Writing Institute in the Bahamas Ready for Its Second Summer!

Greetings Readers!

Below is an announcement from the Bahamas Writers Summer Institute regarding our upcoming summer program; take a look and if you are interested in applying, please do email us at bahawsi@yahoo.com. We would love to hear from you!

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What are the stories you need to tell? Who are the characters that people your stories? Do you see visions you wish you could write down? Have you always wanted to be a writer, but didn’t know where to start?

At the Bahamas Writers Summer Institute, from July 12th through July 29th, you can explore what it means to be a writer with five published Bahamian writers. Through five different craft workshops, from screenplay writing with Travolta Cooper, to writing for the stage with Ian Strachan, to poetry with Marion Bethel and fiction with Lelawatee Manoo Rahming, as well as the writing of memoir with Helen Klonaris, you can delve into the writing genre of your choice and give yourself the gift of tools that will give your imagination wings strong enough to fly.

At BWSI we teach the craft of writing in conjunction with theories about how and why we write, from a Caribbean centered perspective. This year we will explore these theories and the literature they impact with Bahamian scholars Krista Walkes and Angelique V. Nixon. We’ll also discuss the ways writers can publish their work, bringing their stories and visions to a wider audience.

We believe in the enormous talent of Bahamians to imagine, to story, to write, and our goal is to bring together beginning and established writers each year, all the better to cultivate a flourishing Bahamian literary tradition.

In community with each other, beginning and established writers thrive. In community with each other they recognize the value of their words, and in the role of the writer as a co-creator of our communities and our world. As Bahamian writer Keith Russell has said, writers “imaginatively examine the world that is, and story a world that can be.”

Don’t miss the opportunity to attend the only program of its kind in the Bahamas!

Workshops take place from 4pm to 9pm Tuesdays through Fridays, between July 12th and July 29th, with public readings and discussions taking place on Monday and Saturday evenings for the duration of the program. The cost of the program is $400, which includes 36 hours of study in addition to faculty readings and discussions, a master class in fiction by renowned Jamaican writer Olive Senior, and all reading materials. Limited scholarships are available.

For more information or to receive an application, please write BWSI at bahawsi@yahoo.com, or call BWSI at (242) 325-0341.

Imagining Eve

(Presented at a BACUS symposium on the Literary Arts in the Bahamas, July 17, 2008)


Dear God,

They want me to talk about the role of the writer in Bahamian society. I want to tell them straight up, the writer is a trickster. You know what I’m talking about. You set things up this way in the first place. Eve, holding in her right hand, or perhaps her left, a living metaphor: a red thing and fleshy, in its belly tiny black seeds of resurrection.

I want to tell them straight up, being a writer is about making people uncomfortable, beginning with your self. The writer is always in the middle of things and on the fringes, always wanting connection and simultaneously in perpetual exile from the center. It is our job to live these contradictions so we can make them useful. We're here to make ‘friction’ (David Bain). Anything else is pure decoration, and I don’t have time for that.

What’s that you say? Tell them about how being a writer is about being a witness? How being a witness is redemptive, even if there is no happy ending? It’s true, and without witnesses, we have no stories, and without stories, there is a way in which we don’t exist. Writers put on other people’s skins and walk around in them. Writers bear witness to the enemy as well as to the lover; they wine up inside the body of God and come back in time to write poems about it.

Of course, Eve, and all the Eve’s before and after, female and male, have all met with less than love and appreciation from their beloveds: She/he who holds in his/her hand, yes, the left hand, a red thing, an idea made flesh, in its center, seeds for a new society, is not always welcome. But this is what tricksters do, they meet the world with new ideas in their hands, hold them out to their beloveds, and with soft voice and trembling say, “This is good, eat!”

Nan Peacocke wrote “poems are rebels … they can bring down governments starting with the ones in our heads…” Audre Lorde wrote “…poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.” Leslie Marmon Silko wrote “Don’t be fooled. Stories are not just entertainment. They are all we have …to fight off illness and death.” Lynn Sweeting says, “A poem makes me visible: …I exist, I’m here, contrary to what patriarchy and popular culture have to say….”

This is what Eves do: we expose our thoughts, our truths, our selves to the eye/I and there is always a struggle. We run through the streets naked, our hands snatching tufts of knowing from the air and wave them like they’re something to see, and people on their porches stare and the generous ones say, “That’s just Eve, you know how she goes” and the ones not so generous say “Lock her up.” And Eve suddenly becomes acutely aware of her nakedness and the omniscient eye/I says, “Who told you you were naked?” and Eve, out of breath, falls back onto her sofa, or bed or floor, and says, “My God, what have I done?” Because exposing yourself is one thing, and giving people a new idea to swallow is quite another, and what if we’re wrong, and what if the old ways are good and better, and how dare we…?

How dare we, indeed. Listen, in any society, creation is an act of struggle. But in a postcolonial, patriarchal, fundamentalist society, creation is not simply struggle it is also fraught with shame. Particularly for women writers. And the queer and the differently-abled. Those whom I call ‘The Invisibles’. And whereas struggle is necessary, the creative tension that precedes birth, shame is counter-productive; shame warps the creative process and disables the imagination, silencing the possibility of new ideas. The apple in Eve’s hand frozen in a too literal rendering against a landscape that does not bleed, its tiny black seeds of resurrection holed up, dormant, unacknowledged, and powerless.

And against this landscape, it is the writer’s job to steal the apple, dream it into a scarlet plum, or better yet, a mango; to tear at the skin with her teeth, and watch how, as she sucks on its sweetness, her lips and cheeks yellowed and slick, God himself changes shape into a thick breasted woman who sings, ooh, child things are gonna get easier…

The job of the writer is to say that sometimes 6 times 11 is 68 and mean it (Charles Baxter); the job of the writer is to fall asleep and dream that she grows wings and claws and swoops down on rapist boys who have morphed into fish, swallowing them whole and flying off into the blue-blue yonder (Lelawatee Manoo Rahming); the job of the writer is to make possible what does not yet exist (Julia Kristeva), to transliterate what she knows in her body into language on the page (Olga Broumas), forming a bridge between the unknown and the knowable, from silence into language and action (Audre Lorde): this is the power of the writer.

And, knowing this, the writer’s job is therefore to embody unmitigated courage to tell the stories no one wants to hear; to see the parts of us no one wants to look at. The writer’s job is to imagine, by any means necessary, and to tell new stories, the stories we need to live by. The writer’s job is to run through the streets naked announcing her visions, and back home again at day’s end, to say, “God, what have I done?” and to get up the next day and do it again. Because it is not our job to preserve culture; it is not our job to placate, or to maintain the status quo; it is not our job to replicate what already exists. Our job is to create new culture out of our everyday lives, out of the blood and guts of our bodies, as well as the blood and guts of our dreams. We are not here to make peace, but to witness to the daily wars and to point to a way forward through them all. Our job is to create new language for the worlds we can imagine and hope years from now, maybe two or two hundred, that language will prove useful to the ones we leave behind.

Yes, I believe this is what I will tell them,

Your faithful Trickster,
Helen

Of Heretics and Mangrove Swamps

her·e·tic: a person who holds controversial opinions; from the Greek ‘hairetikos’, able to choose.

mangrove: an evergreen tree or bush with straight slender stems and intertwined roots that are exposed at low tide. Native to: tropical coasts.


Lately, I have been thinking about mangrove swamps. How they are not much valued in this island country. And how they are necessary to the birth of new life.

Fish spawn in mangrove swamps. Fish in dreams are considered to be new ideas rising up out of the murky waters of the unconscious. New ideas need swamps, wetlands. But wetlands are being filled in, to make more room for ‘development’: condos and gated communities; hotels and all-in-one resorts. Mangrove swamps are inconvenient, wasted space. Cheap land or wholly unmarketable. Development needs hard ground.

I have also been thinking about censorship and the banning of ideas. How Brokeback Mountain was banned all those months ago. How the same group of censors (clergy) wanted to ban The Da Vinci Code. Because they know very well that ideas are powerful. The idea of a man dying on a cross then coming back to life three days later is a powerful idea. The idea that God might be comfortable in human flesh, walking among us, is more powerful still.

The Christ was symbolized by a fish. There was something of revolution in the air, all those thousands of years ago. Something dangerous in the idea of the Christ. A man who refused to die. New ideas are always and still rebels.

Writers are something like wetlands. There isn’t much use for us where development is going on. You can’t market a poem. Or build a house on a haiku. The mark-up on novels is small things compared to the sale of a sea front home on what used to be Hog Island. And of course, governments are all about development. I heard Prime Minister Christie say many moons ago that he intended to put a hotel resort on every family island. Something like Monopoly.

I was never good at Monopoly, bought the cheap properties, never had enough money to buy hotels, but I wrote my first Haiku at 12. And it was powerful. Showed me an idea I hadn’t seen before. Showed me something about myself that saved me.

Now, whenever I hear about a book or a movie being banned, keeping stories from getting told, I know there’s an idea in that story that is powerful. An idea someone doesn’t want us seeing. Brokeback Mountain was, on the surface of things, a tragic love story between two men. But really, it told of the way society threatens us with death if we dare live our truths.

If we had watched Brokeback Mountain, maybe we would have recognized something about ourselves, no matter who we were. Sitting in the dark as the credits rolled, maybe we wouldn’t have felt satisfied any longer with half truths, half lived lives. And we would have become traitors to silence, to our own cherished lies and fears.

Human psyches are something like wetlands. Like mangrove swamps. Where what is unconscious in us teams with unborn and newborn life: ideas waiting to get told. But in a society where all the questions and all the answers have already been provided by the One Book, (we are told), our psyches get neglected, ignored. It is dangerous to entertain ideas that come out of nowhere, (we are told), different ideas, original ideas, because who knows where they came from. If it is not of God, well then. But I think God lives in mangrove swamps. I think God is in the rusty brown water, salty and teaming with unborn and newborn life. Waiting and waiting to get told.

Lately I’ve been dreaming about fish and wet places. Unfortunately, I don’t have to wonder what will happen to the fish when the mangrove swamps have all been filled in with concrete and stone. I know what will happen. The censors or the developers, or the government or the churches will ban more movies, and more books. They will call more of us heretics. They will tell more of the people that the devil is afoot. They will build bigger churches and only the most virtuous can come inside. We will be told that dreams are nonsense and only sorcerers listen to them, and any ideas which contradict the ideas of the One Book are blasphemous. Our dreams will terrify us. The fish will become scarce. The people will be hungry. And the government and the churches will be fat, and very powerful indeed.


First published in the Nassau Guardian, Nassau, Bahamas, October 4th, 2006