Black Consciousness Festival celebrates Earl Lovelace's Salt

The Black Consciousness Festival fetes the 25th anniversary of the publication of Earl Lovelace’s novel Salt on November 21.

Reparation for African chattel slavery is a major theme of the lyrical, poignant book, for which Lovelace won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Actor Wendell Manwarren will have a conversation on the book’s impact in education and art with postcolonial literatures scholar Prof Supriya Nair of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, said a media release.

“The idea of reparations is at the heart of the piece,” Manwarren said in the release. Salt shows that after Emancipation, "people were liberated into nothingness. They were meant to be free but still available to work for the man who was just there whipping them. We still are dealing with the consequences of that to this day.”

Arguments against making reparations to the descendants of those enslaved people usually end up saying that slavery ended a long time ago and “since then ‘Everybody had a chance.’ That’s the flaw. Everybody don’t have a chance,” said Manwarren.

Lovelace will have a conversation, Revisiting Salt, with festival director Erica Ashton.

“Salt also deals with leadership in the present; the idea of victimhood, humanity, living in a space with many others, cultural identity and difference,” Ashton said in the release.

The theme of the festival is SHIFT, indicating “the need to revisit how and what we see. Revisiting Salt 25 years after its publication gives us that opportunity, to see ourselves anew, see the contribution of Earl Lovelace to the thinking in the space, as one of the giants on whose shoulders we stand,” the release said.

Reparations is part of a wider interrogation of black survival, resistance and resilience the festival is designed to foster. Festival founder and content and communications director Sean Samad said the festival is focused on honouring the contributions of people of African descent.

“The Black Consciousness Festival and the celebration of Black Consciousness Day on November 20 in Brazil is grounded in recognising the daily work that people of African descent, like Zumbi dos Palmares, have always done and continue to do,” Samad said in the release.

Zumbi was a 17th-century freedom fighter who fought for African freedom from the Portuguese in Brazil and led the long-standing freed settlement of Palmares. He was martyred on November 20, 1695, but his legacy of resistance is still alive. Black Consciousness Day is celebrated in Brazil and is also known as Zumbi Day.

“That work is essential to resist the persistent dehumanisation and affirm the humanity, pride, power and practice of people of African descent,” Samad said.

On November 20 the festival will observe Black Consciousness Day by conversations with Brazilian speakers on Sisterhood, Endurance and Resilience (with Any Manuela Freitas, Luísa Mahin and Ndembu Tandala), and Unconscious Bias (with Fernando Santos and Velluma Azevedo).

Manwarren said in Salt, Lovelace speaks to the void left by the persistent failure to address the effects of the Atlantic slave trade. Lovelace “humanises it, brings it down to the real dynamics in people’s lives. Earl’s deep dive into it – and there’s a lot of our history in the book – that is filling the void, challenging the assumptions.”

Nicholas Ward, 21, is the youth member on the festival's board. A visual artist and activist, Ward sat on a youth panel on reparations in a 2021 pop-up event of the festival. He will participate in a panel on Reflections on Salt this year with UWI students Aisha De Bique and Dawn-Marie Alexander.

Ward, a UWI graduate from Ste Madeleine, said African chattel slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean left “psychosocial effects” that resonate today, including the “demonisation of African spirituality and the perception of European hegemony” in cultural and economic spheres.

Prof Sir Hilary Beckles, UWI Vice-Chancellor and chairman of the Caricom Reparations Commission, will open the Salt celebration with greetings and comments. Beckles is the author of the 2013 book Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide.

The Black Consciousness Festival began on November 13 and runs daily until November 21. In its sophomore year, the festival planned 26 conversations and five workshops on diverse topics, including black spirituality, the creative arts, transformative Afrocentric governance and herbalism. Registration for the online festival is free and open to the public. Registrants will get free access during the festival to a curated film playlist powered by the premium streaming platform of curated black audio-visual content, thanks to a partnership with kweliTV.

Salt 25th anniversary programme:

12 pm: Feature comments by Prof Sir Hilary Beckles

1 pm: Revisiting Salt with Earl Lovelace in conversation with Erica Ashton.

3 pm: Salt’s impact on education and art, a conversation with Wendell Manwarren and Prof Supriya Nair.

5 pm: Reflections on Salt with Nicholas Ward, Aisha De Bique and Dawn-Marie Alexander.

To register for the Black Consciousness Festival, go to: http://blackconsciousnessfestival.com/REGISTER2021