We were a small, mainly agricultural colony and we said all the time, without unhappiness, that we were a dot on the map of the world. It was a liberating thing to be, and we were really very small. There were just over half a million of us. We were racially much divided.
French-born illustrator Tomi Ungerer made children’s books with names like ‘The Three Robbers’ - that and other work about weird erotica.
We think it’s a little strange that despite the many challenges facing our education sector that some people want to take what is an oral tradition, Jamaican patois, and turn it into a written language. Translators are needed for the US$1 million project that could take 12 years to complete.
Writer of the great Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. More troublesome in his day than Jon Stewart and to think Thompson never even had his own TV show.
“I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending…I think life is difficult and that’s that.
In 1919 West Helena, Arkansas a group of black sharecroppers met to discuss unionising. This provocation ended with a riot - really, a massacre - that led 4 whites and 100 blacks dead. And how did authorities respond? 300 blacks were jailed, 12 of whom were executed in trials lasting one hour or more.
Long before Zadie Smith’s White Teeth defined a second generation of British emigrants came Samuel Selvon. Born in Trinidad Selvon’s novels, beginning with 1956’s Lonely Londoner, brought to life the ‘cities within a city’ - divided by class and race.
You wonder about the world we live in, and then you learn that friendly fascist Walt Disney is the most translated author of all time. Suddenly it all makes sense.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 gets another look with Michael Dobbs’s ‘One Minute to Midnight’ which tells how the world came one or two miscommunications away from nuclear annihilation; and close enough to Jamaica for Soviet warships to be visible off the coast.
Richard Wright, the pioneering black American author of Native Son is having several of his works republished.
