Arts & Entertainment

Our big dog Buddy, “the enforcer” keeps an eye on things through the windows. He wants to get at the squirrels and chipmunks. He has to wait till he gets down to Long Point beach where my wife takes our two dogs every day for a walk and a romp. The other dog is a little King Charles Spaniel called Lola. Her passion is to chase feathers up and down the beach, oblivious to everyone and everything else around.
I have become a country boy, accustomed to the sights, smells and sounds of the country. I visited Markham in Metro Toronto recently for a weekend and woke up the first morning to the sounds of silence. I thought I was in a tomb. Where was the excited chatter of the little birds, the squawks of the big birds, and the songs of the songbirds? I had forgotten what it was like to be in a concrete and asphalt jungle.
Where we live is part of the Carolinian forest, a Biosphere so designated by the United Nations. Flora and fauna is almost semi-tropical. Interestingly enough, we are less than three hours drive from Toronto into Southern Ontario.
At night, the stars put on their own special show for us. The fireflies flit around like they did in the old days when I was growing up in Guyana. The mosquitoes are also out and about trying to make their mark.
A number of the neighbours are quite elderly and seem to spend most of their time “pimping” on everyone else. They sit on their porches and in their front rooms in total darkness looking out, across, up and down the street, day and night. I call them “the neighbourhood watch”. I remember neighbours like that when I was living in Guyana and Barbados.
Some RCMP retired horses are on a farm behind our backyard. They seem happy to graze in this peaceful pastoral environment. Our flower garden is blooming, the vegetable patch is looking prosperous, and the bowling green is always inviting for a game of bowls which my wife often wins. When she doesn’t, she complains that I had not rolled the green enough. Yes, I am also the ‘groundsman’.
I rarely get to the city these days. I’m no sooner there that I am restless and anxious to get back to the tranquility and freshness of the country. The summer breeze is almost tropical, the sudden thunder storms brief but cleansing. I fall asleep in my hammock on my porch most afternoons.
I have learnt so much since we relocated to the country five years ago. I know that summer in the city is special with Caribana and a host of other activities that I once enjoyed. Now the simple pleasures of gardening bring relaxation and new joys. If I want to go to a beach and take it all off, I can do that too. I can cruise top down in my Triumph Spitfire up and down country roads, as free as a bird.
Sometimes we stop for a visit at a cottage of some friends at Long Point beach. It’s like being in the islands - the breeze off the lake, the waves hitting the shore, the colours of the water at sunset and on a moonlight night.
The best news is that a Guyanese friend came by last weekend and got my juke box barking. Now we can have this joint jumping and jiving. Ah gone folks. This is summer in the country and it doesn’t get much better. If the creeks don’t rise and the sun still shines, I’ll be talking to you.

July 23, 2008 issue
Arts & Entertainment
Long summer days and thankful I'm a country boy!
	It is summer in Norfolk County on the shores of Lake Erie where we retired five years ago. We have a constant stream of visitors – friends and family - city folks, and we are booked till the end of September. It is mid-summer and we are at our best. The beaches are crowded – the parks and resorts are full, the roads are choked with visitors. We also have lots of visitors of the feathered variety. They wake me at dawn with riotous behavior. They are involved in a feeding frenzy at a number of bird feeders that my wife put up around our yard.
They come early for breakfast at dawn, before the sun stands up in the eastern sky. They are so excited, they throw food all over the place! My wife buys the bird seeds in large bags and I complain that the birds are better fed than I am, but my complaints fall on deaf ears! Whatever falls on the ground, the squirrels and our dogs are happy to clean up.

*A summer day in Norfolk County by the beach*
Our big dog Buddy, “the enforcer” keeps an eye on things through the windows. He wants to get at the squirrels and chipmunks. He has to wait till he gets down to Long Point beach where my wife takes our two dogs every day for a walk and a romp. The other dog is a little King Charles Spaniel called Lola. Her passion is to chase feathers up and down the beach, oblivious to everyone and everything else around. I have become a country boy, accustomed to the sights, smells and sounds of the country. I visited Markham in Metro Toronto recently for a weekend and woke up the first morning to the sounds of silence. I thought I was in a tomb. Where was the excited chatter of the little birds, the squawks of the big birds, and the songs of the songbirds? I had forgotten what it was like to be in a concrete and asphalt jungle. Where we live is part of the Carolinian forest, a Biosphere so designated by the United Nations. Flora and fauna is almost semi-tropical. Interestingly enough, we are less than three hours drive from Toronto into Southern Ontario. At night, the stars put on their own special show for us. The fireflies flit around like they did in the old days when I was growing up in Guyana. The mosquitoes are also out and about trying to make their mark. A number of the neighbours are quite elderly and seem to spend most of their time “pimping” on everyone else. They sit on their porches and in their front rooms in total darkness looking out, across, up and down the street, day and night. I call them “the neighbourhood watch”. I remember neighbours like that when I was living in Guyana and Barbados. Some RCMP retired horses are on a farm behind our backyard. They seem happy to graze in this peaceful pastoral environment. Our flower garden is blooming, the vegetable patch is looking prosperous, and the bowling green is always inviting for a game of bowls which my wife often wins. When she doesn’t, she complains that I had not rolled the green enough. Yes, I am also the ‘groundsman’. I rarely get to the city these days. I’m no sooner there that I am restless and anxious to get back to the tranquility and freshness of the country. The summer breeze is almost tropical, the sudden thunder storms brief but cleansing. I fall asleep in my hammock on my porch most afternoons. I have learnt so much since we relocated to the country five years ago. I know that summer in the city is special with Caribana and a host of other activities that I once enjoyed. Now the simple pleasures of gardening bring relaxation and new joys. If I want to go to a beach and take it all off, I can do that too. I can cruise top down in my Triumph Spitfire up and down country roads, as free as a bird. Sometimes we stop for a visit at a cottage of some friends at Long Point beach. It’s like being in the islands - the breeze off the lake, the waves hitting the shore, the colours of the water at sunset and on a moonlight night. The best news is that a Guyanese friend came by last weekend and got my juke box barking. Now we can have this joint jumping and jiving. Ah gone folks. This is summer in the country and it doesn’t get much better. If the creeks don’t rise and the sun still shines, I’ll be talking to you.
Even flow of compassion, realism in Goodison’s ‘Harvey River’
Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: A Memoir of my Mother and her People, Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, Ltd., 2007. A review by Frank Birbalsingh For some people 13 is an unlucky number. Not for Lorna Goodison, the Jamaican author, whose thirteenth book From Harvey River: A Memoir of my Mother and her People is a masterpiece in its genre. From Harvey River comes after four volumes of fiction and eight of poetry that have propelled Ms. Goodison to a position not only at the head of the pack of current Caribbean women poets, but abreast of the two male front-runners, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, despite their advantage of starting to write decades before her. But literature is neither a race nor a lottery, and From Harvey River must be savoured, independently of literary sweepstakes, for its own special aroma of the peculiar essence of Jamaica, its history, people and culture. As a memoir, a hybrid literary form that mixes biography with fiction, history or other forms of writing, From Harvey River tells the story of the author’s family on her mother’s side – the Harveys – who, in 1840, gave their name to Harvey River, a village in the rural Jamaican parish of Hanover. The Harveys come from English, Irish and Scottish stock that includes a famous English ancestor – William - who, in 1578, was credited with being the first to describe the circulation of blood in reliable detail; and although the family’s story is narrated by the author herself, it is really, as the volume’s title suggests, the story of her mother Doris who was born in Harvey River, in 1910, one of eight children of David Harvey and Margaret Wilson. As the author states in her Prologue, it was after she “dreamed” her mother and even granted a “visitation” to her in heaven that she was entrusted with her mother’s family story to pass on to us. The story itself is divided into three parts and numerous untitled and unnumbered chapters which flow into each other with the unrestricted oral continuity of speech, as they jointly conjure up a bewitching vision of the community of Harvey River and of her mother’s three brothers and four sisters. If it takes the inspiration and insight of a novelist to re-create such a rich variety of true-to-life pen portraits of her uncles and aunts, it calls for nothing less than encyclopaedic knowledge of West Indian and specifically Jamaican history and culture to capture the life of their community with such completeness. Like other Caribbean societies, Jamaica inherits a creole culture formed out of the physical and cultural mixing of people mainly from the British Isles, Africa and Asia: “It was amazing how all the mixing of bloods produced people who looked like Indians and Gypsies.” The legacy of slavery also seeped like deadly poison into every nook and cranny of Jamaican life, and long after slavery ended (1834), during the lifetime of Ms. Goodison’s uncles and aunts in the first half of the twentieth century, Jamaica was still governed by: “British colonial laws that valued the smallest piece of property over the life of any ex-slave.” This is the heart of the matter: that life in Harvey River or Jamaica as a whole consists of remnants, bits and pieces that are leftovers from the actions of others whether they are from Britain, Africa, Asia or wherever. This is why social transactions in From Harvey River consist largely of people mixing memories and matching fragments in a constant struggle to mould something that we now recognise as their own - Jamaican. So Bible verses are traded side by side with African folk beliefs or practices, English – both language and literature – is communicated through creole speech, and the modernity of motor cars and travel to America are special events in an everyday saga of coping with macca thorns and chigoes. The spirited vivacity of this emergent culture is brilliantly evoked when the author’s father – Marcus - changes his lowly job as a chauffeur to open a garage business and receives a tongue lashing from his mother when his business fails: “You pass you place, Marcus ...You see me, I know my place...High seat kill Miss Thomas’ puss! Nayga people must know dem place...Is that Hanover woman you go married to who encourage you inna that damn foolishness.” Here the author’s mixture of the dehumanising legacy of slavery with the sustaining, inter-locking humanity of mother, son and wife is reinforced by her rich creole idiom and prodigal poetic gifts to reach bottomless depths of pity and pathos. Whether it is her frank acknowledgement of Jamaica’s unjust colonial history or stark documentation of her mixed blood family’s struggle in the squalor of a Kingston slum, the author’s reactions are informed by a compassionate yet realistic acceptance of life’s injustices, one suggesting a distinctly female flavour that comes as much as from her heart as her brain. Ripeness is all, it seems, when we salivate over Goodison’s mouth-watering descriptions of food, for example: “ big country breakfasts or ‘morning dinners’ of roasted yams and breadfruit, bammies made from grated cassava, fried plantains, fried eggs, stewed liver, kidneys, and light, and escoveitched fish washed down with quarts of coffee and chocolate tea.” Sheer relish or delight in the food of Jamaica celebrates the human resilience of Jamaicans in coping with the horrors of their past. The two principal features accounting for success in From Harvey River are its even-handed, confessional integrity in revealing truths, good or bad, and its heavenly, womanist sense of compassion in doing so. As we already know, the vision in her memoir is handed directly down from heaven by the author’s mother Doris Harvey. We also learn at the end that: “She [Doris Harvey] dipped her finger in sugar when I [Lorna Goodison] was born and rubbed it under my tongue to give me the gift of words.“ For only the purest and sweetest words of a born poet could be equal to such a heavenly vision.
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