Among the ceremonial duties of the consul general of Barbados in New York is a charming custom rooted in the colonial history of that island nation. When a Barbadian here turns 100, the consul attends the birthday party, and each subsequent one, bearing flowers and a proclamation celebrating the person’s life and longevity.
The ritual expresses appreciation for the elderly and pride in Barbados, which claims to have one of the highest percentages of centenarians in the world.
One Barbadian, however, is not playing along.
Mae Bishop is 101. According to her birth certificate, she will turn 102 on May 16. But with the feistiness and independence that have characterized her long life, she has steadfastly refused to acknowledge that she has lived a century.
From a charming article, in the New York Times, about Barbadian centenarians, both in Barbados and in New York.
The theme of the 8th Annual Lecture Series hosted by the Barbados Museum and Historical Society and the the Department of History & Philosophy of the University of the West Indies is Emigration from Barbados.
The sixth lecture in the series takes place on Tuesday March 30 at 7:30p.m. in the Grande Salle of the Tom Adams Financial Centre. The speaker will be Dr. Cecilia Karch Brathwaite, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at UWI, and her topic will be Two Strands – Two Outcomes: Barbadian Migration to West Africa & the Hispanic Caribbean. Live streaming of the lecture should be available on the date.
There are nine lectures in all in the 2010 series.
A few weeks ago I was staying with a family in Dominica who had an adorable and very very active almost-two-year-old. (CCQXRNVBQNY4) One of the ways I found to get him to sit quietly for a little while was for us to watch videos on YouTube together (this is probably not a recommended child-minding technique). These were some of his our favourites.
Yo Gabba Gabba: Don’t Bite Your Friends
Sesame Street: Outdoors with Jason Mraz
Sesame Street: African Alphabet
Jamaica Kincaid‘s debut novel, Annie John, has received the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal. The Clifton Fadiman medal is awarded to “recognize a work of fiction by a living American author that is deserving of rediscovery and a wider readership”, and honours books that were first published at least 10 years ago.
The Gospel Word, Speightstown, Barbados
- vay•ki•vay (vaɪ-ki-vaɪ/vahy-kee-vahy)
adj. (Dominica, St. Lucia)
- 1. Carelessly, haphazardly.
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The Grantley Adams International Airport in Barbados has been voted the best in the Caribbean for service excellence.
A man in St. Lucia refuses to sell his land, even after an offer of US $60 million.
I love how this is classified as “weird news”.
How then shall we
succeed?
The eye must heed
the meaning
the eye must be free
seeing.
What is a word
to the eye?
Meaning.
Seeing the pot-
boil of leaves in the wind
it is a tree.
Watching the pale hoist
of shining
it is the moon
climbing.
The tree must be named.
This gives it fruit
issues its juices.
The moon must be named.
This renders love
madness.
Barbadian Minister of Culture Steve Blackett is pushing for 2 days of Kadooment by 2012.
I don’t necessarily have any strong feelings on this one way or the other, except that I am a bit worried by this statement, from the linked article:
We’ll have to use the two bank holidays that are available to us in the month of August in a better way.
Because one of those “bank holidays … available … in the month of August” is Emancipation Day, and I would hate to see the significance of that day and the event it commemorates diminished by efforts to incorporate it into an extended Kadooment jump-up (keeping in mind that Kadooment is the more established of the two holidays). That being said, it will be interesting to see how the NCF handles things the next time Kadooment Day and Emancipation Day fall on the same date, as will be the case in 2011.
Sensays, Ol’ Mas, Mas Domnik 2010, Roseau, Dominica
Folk living in the tent city at College Auro in Port-au-Prince show reporters from the Guardian newspaper what they saved when the quake struck Haiti.
Bequia
I’ve been looking for low-cost software to help with transcription of the dozens of interviews I’ve done for my research; here’s what I’ve found so far.
Easy Scribe is free and available for Mac and Windows computers.
Transcriva is Mac only, free to try, US$29.99 to buy.
Having tried them both, I think I prefer Transcriva; it has a more attractive and easier to use interface, I was able to figure it out and get going quickly, and it has more handy features. I am seriously contemplating forking over the $30 for a license, which is saying a lot, considering how much I love a freeness.
I saw The Cove recently at the UWI Open Campus in Dominica, where it was screened by environmental artist and activist Peggy Oki (I’ll write a bit more about how I met Peggy in a future entry). It is an excellent movie (and parts of it were filmed in the Caribbean; a couple of people I’ve met in Dominica for my research appear in the movie, though not always in a flattering light), and I was delighted to find out this morning that it won the Best Feature Documentary award at the Oscars® last night.
Berbice Dutch Creole
In 2003, linguist Hubert Devonish met Bertha Bell, then aged 103, the last known speaker of Berbice Dutch Creole, one of the Caribbean’s indigenous languages. Mrs. Bell died in 2005, and in March 2010, Berbice Dutch Creole was officially declared extinct.
- a•wa (ɑ-wɑ/ah-wah)
excl. (Dominica, St. Lucia)
- 1. Negative expression indicating strong ridicule, despair, disappointment, objection, impossibility, etc.
- 2. No way, no, oh no
“Sun,” “sunlight”—to me they had always been different words. “Sunlight” was a nice word. “Sun” was harsher; it was what the sunlight of early morning in Trinidad turned to at about eight, when it was time to go to school. The slogan on the label for Trinidad Grapefruit Juice, when I was a child, was “Fruit Ripened in Tropical Sunshine.” I had always thought that the words were too pretty. “Fruit Ripened in Hot Sun” would have been truer to the climate I lived in; but then they might have been less of a slogan. “Tropical Sunshine”—they were tourist words, I always thought; and indeed they could have little meaning for someone who had known nothing else.
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“Nom Tèw (Man of the Soil)”
Filmed in Dominica.
Goodness, people (if anybody is even still reading this), has it really been nearly 6 months since I last posted here? Well. I’ll have to do something about that, won’t I?
