A dramatic performance called Choo Kong and Pennie Tell It Like It Is presented by Raymond Choo Kong Productions of Trinidad and Tobago, which is currently on stage in Port of Spain, draws attention to a number of issues in Caribbean theatre.
During Carifesta X in Guyana in 2008, one of the usual features, the Carifesta Symposia, assumed greater prominence than in most of the previous regional festivals.
On the 40th anniversary of Mashramani which celebrates Guyana’s attainment of republican status it is worth a brief note on the state of the cultural festival after four decades in 2010.
I don’t care if the whole a BG burn down
But they will be putting me out me way
If they tackle Tiger Bay
An bun dung de hotel
where all me wahbine does stay
The Mighty Sparrow
Strange as this might sound, those words are a compliment to Guyana.
In an old introduction to African poetry, Nigerian poet and playwright Wole Soyinka who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986 comments on some of its themes and characteristics.
Derek Walcott achieved yet another significant chronological landmark with the celebration of his birthday yesterday, January 23, at the end of the first decade in the twenty-first century.
Tears For The New YearI have always thought of tears
as redemptive, irrigating my bone-dry
spirit, disposing it to bloom again,
unfurling astonishing, frail flowers of hope.
Arts On Sunday
During this week the work of two of the most important Guyanese authors, Martin Carter and Edgar Mittelholzer, will be celebrated since it will mark two anniversaries.
Many records exist of colonial and pre-independence Guianese poetry, but they are in different forms and different types of resources, and for the main part one has to seek them out in various places.
The 6th Caribbean Writers’ Residential Workshop sponsored by The Cropper Foundation in Trinidad recently circulated invitations to new writers to send in applications for places in their 2010 workshop, and Poui, the Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing recently launched its latest issue, Volume 10, in Barbados.
As this column noted last Sunday, despite including nations which earlier had staunchly championed the cause of poor countries, the G20 since leading the coordination of international efforts to tackle the global crisis has turned out to be like the G7 before it, a serial violator of its pledges to help poor countries.
The stage performance of Baghban (The Caretaker) directed by Neaz Subhan in the name of the Indian Arrival Committee is the latest attempt in a long endeavour by Subhan to create/promote Indian drama in Guyana.