Encounters with genius: Rohan Kanhai and Jock Campbell
Such men as these walk onto a field of play, or enter a room, and their life-force brings everyone to silence and attention – these were two men who in their very different ways set my mind alight. • The cover driving came from the same place as a Carter poem or an Aubrey Williams [...]
Encounters with genius: Maureen ‘Little Mo’ Connolly
For a short while one summer day out of nowhere in my life she flashed like a comet across my sky. My first competitive game of tennis was played in the Trinidad and Tobago Junior Championships when I was 12 – and my last at the age of 52 when Roy Dookun and I, more [...]
Everything and more
I thank whatever Gods that be that even at the age of 78 my mind remains restless and eager to absorb new facts, new theories, new ways of looking at life and the world, new stories of mankind’s continual search for perfected knowledge, new illuminations of the spirit. Not a day passes which is not [...]
The urge to keep competing
Anyone who has played sport at the highest level knows that sinking nervous, almost fearful feeling before a big event. It is made up of all manner of emotions – the pure nerves associated with any competitive endeavour, the fear of letting your team or country down, the fear of not doing yourself justice in [...]
True value in a nation
Not long ago I wrote a column throwing freezing water on the usefulness of election manifestos or indeed any master plan. However, as the season of campaigning grows towards ripeness, I wish to put forward a little manifesto in the form of an article which I wrote some time ago and which I believe remains [...]
The world’s bottom line
Every nation in the world obsessively continues to measure success by the state of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It is the equivalent of the famous “bottom line” in a company’s accounts. Yet this measurement can be hugely misleading just as the “bottom line” can also mislead if not calculated properly. Any qualified accountant will [...]
Compare this with being young
I will very soon be 78. A young man once wrote – or rather sent an email – to me asking about the magazine Kyk-Over-Al which I used to edit once upon a time. He pointed out, with brutal frankness, that I had failed to keep Kyk going and that the cultural torch I had [...]
‘Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small’
The world is suffering from giganticism. Bigger is considered better and biggest best. We are encouraged to look at the big picture and ignore the small details like, for instance, individual human beings. We all must worship at the iron altar of economy of scale. We are led by the nose to equate huge size [...]
Capturing immortality in words
The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins – glancing and incandescent – is some of the most extraordinary to be found in English. The poetry is all the more striking because it comes from a Victorian priest who spent his short life in virtual retirement from the world. Hopkins was born at Stratford in England in [...]
One does not, if one is beauty, have to know what beauty is
I am not a horse-racing fan nor a lover of horses however thoroughly bred into strength and beauty they may be but once a friend of mine and connoisseur of many of life’s artistic achievements, including that of great horse-racing, sent me a piece of marvellous writing which has ever since figured right at the [...]
Roots poetry
In Caribbean literature there has always been a vigorous strain of oral composition existing alongside the written tradition. Think of the slave and indenture songs of sorrow and survival, folk tales, the Anancy stories, calypsos and road marches, reggae lyrics, and the more recent dub and performance poetry. Such as these have always fertilized the [...]
A dream of my father
A few nights ago I had a vivid dream of my father. When they come in dreams my mother and my father seem very real and I reach out to them. My father died fifteen years ago at the age of 89. He was a good man and a beloved father. I often think of [...]
Truth cannot be proved
Karl Popper, one of the very greatest thinkers of his, or any, age, was modest in expressing his philosophical findings. He prefaced his book The Open Society and its Enemies with a quotation from Edmund Burke which implied that all he, Popper, was trying to do was make a useful contribution to the greater work [...]
Hawk above a muddy shore
It was announced last month that Derek Walcott had won the T S Eliot Poetry Prize for 2010. He won from a shortlist of some of the very best poets writing in English including his fellow Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. At the time, Al Creighton wrote a lovely piece on Walcott and the book of [...]
‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’
The original Treaty of Chaguaramas which established Caricom in 1973 carefully provided no machinery for exercising central powers of implementation. Since then heads of government have steadfastly made sure that this should not change. Bold initiatives expanding the original objectives of Caricom, shining words expressing visionary goals of togetherness, ringing declarations of unity and brotherhood, [...]