Island Beat (September/October 2000)

Keep in touch with what's going on in the Caribbean: People on the move and the Caribbean's new launch-pad

  • Golden Tree Frog. Photograph by Julian Kenny
  • Christopher Rodriguez. Photograph courtesy Christopher Rodrigues
  • David Rudder. Photograph courtesy Ellis Chow Lin On

UWI fete for Miami Carnival

It’s official. The UWI fete is coming to Miami.

This is a chance for Caribbean people in the United States to have a great party, and to support a crucial Caribbean institution at the same time.

For the last 10 years, the Development and Endowment Fund of the University of the West Indies (UWI) has held a hugely successful on-campus fundraiser in Trinidad on the grounds of the Principal’s official residence. Since 1989, the Fund has raised over US$3 million and provided scholarships for over 600 beneficiaries. About 4,000 people flock to this all-inclusive annual affair: it has become famous for its high-quality food, premium drinks and unbeatable camaraderie and fellowship.

Now this fete is coming to Miami for the Miami Carnival — on Saturday, October 7, 2000, to be exact, from 12 noon to 9 p.m. It’s being held at the beautiful and centrally-located Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach. “We’re concentrating on quality,” says Alwin Chow, one of the Miami committee members, “quality of food, drink and entertainment, quality of service, security and parking. No stone will be left unturned to ensure a good time is had by all.”

Music will be provided by David Rudder with Charlie’s Roots, Blue Ventures with Ronnie Mclntosh and Sanell Dempster, and popular DJs. Tickets purchased before 17th September will cost US$50; patrons pay US$60 at the door. Sponsors include BWIA and Angostura.

The committee sees this fete as broadening the appeal of the Miami Carnival. Its promotions are reaching Caribbean people in New York, Toronto, Atlanta, Washington, Boston and Texas. Their e-mail address is uwimiamifete@hotmail.com the phone contact is 954-340 5828, while the street address is 2900 University Drive, Coral Springs, FL 33065.

 

Clear the Way for Chris Rodriguez

Trinidad came to London in August, when Christopher Rodriguez’s play Clear Water opened at the Pit, the smaller auditorium of the Barbican Centre, the London home of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Clear Water was part of the international BITE (Barbican International Theatre Event) festival, which this year also included world-famous performers like the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and the Comedie Francaise. According to the Barbican’s press release, Clear Water “takes us on a journey to the heart of Trinidad and Tobago and its people. As popular culture clashes with ancient practices a new world is born. Clear Water combines language, music, myth and carnival in a universal story of aspiration and achievement. The show features live African drumming and a rapso (rap/ calypso fusion) soundtrack.” (The music was by Trinidadian rapso group 3Canal, one of whose members, Wendell Manwarren, co-directed the production, as well as being musical director.)

What does the name mean?
Clear water, Rodriguez explains, has a spiritual significance. “There’s an African belief that to keep the ancestors close you must keep a glass of clear water in the house. When the water level drops, vou know that they are drinking the water. So the glass of water is a reminder that the ancestors are close by.”

Rodriguez’s own ancestors are far away these days, for the 35-year-old playwright is based in England at present. But perhaps they’ve played a part, behind the scenes, in his stunning success. Rodriguez: has been in London for the past two years as writer-in-residence at the Oval House Theatre in Kennington, where his Independence day had a successful run in February. That brought him to the attention of the literary director of the National Theatre, Jack Bradley, who commissioned a new play from him after reading the reviews and the script.

Britain’s National Theatre is one of the most prestigious theatres in the world, and Rodriguez is still dazed at the opportunity. But not too dazed. He has finished another script, Equiano, which is based on the 18th-century autobiography of a Nigerian-born American slave, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African. It looks as though it will be as successful as Rodriguez’s last two plays, and attracted a lot of interest even before Rodriguez finished the script.

“England is hot for the topic,” says Rodriguez. “It was booked in six theatres before I started the script, and by now it must be up to 10 or 12.”

Rodriguez’s first connection with the performing arts was through singing, after he was “forced into the choir” at St Mary’s College, the boys’ school he attended in Port of Spain. He sang bass in the school choir, then went on to sing in the chorus of operatic productions and musicals. He continued to sing while studying in London, and once found himself onstage in the West End in the chorus of a charity performance that included members of the casts of the world-class productions of Les Miserables and Cats. With four other Trinidadians, he sang at the Chichester Jazz Festival, where they were the opening acts for Inkspots, and were broadcast live on BBC radio. The audience loved them, even though they forgot the words and had to improvise.

In 1991 he returned to Trinidad and was asked to write an adaptation of The Sound of Music. The original script had 28 scene changes; Rodriguez adapted it so that one set was enough, and that was how he became a playwright.

Among the writers he admires are Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and Christopher Hampton (Les Liaisons Dangereuses). His own work has no consistent themes or styles, he says. Clear Water is written on an epic scale, with realistic scenes alternating with encounters in the worlds of African spirits and characters from Trinidadian folklore, such as La Diablesse, a temptress with a cloven hoof, the soucouyant, who sucks the blood of her victims, and Gang Gang Sara, the witch from Tobago who tried to fly back to Africa.

Independence Day, however, is a naturalistic, intense confrontation between two characters, a middle-aged woman and her husband, who is 20 years younger. Rodriguez describes it as an emotional roller-coaster and admits that it’s the play closest to his heart. It wasn’t meant to be autobiographical in any way, but a it was written he realised that “life, love and heartbreak filter in, whether you want them to or not.” The London production fared well with critics, although Rodriguez describes it as a very Trinidadian play; he refused to change the language which he’d written it.

“We kept the dialogue pure Trini,” he said, “set it Trinidad and used two English actors and told them to forget accents — just go for the dialogue in Brit tongue and Trini lingo.”

The Stage, the UK paper for the performing arts, said of Independence Day: “Games of truth or dare and sexual roleplaying warp into vicious outbursts of jealousy and power play. So vibrantly do these two performers capture this uncontrollable emotional energy that they transform the play that Rodriguez thinks he has written … shades of Sam Shepard, Tennessee Williams and especially Edward Albee hang over Rodriguez’s work, but it stands on its own as a moving study of the horrors of loving not wisely but too well.”

Then there’s Equiano, which is quite different from its two predecessors. “It means writing in a foreign voice for a foreign culture, in language 200 years old. I read Moll Flanders 2,000 times and then went to the computer to write, and hoped some of it rubs off. I’m playing with different styles. Because it’s 18th-century I’m creating scenes which are like Restoration comedy, along with more modern, naturalistic scenes, mixed with the absurd: the characters are aware that the scene is changing, or that the dramatic tension is shifting.”

Rodriguez writes in long, obsessive bursts. “I don’t exactly know what would trigger me, but once I start, I have to write — even,” he says with annoyance, “if it means going two days without eating.” That’s an unexpected situation for someone who three years ago was an assistant manager at Price Waterhouse in Port of Spain. Rodriguez comes from a family of accountants, failed literature at O Level, and says although he was made to read all the classics as a child, he doesn’t remember a word of them.

As a former high-flying money manager, he’s having trouble getting used to his still precarious freelance status as a writer. “I’m still adjusting; I still assume there will be a cheque at the end of the month,” he says. “But I have to plan next year, or I’ll be broke,” Rodriguez has long-term plans, however, which include turning his hand to screenwriting and scripts for commercial theatre. Ideally, he’d like to be able to divide his time between England and Trinidad. For this young playwright, London is where the bright lights are, but home, as the ancestors of Clear Water would agree, is where the heart is.

 

Technology: The Beal Deal

Guyana’s remote north-west. Coastal wetlands; Shell Beach with its nestling turtles; rain forest; still, dark rivers where Amerindians from tiny villages paddle their wooden corrals. And, in a few years’ time, perhaps the world’s first privately- owned spaceport.

Beal Aerospace, a company based in Dallas, Texas, last May 19 signed an agreement with the Guyana government to build a rocket-launching pad. The company will buy 25,000 acres of coastal wetland — around a hundred square kilometres — for US$75,000, or US $3 an acre. They will pay a similar amount for a surrounding buffer zone, three times as large. In addition, the government will collect US$100,000 a year for administrative expenses, and a launch fee each time Beal sends a package into space.

There will be 500 jobs for Guyanese in the construction phase, and 200 permanent ones afterwards.

But why this remote site? Some satellites need a “geostationary” orbit — rotating with the earth, they remain above the same point on the Equator. For these, hitting the right spot is less difficult with a low latitude launch — and at 8˚north, the Guyana site easily meets this requirement. For safety reasons, they also need a coastline with clear water to the east, so that a bad launch can splash down harmlessly (satellites which are polar orbiters need clear water either north or south). The Guyanese coastline faces north-east, and meets both requirements — and it has a big chunk of flat land with few inhabitants.

Most Caribbean islands don’t have the room, although the other strong contender for the Beal project was a tiny rock called Sombrero, 35 miles from the nearest inhabited island, Anguilla, so small that the sea would have proved a buffer zone, and right in the north-east corner of the island chain.

Worldwide, spaceports are a growing industry. Down the coast from Guyana, Kourou in the French overseas department of Guyane is well-established as the site of the European Ariane rocket launches. Cape Canaveral in Florida, Vandenberg in California and Baikonur in Russia have until now been its main rivals, each with perhaps 20 annual launches. Brazil is now completing a spaceport at Alcantara; and there are others — India, China, Japan all have interests.

Guyana wants foreign investment. A high-profile operation like this could fly the flag internationally, promoters feel. But, as with most big projects, there are doubters too.

Some Amerindian groups welcome the spaceport; others are opposed. There is a small Amerindian population living close to the project site and they will be paid to relocate. Some may even take regular paid employment. The buffer zone will remain open for hunting, fishing and corial traffic along the Waini river.

Environmentalists, too, don’t speak as one. Some influential and internationally respected voices with long experience of Guyana’s northwest feel that a restricted access zone may, in fact, give protection to turtles and other species, as it has in Florida. Most of the site will not be cleared — buildings will cover a few acres at most. There will be an aircraft runway, but no wholesale forest destruction. The Beal project remains subject to an environmental impact assessment, which is expected to take 18 months to complete. Subject too – and for different reasons — to approval by the US authorities, for the use of advanced technology outside their national borders.

The main reasons voiced for hostility within Guyana are the terms of the agreement. Critics argue that the government could have extracted much better terms. The main private sector organisations are among those who support the proposal. There has been much press comment, for and against. What is the fair market price for a rocket site on undeveloped wetland? It’s hard to give an objective answer. The same can be said with at least equal force of giant forestry concessions granted in the remote north-west to Asian firms by a previous administration — or, indeed, of heavy industry projects in Trinidad, and 1,000-room hotels in the Bahamas. Public debate about a big proposal is a vital part of the democratic process.

 

Bearing Gifts

The best of Caribbean craft and gift items will be on show at the Sherbourne Conference Centre in Barbados from October 5th to 8th. For the seventh year, the Caribbean Export Development Agency is staging the Caribbean Gift and Craft Show to demonstrate what the region can do in areas like basketry and batik, clothing and ceramics, fashion accessories and aromatherapy items, pottery and specialty foods.

This year, the event is attracting about 150 exhibitors from 20 countries around the region, and more than 200 buyers from North and South America and Europe, as well as from the Caribbean itself. For more information, check the Caribbean Export website (www.carib-export.com).

 

A View From the Ridge

A new, lavishly illustrated survey of Trinidad and Tobago’s natural history is due for release in time for Christmas. A View from the Ridge, by Julian Kenny, is written not only for naturalists and eco-visitors, but for anyone interested in the vast riches and diversity of Trinidad and Tobago’s ecology.

Julian Kenny, for many years Professor of Zoology at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, is one of the Caribbean’s best-known environmental spokesmen. In his new book, he combines the passions that have been part of his life for 50 years — clear and careful scientific description, long experience in exploring every corner of Trinidad and Tobago, nature photography, and a deep concern for environmental policy.

A View from the Ridge is an overview of Trinidad and Tobago’s natural history, covering everything from the underwater reefs to the mountain peaks: the coasts and swamps, the caves and forests, insects, reptiles and birds. The text is supported by maps and diagrams, and by the author’s own outstanding colour photographs.

Published by Prospect Press in Trinidad, the book is due in bookstores in December.

Funding provided by the 11th EDF Regional Private Sector Development Programme Direct Support Grants Programme.
The views expressed on this website are those of the the authors and do not reflect those of the Direct Support Grants Programme.

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