Title: Caribbean Dispatches - Beyond the tourist dream

Editor: Jane Bryce

Reviewed by: Barbara Nelson

CARIBBEAN DISPATCHES Beyond the Tourist Dream is a smorgasbord of personal perspectives on the Caribbean, from Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago in the south to the archipelago of the Bahamas in the north.

It is a very unusual, engaging and well-written book in which 28 writers of different backgrounds who know the region give their personal perspectives on the Caribbean. Among the various forms of writing are poetry, fiction, commentary and journalistic account.

Jane Bryce, who teaches creative writing and African and Caribbean literature at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies, is the general editor.

One of the contributors is Klaus de Albuquerque (1946-1999): a sociologist who was internationally recognised for his seminal contributions in inter-island migration, island demography and other aspects of Caribbean life. He taught at the University of Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.A.

Albuquerque's Vroom! Vroom! is a very humorous, but compassionate tale about the eccentric Masefield Osborne who "resided all his life in a little wooden cottage in Belham in the island of Montserrat", Masefield was in his late 40s, lived with his 80-year-old mother, "and he never walked anywhere without driving".

Another contributor is James Ferguson, a writer, editor and publisher based in England who has written extensively on the Caribbean and Latin America. His story From Oxford College to Baby Doc's Haiti paints a vivid picture of the contrasts and contradictions in "what Graham Greene had unreassuringly dubbed the 'nightmare republic'".

Ferguson described Port-au-Prince as "a snapshot of third-world chaos ... and everywhere (was) the frenetic and noisy activity of the Haitian capital". Fortunately for him, he stayed at the Santos guesthouse that "promised calm and good taste rather than poverty". He writes of the poverty in Port-au-Prince that was sometimes shocking, but notes that "the city was also beautiful. Gaunt mountains, skeletal through deforestation, surrounded a perfect horseshoe bay."

mouth-watering descriptions

Jamaican-born University of California professor, Opal Palmer-Adisa, is the author of Eating Jamaica. Her mother, she writes, took both the preparation and presentation of meals seriously. Palmer-Adisa then launches into mouth-watering descriptions of Jamaican food - "steaming hot, very sweet cocoa, the chocolate fresh from my mother's village, grated and boiled, always with an oily film on top ... sardine omelettes sprinkled with pickled pepper sauce ..."

In the introduction) editor Bryce mentions "what emerges from the spectrum of viewpoints that makes up the collection is a certain preoccupation with change. It is a truism that society in the Caribbean has been in flux since it was first 'settled' some 500 years ago. Movement and change are a quintessential part of living in, or being from, the Caribbean, as these pieces demonstrate".

The pieces are organised into categories - Landscapes, Encounters, Personalities, Performances, Retrospectives.

Landscapes has contributions from 1987 Commonwealth Writers Prize-winner, Jamaican, Olive Senior; Ian McDonald, editor of the Guyana literary journal, Kyk-over-al; Kim Robinson, editor of the Jamaica Journal; Mark McWatt, Professor of West Indian literature at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados; Jane Bryce; Polly Pattullo, a journalist with the Guardian newspaper, London, who has made a second home in Dominica; Simon Lee, born in London, now writing a book on Caribbean music; and Philip Nanton, born in St. Vincent and one of the pioneers of West Indian literature.

Stewart Brown writes on 'Whales' and 'Peace an' Love' in the second category, Encounters.

He is a poet, editor and critic of Caribbean writing. Other contributors in this section are Ian Craig, a specialist in Latin American Cinema, Jeremy Taylor founding editor of the BWIA in-flight magazine Caribbean Beat; Jayne Bryce; Olive Senior, Simon Lee, Robert Edison Sandiford, founding editor of Arts etc: The Premier Cultural Guide to Barbados; Marie Elena John-Smith, Antiguan author of Unburnable and James Ferguson, writer, editor and publisher who is based in England.

contributing writers

The third category, Personalities, includes work by Annalee Davis, a Barbadian artist; Andy Taitt, former travel editor of Caribbean Week; Philip Nanton, who is published in a variety of journals and regional literary magazines; Jane Bryce, Oonya Kempadoo, whose first novel Buxton Spice was published to much acclaim, and Klaus de Albuquerque.

There are seven contributors from six writers in the section Performances. They are Shake Keane a noted Vincentian musician and poet whose collected poems was published posthumously in 2005, Simon Lee, Robert Edison Sandiford, Rob Leyshon,a theatre director and drama teacher in Barbados, Philip Nanton, Kim Robinson.

In Retrospectives the contributors are Ian Bethell Bennett, a Bahamian who teaches at the University of Puerto Rico and is editor of the journal Sargasso, Opal Palmer-Adisa, Marina Warner author of several prize winning novels including Indigo; Anthony Winkler a Jamaican full-time writer living in the U.S.A., his novel, The Lunatic, has been made into a highly successful film; Simon Lee; Denise deCaires Narain who teaches literature at the University of Sussex; Lennox Honychurch author of 'The Dominica Story; Cave Hill, Barbados and is the author of the collection, Hazel Simmons-MacDonald, author of the collection, Silk Cotton and Other Trees, and Trinidadian-born Marina Salandy-Brown who was at one time senior manager and programmes editor for Radio 4 and Five Live at the BBC.

Ian McDonald in A Different Sort of Time says, "If ever there was wind that deserved to be painted it is Essequibo wind - how it moves the caravans of clouds ... how the birds ride the heavens on it." Kim Robinson looks down from Red Hills early in the morning at the sprawling city of Kingston and is "momentarily awestruck" at the city lights that glint "like jewels on the jet-black plain."

Mark McWatt writes about the mighty rivers of Guyana with their mysterious creeks and affirms that those rivers are really for - and about - love.

It is a great read. It looks at the range of social attitudes in the Caribbean, the variety of people, languages, topography, dialects and experiences. It celebrates parents, recalls the innocence of childhood, revels "in the gamut of sensations" of Trinidad carnival, talks about "Barbados, where life is a musical" the Bahamas where some places "have been catapulted into the 21st century without so much as an apology," and Jamaican Christmas that always turned young Winkler's world "topsy-turvy."