TT life stories for Christmas

This Christmas season has sneaked up on many of us who have not had time to prepare for the sharing of generosity and kindness. But all is not lost, as there are many good books that are easy to get, depending on where you live, which will make excellent gifts and last a lifetime.

Over the last nine to ten years that I have been involved in the promotion of Caribbean writers and of reading as a vital tool for personal and social development, I have seen literary tastes change.

The exemplary and outstanding poetry of Martin Carter, Derek Walcott et al and the classic novels by the likes of Naipaul, Lovelace, Rhys and Lamming will always anchor the Caribbean literary canon, but finding themselves alongside now are new, prize-winning poetry, diverse genres of fiction and non-fiction.

The number of books by the current generation of local writers is multiplying for many reasons, but chief among them is that technology now enables people to get their thoughts into print. For the last decade Nalis has run the very encouraging First Time Authors appreciation programme and handed out congratulatory plaques to around 400 budding and self-published writers.

For the last few years the NGC Bocas Lit Fest has joined the Nalis effort and run an annual, free, half-day of seminars for those new authors to introduce them to the world beyond their book’s publication. A raft of workshops each year is intended to help those newer and the more well-versed literary storytellers to improve their skills. All the venues are always at or near capacity.

The desire to tell stories is as much part of being human as walking upright. Going back millennia, mankind has understood the importance of registering its presence on earth and left stories on cave walls and on stones and in funereal tombs. That desire is as burning as ever.

In the last few weeks I have attended the launches of three biographical books, about the lives of TT men, two by offspring, all of them certain to appeal to large sectors of the reading public. Our Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, himself the author of his own life story, From Mason Hall to Whitehall, spoke at two of them. Twice he said the same thing – we must write our stories. He tried to encourage those in the audience, many of them guardians of important parts of our national history, because of the profound need to ground ourselves in our heritage and understanding of what came before and, therefore, how and why things are as they are now.

I already have written here about one of those books, Selwyn Ryan’s autobiographical Ryan Recalls, an account of a good life spent in service of the people of TT. A debut book by Justin Sobion, The West Indian Lawyer: Keith Sobion, tells, in very lively prose, the story of his father’s relatively short life as a servant of the people of this country and our region – former attorney general, esteemed lawyer and latterly principal of the Norman Manley Law School in Jamaica. Like all good biographies we get an inside track on the big moments that shaped our modern political history but the book is a deeply personal story, deftly told and avoiding many of the possible dangers of relating stories about other people’s lives. Justin Sobion decided to devote nine years to the project because someone told him that the people in Moruga, of which Keith Sobion was once PNM parliamentary representative, no longer remembered who or what had happened when.

Minshall by Norton was driven by a similar impulse in Norton's children, who found their father’s note: “Peter, Peter… the Book! The island needs it.” Noel Norton, TT’s iconic recorder of national culture and history, died leaving a treasure chest of photographs. Prime amongst the Noel Norton Collection were the fantastic creations of masman extraordinaire Peter Minshall. No attempt to capture Minshall’s work between covers has succeeded till now, and it was worth waiting for. With an elegant foreword by my literary activist colleague Nicholas Laughlin, the 204-page must-have book overflows with beauty of colour, image and text.

Also look out for Trevor McDonald: An Improbable Life, a brand new autobiography by the TT-born and most famous Caribbean news anchor in the world; the authorised biography of Sat Maharaj by Kumar Mahabir (understand what motivated the game-changing firebrand); the beautifully produced and well written Forged From the Love, about the life and work of Colin Laird, architect of several important public buildings and spaces, published by his family; A Will and a Way: Autobiography of Anthony N Sabga, amongst many other titles.

Paper Based bookshop at the Hotel Normandie has most of them. Also try Metropolitan Bookshop in Port of Spain and the Book Emporium in a newly shared space with the House of Arendel at the C3 Mall in San Fernando, certain branches of RIK and Nigel Khan to find some of them.

Have a peaceful Christmas full of good reads.