Things I read or view or listen to that you might like too. Things will be added – up to about 20 or so – before this installment in the Reading Room and Gallery series is archived. For previous and future installments in this series, use the search feature to the right. Possible warning for adult language and themes.
BUSINESS
“It’s pretty difficult to advocate for yourself when you’re an artiste and you’re doing something that you really like; it’s very easy to sell yourself short…eventually I created a fake manager, it was really me, and I was able to negotiate a lot higher. It’s very, very important. Somebody needs to teach a class on that for sure.” – Felicia La Tour, life and wellness coach
FICTION
‘It was never meant to be this way,’ she reminds me as we walk past the more elaborate tombstones. ‘He was meant to bury me.’ – from ‘The Strong-Strong Winds‘ by Mathapelo Mofokeng
VISUAL ART
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This is a link to an article on must-see Antiguan and Barbudan films, according to Caribbean Loop news. HAMA, producers of the country’s first full length feature, The Sweetest Mango, dominates the list with four features but click to see who else made the list. Speaking of Antigua and Barbuda’s first full length feature, here’s a making of that I recently came across on YouTube.
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This is a link to several animated shorts (or trailers for shorts) by women from all over the world – although not, alas – the Caribbean (though not, I’m sure, through lack of ideas). There are seven shorts. Three of the ones you can watch all the way through are Paper or Plastic, dir. Nata Metlukh of the Ukraine and the US, Albatross Soup, dir. Winnie Cheung from Hong Kong, United States, and Japan, and The Opposites Game, dir. Lisa LaBracio & Anna Samo from Germany, Russia, and the United States.
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‘Cinematography, per Britannica.com, is “the art and technology of motion-picture photography. It involves such techniques as the general composition of a scene; the lighting of the set or location; the choice of cameras, lenses, filters, and film stock; the camera angle and movements; and the integration of any special effects.”’ – this post frames and links to a Variety article entitled ‘Contenders: How Cinematographers played with Elements to convey Director’s Vision’
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The cinematographer of the Small Axe anthology series was Antiguan and Barbudan Shabier Kirchner. Director Steve McQueen is British of Grenadian and Trinidadian descent. – “You need to see it hurts.”
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BEFORE SILENCE: Afghan Artists in Exile.
POETRY
“To be born is to be ushered in to noon’s brightness…” – from ‘Spirit of Labyrinth’ by Wilson Harris, read by Ian McDonald
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“So you try not to act too muscular not to look too big
muscular looks very threatening on your skin
you want to walk hard jog hard
be hard
but today you think about your mother
you owe it to her to protect her from this
what you can do what can be done to you” – from ‘Place de la Nation (III)’ by Jason Allen Paisant in Moko: Caribbean Arts and Letters
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My 2022 World Poetry Day live includes readings of poetry found right here in the Reading Room and Gallery series. Including poems by Grace Nichols of Guyana, Juleus Ghunta, Claude McKay, and Safiya Sinclair of Jamaica, Yvonne Weekes in Barbados, Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming of Trinidad & Tobago, US poet Lucille Clifton, Stanley Humphreys in Antigua-Barbuda from the song lyrics data base, and some of my poetry as found in A & B Writing in Journals, Showcases, and Contests
The audio is not as clean and clear as I had hoped, but the poems are linked on my jhohadli blog; so you can read along.
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“play my body like a dub riddim” – from ‘Yes‘ By MOON in Rebel Women Lit digital literary magazine
CONVERSATIONS
The Tim Tim Bwa Fik podcast focusses on Caribbean romance literature and I’m pointing you there specifically to check out a series of conversations with Caribbean authors who have written in the genre. The line-up begins and continues with the British Virgin Islands’ Eugenia O’Neal (Jamaica Dreaming), Trinidad and Tobago’s N. G. Peltier (Sweethand), Barbados’ Callie Browning (The Vanishing Girls), and Antigua and Barbuda’s Joanne C. Hillhouse (Dancing Nude in the Moonlight) and Rilzy Adams (Twelve Dates of Christmas).
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“I am talking to super compassionate, people who are interested in nuance, people who are intelligent, but people whose emotional intelligence is off the charts, but importantly, people who I can trust with these things.” – Kei Miller
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“There’s a Stephen King novel called 11.22.63 about a man that goes back in time to stop the Kennedy assasination, and one of the main characters in that is a librarian named Mimi Corcoran who is a best friend of this character who goes back in time. When Bridget Carpenter was writing that series, she felt very strongly that she did not want to do a series set in the 60s where the only roles that Black people played were shoeshine people; even though that was quite a reality of the time, she didn’t want her series to reflect that. So she decided that she was going to take Mimi Corcoran and cast it as a Black woman.” – Tonya Pinkins during this very interesting panel with a number of African-American actresses including the legendary Diahann Carroll
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“It’s difficult to find an edge on me; my spine is a valley” – Bones by Lisa Ann Cockrel, Kenyon Review workshop (online)
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“I thought you know, my mom and dad are particularly ridiculously crazy about each other…you’d go out with them to a store and you’d catch them stealing a kiss…in a way, my parents were the first pushing back…the ways in which they creatively circumvented disciplinary measures to pursue pleasure.” – Andil Gosine
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“Trust that people will meet you where you are and if they’re not there on their own, give them a map so that they’ll meet you there.” – Stacey Abrams with Merriam-Webster’s Book Thing
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“When you’re that young, you’re so clear eyed about how stupid these rules are…” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
CREATIVES ON CREATING
“Being under water, swimming, keeping an eye on things under water, trying to get the best shots possible in such a foreign environment, I was really excited by the challenge.” – Arati Jagdeo, past Wadadli Pen finalist, make up artist and art director on Yemoja’s Anansi
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“This is the world in which I’m creating.” – Christal Clashing on her Anansi series for my (Joanne C. Hillhouse) CREATIVE SPACE column
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This is actually creatives creating. The Beatles working out ‘Something’. It’s from the 2021 Peter Jackson directed docu-series, The Beatles: Get Back.
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This is how it was adapted about a book cum film that the whole film making academy slept on in the 2022 awards season. Read my review of the book and of the film over on my blog.
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Elijah Wood on his Lord of the Rings experience –
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“I love creating characters…I create my characters from every body I’ve ever known.” – Bernadine Evaristo
ARTICLES
“There’s a deep irony to the parallels: an outraged white Texan succeeds at getting a novel about Mexican American experiences removed from schools, and she does it with a distorted reading of a passage about a group of white Texans, in 1937, venting their outrage at the presence of a Mexican American in their school.” – from ‘A Texas School District Banned My Book. Then Things got Really Ugly.’ by Ashley Hope Pérez, author of Out of Darkness, a historical novel chronicling a love affair between a teenage Mexican American girl and a teenage African-American boy in 1930s New London, Texas, occurring right up to the 1937 New London School explosion.
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“The two people who vouched for Moore’s birth and life experiences in Antigua with the most depth were Black women who had until recently been enslaved themselves, her half sister Hester Blackstone and her friend Mary Hughes. Moore did not know her own date of birth, and the retelling of her early life in Antigua rested on the estimates of women who were equally unsure about details of Moore’s biography and the exact moments when she was taken from and returned to the island. But the women speaking on her behalf skillfully figured out how to circumvent their inability to provide exact dates. Hester and Mary used imperial events in their 1838 depositions, a tactic manifested in their testimonies in so similar a fashion as to suggest deliberate coordination. Hughes and Blackstone linked important moments in Moore’s life with notable British imperial administrative and military events at the turn of the nineteenth century, such as the installation of a new governor in Antigua or the outbreak of war in the Caribbean. Their use of imperial time made their affirmation of Moore’s birth and life in Antigua as a child more legible to the powerful administrators hearing testimony from these formerly enslaved women. Their success, however, should not obscure the reality that the strategy they adopted out of necessity calls our attention to yet another dehumanizing aspect of enslavement: the negation of enslaved people’s sense of themselves as beings in time, and thus as autonomous participants in their life stories. Their inability to know time intimately and the denial of the privilege to preserve a record of important dates in their lives, such as their own birthdays and the births and deaths of loved ones, helped to compound the exploitation deeply embedded within enslavement. The depositions of Blackstone and Hughes nonetheless underline the crucial function of community in slavery as the support system that facilitated both survival during bondage and individual enslaved people’s acts of fugitivity and claims to freedom. The British government would not have taken Moore’s case seriously if these women had not vouched for her. Eliza’s first point of self-presentation was to invoke her Antiguan-born mother, Sally Carr, which both Blackstone and Hughes reiterated. Proclaiming her birth to an enslaved mother in Antigua and demonstrating her sisterhood and friendship with formerly enslaved Antiguan women all grounded Eliza in that British colony and contributed to the colonial administrators’ serious consideration of her case. These details subtly show how enslaved people fostered and deployed loving relationships even over time and distance.” – from “So Far to Leeward”: Eliza Moore’s Fugitive Cosmopolitan Routes to Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean by Natasha Lightfoot in The William and Mary Quarterly, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Volume 79, Number 1, January 2022
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This links to CREATIVE SPACE 1-10, 2020 – 2022 on my Jhohadli blog. It is an anniversary check-in of the top performing installments of the column since it began its Observer run in 2020. This image is from CREATIVE SPACE #28 OF 2021 – CARIBBEAN CHRISTMAS. CREATIVE SPACE is an Antiguan-Barbudan/Caribbean art and culture column by Joanne C Hillhouse.
As with all content on wadadlipen.wordpress.com, except otherwise noted, this is written by Joanne C. Hillhouse (author of The Boy from Willow Bend, Dancing Nude in the Moonlight, Musical Youth, With Grace, Lost! A Caribbean Sea Adventure, The Jungle Outside, and Oh Gad!). All Rights Reserved. If you enjoyed it, check out my page on Amazon, WordPress, and/or Facebook, and help spread the word about Wadadli Pen and my books. You can also subscribe to the site to keep up with future updates. Thanks.
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