miller, who’s dropped in for a visit. Nicholas has just posted about the post-lunch open mike session at Antilles, and the pool of Calabash photos continues to grow. . . .

Nicholas and I have decided to divide the labour: he writes, I take the photos. Read his account of this morning’s proceedings here, and view the photos here.

Roger Guenveur Smith performs “Who Killed Bob Marley”

The Calabash Literary Festival opened this evening with an overlong and meandering but still quite fascinating performance piece by American actor Roger Guenveur Smith called “Who Killed Bob Marley”, followed by a far less compelling trio of readings by three young authors from Brooklyn-based independent publisher Akashic Books. I’m far too beat to write more at this point, so I’ll point you to Nicholas’s brief but comprehensive report at Antilles and also our growing pool of Calabash photos.

More later.

We’re in Treasure Beach, Jamaica, for the Calabash Literary Festival, which kicks off this evening. Check in here and at Antilles for updates, and at my Flickr page for photos. The only images posted so far, however, are of us lounging at the lovely Lyric villa: the envy-prone may wish to exercise caution.

Flickrvision.

1. Read Nikipedia’s conversation with another of our CFR friends, Jamaican lit-blogger Geoffrey Philp, over at Global Voices

2. Check out Antilles, the blog of the Caribbean Review of Books, but also a rock-solid lit-blog in its own right. (And don’t forget to subscribe - here’s the feed)

3. Take the Caribbean Review of Books reader survey