Is This the World's Most Glamorous Book Club?
If you haven’t visited Jamaica recently, one very good reason to do is the Calabash International Literary Festival, located in the rustic fishing village of Treasure Beach.
It’s a spectacular, colorful three-day celebration of words, life, and endurance through literature, music, and conversation. The gathering of locals from across the island and international guests—Angelina Jolie was in the audience this year—is notable for the energizing and cleansing effect of storytelling; its programming emphasizes harmony, joy, and empathy in a place where stories, music, and laughter are mainstays even after centuries of deep-seated trauma.
For many years this literary festival was on my radar. I went, fearing disappointment, but finding cultural enthusiasm, fire, energy, open-mindedness, and a landscape of ideas, where culture, knowledge and responsibility unite. This audience listened, learned, and contributed, each with their singular emotions and stories—a direct connection linking reader and listener. Yvonne Bailey-Smith’s reading about her “exile” as a child to London from these very same sands where we listened immediately recalled my own to New York City. How was I identifying with the experiences of the fiery Staceyann Chin as she told us of the mental and physical abuse of her youth as a queer woman in Jamaica, followed by the extremely painful experience of childbirth? I think every single woman, in the thousands, was vibrating equally with tears, horror, laughter, as well as triumph. It was a spiritual feminine cleansing despite our immense differences. Amens and applause thundered beneath the tent. I felt included with these very different people, yet I was of the diaspora, returning after 15 years. What a thrill to realize that I remembered the words to "The Banana Man" by the Jamaican poet Evan Jones. I found myself repeating the refrain along with my companions. I am Jamaican.
During this, the 15th year of the festival founded by Justine Henzell and Kwame Dawes, writers from Jamaica (Olive Senior, Staceyann Chin, Kei Miller, and Maisy Card) and well as those who hail from around the world (Cathy Park Wong, Nathalie Diaz, Andrew Motion, and Padma Laksmi, to name a few) and a generation of future laurel bearers were on hand for readings, workshops, dance parties, live music performances, film screenings, and tributes.
The artistic director Kwame Dawes says, “Calabash began as an expression of our conviction that readers and writers in Jamaica deserved a world-class international literary festival simply because there was not one, and we believed there could be one. We also started the festival to bolster our effort to create opportunities for Jamaican writers, through seminars and workshops, and the opportunities that come through contact with writers, agents, and publishers from around the world. Our audience is international, even as it remains deeply committed to the Jamaican people who have proven to be some of the best audiences for literature.”
Over the course of the final weekend in May, approximately 3,000 guests float beneath an enormous open-air tent and the hot sun of Treasure Beach, softened only by characteristic sweet breezes and the rhythmic pounding of the waves. Audiences were attentive and receptive to personal and authentic stories, both Jamaican and foreign, which created strong bonds between participants and listeners alike. One of the freeing experiences is the mingling of writers and audience between events, while obtaining food, strolling along the beach, sitting by the hotel pool, being side by side during the readings, or sweating and swaying rhythmically in the early morning hours to the sound of reggae music. All five senses enjoy the magic in a seemingly simplistic world of this colorful rural Jamaican town, but layers are stripped away as conversations show how distinct yet similar, we are. The exchange is freely given as I greet a passing poet laureate or a man with dreadlocks selling beaded bracelets on the street. Then encountering the white robed writer Taiye Selasi, happiness found in the mangoes and large knife in her hands, seemingly to walk off the page of a novel. Sitting with Maisy Card to speak of her novel that I had just finished with characters, emotions and places strongly reflecting the very essence and existence of what I was witnessing on this reentry to my Motherland.
The next Calabash won't be celebrated again until May 2023, but my bags are—in my mind, at least—already packed, and perhaps that time I’ll find the courage to voice my own story.
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