Why Trinis speak Spanish at Christmastime

English may be the official language of Trinidad, but at Christmastime the country sings in Spanish. De Cooler : Soca News announces the results of the National Parang Championships, the competition which showcases Trinidad's traditional Christmas music, while Caribbean Free Radio plays a few parang tracks and explains the genre's Venezuelan origins.

Technorati Tags: trinidad, caribbean, music, parang, christmas, parranda, venezuela

The dirt on maps

It's common knowledge that Nicholas prefers to travel with maps, and there must be other readers of this blog who will also appreciate this collection of soil maps of Latin America and Caribbean Islands from the European Digital Archive of Soil Maps (EuDASM), "a common platform that would provide particular benefit to international conventions and to developing countries where much soil information is threatened to be lost through deterioration." The maps are available for download as well as on a DVD-ROM.

Link via Sokari Ekine at Global Voices.

Technorati Tags: caribbean, maps

"How it is done"

This email arrived yesterday--I've left out the writer's name, but otherwise it's verbatim:

I from South Africa and I would like to attend the next Trinidad & Tabago carnival.

I am very interested in "wining". Can you please explain to me how it is done. Or perhaps send me a video clipping, or refer me to a website address, which has video clippings of "wining".

Hmm--video footage would certainly give a better idea than a written description, but, as it happens, in the forthcoming January/February issue of Caribbean Beat we will publish a "Last Word" by Lisa Allen-Agostini called "Wining words"--a sort of wining glossary. Not a moment too soon, it turns out.

"The Harder the Come" on stage

'Tis the season, it would appear, to talk about adaptations of Caribbean classics.

Last week the intrepid JT mentioned in these pages a London stage musical based on V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas which, unfortunately, never saw the light of day. Now, according to BBC Caribbean, a London stage adaptation of the classic Jamaican film The Harder They Come is in the works. The script is by Perry Henzell, the film's original producer, writer and director, and according to Jan Ryan, managing director of UK Arts Productions, the production will furnish whichever young Jamaican performer is picked to reprise the Jimmy Cliff role with the opportunity of a lifetime. "I don't think we're trying to reproduce what Jimmy did - that was amazing," says Ryan. "He made the role his own, but we are looking for a guy who will hopefully have the same success out of doing the stage version as Jimmy did with the film.”

The production will debut at the Theatre Royal in 2006.

Technorati Tags: jamaica, perry henzell, theatre, puppy, the harder they come

Reggaeton style

Reggaeton consists of rapping in Spanish over rhythms derived from Jamaican dancehall and salsa. These styles have existed for years, but until the nineties, when Puerto Rican artists began putting them together, Spanish rapping sounded like a stepchild of American hip-hop. Reggaeton turned the beat around. Rather than stressing the first pulse in every measure, the music accents offbeats, and the difference is evident on the dance floor: reggaeton speaks to hips, hip-hop to heads and shoulders. The music's syncopated movement suits the hard phonemes and quick cadences of Puerto Rican Spanish; the best reggaeton vocalists create long, complex musical patterns that are often more sophisticated than those of American rappers.

In this week's New Yorker, pop music critic Sasha Frere-Jones (who also has a blog) writes about reggaeton, the Jamaican-influenced Spanish-Caribbean sound that's breaking through into the mainstream. (Read Dylan Kerrigan's short profile of reggaeton star Ivy Queen in the July/August 2005 issue of Caribbean Beat.)

"The light I fashion"

Let my greatnesses transcend my indecencies
and let the sun that nature fashioned to make trees green
be as nothing to the light I fashion to make myself
nothingness.

In yesterday's Stabroek News: two previously unpublished poems by the Guyanese poet Martin Carter, discovered by scholar Gemma Robinson a few months ago, and published in Stabroek to mark the anniversary of Carter's death. They will also be included in the new edition of Carter's poems being edited by Robinson for Bloodaxe Books.

From Robinson's note to the poems:

Carter could make poetry out of a flower, a leaf, the rain, a bird or a fish as easily as he could address fury, fire and futility. Writing in Georgetown, in the country where he spent his whole life, Carter's world was both local and global. Composing poetry on whatever was in front of him - cigarette cartons, envelopes, scrap paper - the urgency of his writing matched his need to understand himself and the world. Today, on the anniversary of Carter's death, it is important to remember him, his example and his work.

Caribbean Beat in Stabroek

In his Arts on Sunday column in today's Stabroek News, Al Creighton takes a look at the current issue of Caribbean Beat and praises five features in which, he says, "currents of cultural traditions, of responses to colonialism, of popular politics and mass movements that Caribbean people have created find expression".

(Creighton singles out Kellie Magnus's feature on Jamaica's traditional Christmas Pantomime. Today's Jamaica Gleaner runs a short piece on the 2005 Pantomime, Zu-Zu Macca.)

Soca soccer

Much elation in Trinidad and Tobago this weekend after Friday's FIFA World Cup draw in Germany. The Soca Warriors are in Group B along with England, Sweden and Paraguay. Jack Warner, the country's football boss and a FIFA vice-president, says: "I predict now that we will be in the second round, and we will be." There's a feeling that T&T has a chance against England: many of the TT players are already with English clubs and know their opponents well, and England hasn't beaten Sweden since 1968. What's more, Paraguay aren't in the same South American class as Brazil and Argentina. A good draw then ...

Well, a rather different view prevails elsewhere. The BBC is fairly typical: T&T slipped into the finals "fortuitously" (a word taken down overnight), and most of its players "play at a low standard for their clubs ... [if] they win one of their matches, the country would go into meltdown". Ouch. The London Guardian's opinion is that it's England that has the really easy start with Group B: they find themselves "being escorted towards the knockout phase of the tournament" by competitors who should be "agreeable companions". Trinidad "ought to be incapable of improving its place in folklore". Ouch again.

Only a few voices at home are sounding a note of caution. Former player and manager Sedley Joseph sees England and Sweden as the favourites to go through from Group B, and commentator Fazeer Mohammed also sounds a sober note. But there's enough optimism in the sports pages to make you think the Warriors are going to soca their way to the finals on July 9, scattering all opposition to the German winds.

- Jeremy Taylor 

Biswas: the musical?

Did you know that the famous James Bond movie theme originated in a musical version of a V.S. Naipaul novel? I certainly didn't, but maybe I'm the last one to hear.

Last month, a small UK label called Bronze Records released a double album of songs by a singer-composer called Monty Norman, called Completing the Circle. One of the tracks is billed as the original song which became the James Bond theme ... that throbbing minor-key electric guitar (first scored for sitar) that introduced Dr No and its successors, and became one of the best-known title tunes in film history.

There's been some controversy over how much the James Bond theme is really Monty Norman's work and how much was contributed by Oscar-winning composer John Barry ... but Norman has won three court cases defending his ownership, and even won damages from the London Sunday Times.

Anyway, Monty Norman insists the James Bond theme is an updated version of a song he wrote for a stage musical version of V.S. Naipaul's 1961 novel A House for Mr Biswas, which was supposed to be a follow-up to Norman's successful Irma La Douce. The song was called Good Sign, Bad Sign, and was to be sung by a character with a perpetual sneeze. And now, on Completing the Circle, he's released the original song that he wrote for that Biswas musical. If anyone hears it, write and tell us!

The Biswas project was eventually dropped, because of cost and the difficulty of assembling a West Indian and Asian cast in early sixties London, according to Norman. But he explains that when he was asked in 1962 to write a title tune for Dr No, he rescued the Biswas tune, reworked it, and, according to later court evidence, earned nearly half a million pounds from it between 1976 and 1999 alone.

Haven't heard any comment on this from Naipaul. But a Broadway musical version of the Nobel prizewinner's most famous novel ... now that would be a mind-blowing spectacle.

- Jeremy Taylor 

Marooned

Alice Backer at kiskeyAcity pointed me to this Jamaica Observer article about the Guadeloupean film Neg Maron, which was shown in Jamaica as part of the 29th annual Francophone Film Festival.

As luck would have it, there's also an article on Neg Maron in the current issue of Caribbean Beat!