Bob Marley. - Contributed photos

Mel Cooke,Freelance Writer

In a fusion of film on a large screen set up on stage behind him and real life in which he was in constant motion, song and speech, rhyme and reasoning, Roger Guenveur Smith opened the 2007 Calabash International Literary Festival with the intriguing 'Who Killed Bob Marley'.

After an hour he had not specified who had done in the Gong, but repeated the ubiquitous "they, they, they did something to Bob". He identified why, though, as the planned tour of the US with Stevie Wonder was too much of a threat ("they couldn't have it like that. They couldn't let that happen").

As for the method, the all black-clad, slow-moving Smith ran through a number of possibilities, "a laser beam in the spotlight", "iodine in his food", "put a boot on his right foot, put a needle in it and the cancer just come up", rejecting the first two with a staccato "no, no no". "It's a conspiracy, it's a conspiracy," Smith said, using his voice like a reverb sound effect, and, as a child wailed under the large tents that sheltered a near two-thirds capacity audience, Smith said "let the baby cry".

Storylines

His other obvious improvisations were comments about a pair of dogs that frolicked on the grass before the stage and at one point on it and the music coming across the sea behind the stage, as he interwove three main storylines into a cohesive whole before a silent, attentive audience.

There was Bob Marley, who Smith met at Tuff Gong Studios in 1979 on his first visit to Jamaica, the relationship with his father, Stan Evan Smith, who had come to Jamaica for six weeks in 1979, and a movie about a suicidal poet who delivers his last piece at the Calabash International Literary Festival. And within that movie was the sub-plot of a real or very realistic relationship between Smith and co-star Karen.

It was to that festival the younger Smith had taken his father to mark his 80th birthday, a blue hat being the tangible connection between the two. And it was that blue hat, on the head of the suicidal poet, which linked the movie and the father and son relationship; the link between Marley and the younger Smith was made with a clip of his father's hat shadowing his right leg as his mother held him. "My masculine side," Smith pointed out, noting that it was the same leg Bob Marley got cancer in.

Silent audience

Roger Guenveur Smith

Chuckles at word play ("Negro professionals, professional Negroes", "Waldorf Hysteria") indicated that the silent audience was really listening and watching the blurring of real life and fantasy, Smith's timing proving impeccable, as when he reached the poet's final exit and turned to face the screen, the poet on screen was really headed to the door under the exit sign.

He interacted with his father on screen with a shot taken from the podium as he accepted an award for playing Huey P. Newton, Smith saying "smile for the camera, Dad" in real life. He watched a clip of himself nearly drowning in the ocean not far from where he was standing, clinging to his father's blue hat. And he closed against the background of a shot of himself and Bob Marley with the advice given to him by the Gong:

"Yu play football, fin' a team. Yu have a song, sing it."

He stood still before the audience, just as he had stood still before them at the beginning, and after the very strong applause.

A trio of novelists from Akashic Books rounded out the evening's stage presentations on the opening evening of a festival whose artistic director Colin Channer said was dedicated to Perry Henzell, "the father of all contrary artists. So we invite you to be as contrary as you want."

Contrariness did not mean tardiness, however, as it started bang on time at 9:00 p.m.