In celebration of the Fourth of July, despite everything… Martha Nussbaum revives a dreamy vision of religious freedom. Jeff Sharlet paints the real bathos of our adapted political piety. I join them both in the pleasure of rediscovering Roger Williams (1603 - 1683) as a neglected American model of real religion, real freedom, real tolerance. As Martha Nussbaum reminds us, Roger Williams was English-born, a friend and contemporary of John Milton. He came to America — and from Massachusetts to the colony he founded in Providence, Rhode Island — in flight from meddlesome Puritans. His affinity for the Narragansett Indians, and his sense of the injustice that the settlers were inflicting on Indian property and humanity, sharpened his educated understanding of the rights of the individual spirit.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Martha Nussbaum and Jeff Sharlet (54 minutes, 25 mb mp3)

And so he developed a view of conscience – which I think is really attractive – which is that every human being has within themselves something very precious which he called conscience, which is a capacity to seek for the ultimate meaning of life in your own way. And the thought is that we all have this equally; whether we’re using it right or wrong, it ought to be respected. And respecting it means giving it lots of space to pursue its own way and not establishing an orthodoxy that squeezes it. He had two really neat images for religious intolerance. One of them was imprisonment, as consciences were imprisoned all over the world. And the other, even more striking one was rape. Consciences were being raped. He called it “soule rape” when somebody sets up a religious orthodoxy and denies a space to others to find their own way.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum of Liberty of Conscience in conversation with Jeff Sharlet and Chris Lydon, July 1, 2008.

We’ve gone irreparably too far. I don’t like the word theocracy; I
don’t think we ever will be a theocracy, but we have severe establishment and we will have establishment of a religion that’s very comfortable with the status quo. It’s a religion of what is, and it’s a religion that shuts down dissent and it’s a religion that shuts down prophetic voices as well. Yes, I think we’ve gone irreparably too far in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that we stop speaking and living and dissenting - and for those of us who feel religious, speaking in prophetic terms, and for those of us who don’t, speaking in political terms. Hope is something that you have when you have a situation that reason doesn’t quite support, so we have to be hopeful. We have irreparably established a certain kind of religion in American life so there’s no going back. I think there’s only moving forward until we get to a country that Roger Williams would like to live in.

Journalist Jeff Sharlet of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and The Revealer in conversation with Martha Nussbaum and Chris Lydon, July 1, 2008.

Tony Schwartz made his famous TV and radio commercials (like the “Daisy spot” for Lyndon Johnson, and Coca Cola’s “It’s the Real Thing” campaign) in what felt like a chapel in his apartment in the old “Hell’s Kitchen” neighborhood of West Side Manhattan. Hunched over his turntables, wrapped in earphones and cables in a room lined on every wall with Tony’s 40 years of sound recordings, he’d remind you of the Wizard of Oz with his bumbling air of magic, but also of Orson Welles with his grasp of theatrical effects, and also his friend Marshall McLuhan with his flair for multi-media theory and his experience with how message systems really work, in and out of your body. I’d first entered this little high church of sound covering George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Hoffman on Tony Schwartz (59 minutes, 27 mb mp3)

I went back in 1974 to write this Times piece, Packaging Voters for Candidates, TV-Style on Tony, the “best in the business” of media consulting. And I went back and back for ever after to absorb Tony’s coaching. He was gently instructive when I took him my first television stand-ups after leaving the Times. “You’re trying to do what Times training impels you to do — push ‘facts’ through the camera lens at the viewer. But listen to me, Chris: television is not a medium of information; it’s a medium of effects…” I learned on my own, when I came back from vacation to the TV desk with a mustache, that television viewers are looking mainly at their presenters’ hair, and not hearing much of what they say. Tony observed that television is mainly an auditory medium, and would be more effective if your picture tube was out of commission. He beleived that for many evolutionary and anatomical reasons — not least because “people are born without ear-lids” — the ear and audio deliver more of the signals that form our thinking than the eye does. And many of the trademark Tony Schwartz spots on television were commercials that deliberately slowed down the eye input with still photos, for example, or neutralized the eye with a shot of just an office clock and a second hand, while an actor’s plummy voice was asking: “Would you give me sixty seconds to tell you why Bob Abrams should be Attorney General of New York?”

Tony adored the babble of babies and the outdoor sounds of his block of New York. Above all he loved what Studs Terkel calls “that fabulous instrument, vox humana.” The blossoming of Tony’s reputation in the Seventies and the soundness of his books — The Responsive Chord and Media: the Second God — ran nicely parallel with the rebirth of radio at NPR. I was late taking the cue to radio myself, but I knew from Tony that radio was God’s own medium, and by the time I got there I knew from Tony why it felt like home. It is wonderful to realize, in the responses on Tony’s death two weeks ago, that the pied pipers of the rising radio generation — people like Jay Allison and Ira Glass– are devoted practitioners of Tony Schwartz’s ideas.

So maybe the next question is how many more of the podcasters and other newbies enabled by the inexpensive tools of Internet radio will get the blessing of Tony’s techniques and wise encouragement. I engage the brilliant and prolific TV documentarian David Hoffman — of “Sputnik Mania” in theaters this summer and the comprehensive film Guerrilla Media about Tony — in the conversation here not only to remember the master of sound and his signature pieces, but to introduce the wisdom of Tony Schwartz to the podcast generation. With your help, it might be just the start of our appreciation of Tony.

Here’s a first conversational stab at the point that Obama vs. McCain — while it’s not the world’s election — is a world event like no US presidential campaign before it. This is partly the Web effect, which puts millions, maybe billions, of people in the churn of daily information about the campaign. And it’s even moreso the resonance of Barack Obama, who’s been dubbed “Germany’s favorite politician at the moment” (in Germany) and “definitively… the candidate of Europe” (in Portugal), as Shmuel Rosner of Ha’aretz wrote in Slate this Spring.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anthony Barnett and Kanishk Tharoor (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3)

It’s different and remarkable, furthermore, as the young editor of openUSA, Kanishk Tharoor, remarks in our conversation, that interest abroad in US politics seems based less on calculations of US foreign policy toward nations and continents like China, say, or Africa or the Middle East. The fascination seems rather with “underlying issues like race, like generation, like globalism.” And the provocative effect of the fascination shows up, for example, in a piece written for openUSA from India that asks: “Can there be a Muslim Obama?” Or as Anthony Barnett of openDemocracy puts it in this conversation from London, Obama “unlocks possibility. He unlocks the imagination. If he could do that, what could I do? What could we do?”

There’s a challenge here for people like Anthony Barnett (and me!) who came to flinch at “American exceptionalism” when Bush-Cheney made it stand for unilateralism and reckless war, but who must be intrigued again with the “only in America” dimensions of, yes, Barack Obama. Here’s the Barnett version:

My views are shifting slightly. I don’t think America is any longer the “indispensable nation.” What Madeline Albright was saying was about power politics: America as Numero Uno — the iron fist and the aircraft carrier behind it. Obviously America is a mightily powerful and economically influential nation, and will remain so. But this sense that it will dominate the century through a combination of wealth and force has, I think, been broken by Iraq — whatever now happens in Iraq. The world doesn’t want it; it’s contemptuous of it. And therefore an element of normalization, and of America becoming a country like other countries, is very healthy and will be very welcome.

But there’s another aspect of this, which is that there was always something about America which said: this is what it’s like to be a modern country. The world will be like us. We are the future. Progress resides here. And for the rest of the world — certainly after 1945, essentially when I grew up — the American way of life, its freedom, its wealth, its liberties, its music… this is what it was to be a modern person. This is no longer the case. For the last ten or 15 years young people have not seen America as what what it’s like to be a modern person. Obama, however, does say something like… “well, it really is an open political system in some ways. Perhaps this recreates a potential for people saying: yeah, right, we want to be like that. America means it. It talks the talk about democracy, freedom and human rights, and actually is delivering. It means it.” That does represent a potential re-lighting of the American example.

Anthony Barnett of openDemocracy in conversation with Kanishk Tharoor of openUSA and Chris Lydon of Open Source, June 18, 2008

openUSA is a freshet of unusually angular commentaries on our campaign, and we mean to drink deeply from it.

Dan Ariely’s genius in Predictably Irrational is for simple social experiments that become giant public parables. Here’s how playing with the taste of beer, for example, takes him to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse: in the student pub at MIT, where Ariely taught, drinkers much preferred the “MIT Brew” to straight Budweiser — unless they were told in advance that “MIT brew” was Budweiser doctored with a few drops of balsamic vinegar. If they knew beforehand what they were drinking, a sour expectation overrode the pleasure of the experience. Moral: preconceptions rule. Application: since memory and preconditioning are so irremediably different between Israelis and Palestinians, only a strong and fair third-party can lift them to a resolution.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with
Dan Ariely (37 minutes, 14 mb mp3)

What could he learn at Duke University from the prolonged test of wills by which “Final Four” basketball tickets were alloted to rabid student fans? When the lottery was over and the tickets awarded, Professor Ariely tried to make a market with students who’d won and others who’d lost out. But there was no price point to be found. Students without tickets wouldn’t pay more than $175 for what they’d missed. Students who had tickets wouldn’t take anything less than $2400 for what now felt invaluable. Moral: we overprice what we already have. Application: commentators and Congress folk are stuck (hopeless, but still stuck) with an Iraq war in which they signed (irrationally) for what are now “sunk costs.”

Neither does war remorse necessarily restore rationality, as Dan Ariely observes in our conversation. The Iraq war has set a new “anchor” price for foreign adventure, just as Starbucks re-set the price of your morning coffee. At $1-trillion or more, the Iraq war could make a sequel look like a bargain. Beware also what Ariely calls the “decoy effect.” We all shop by comparision, and tend to go for the less-flawed version in a pair. The “decoy effect” is the reason why Dan Ariely suggests that for success at a singles’ event: bring along a friend who looks like you but is slightly less attractive. It’s the decoy effect that’s being used to suggest that a mere air attack on Iran, without a ground invasion, would be a cinch compared to Iraq.

Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational reads to me like a catalog of the Bush follies and how a lazy great nation fell for them. In the book and in our conversation there may also be a rough map of the road back to American Pragmatism and the William James test of policies and ideas: how do they work in practice?

On Leaving Iraq: It turns out that the bigger and more effortful thing that you have done – the more attached you feel to it. Partially it’s regret. If we have invested $400 billion dollars and we will just leave it as it is and we haven’t achieved anything, we will feel like it’s a real waste. So what do we do? We keep on investing more and more in the hope that it will achieve something in the future. We can speculate evolutionarily how much [the attachment process] makes sense. You do want a mechanism that gets us attached to our kids, family, community and ideology, but it turns out it’s a very strong force and even when we adapt a wrong path, we have a very hard time overcoming this. This is the place where you can actually think of what the role of democracy is, reflecting people’s opinions versus people’s best interests. If we have people that are extremely attached to the war in Iraq, and the cord was severed, in two months they would not be attached any more. I don’t think people are able to predict how quickly they would get over this feeling of complete waste of this war. Right now, people think that if we stop [the war], it would have all had been for nothing. And how long would it take them to get used to the fact that it will have all been for nothing? I think it’s much shorter than they would have guessed. It’s a real dilemma about who you’re serving for a politician. The people of the moment who think that they will feel that it’s gone to waste or the people in two months who would be relieved that the war is over.

On Obamania: I’ll tell you another thing that worries me about Obama. We wrote a paper about a year ago on online dating. What we basically found was that when people describe themselves in less precise terms, they are more popular. The reason is that when you are vague, everyone can read into them what they want. You say you like music. It turns out that everyone thinks you like the same music that they like. Vagueness translates into liking. It turns out that the same thing happens with pictures, by the way. You put up pictures that are slightly more fuzzy and people think that you are more attractive. The second thing that we discovered is that people get crushed when they meet for coffee… I think Obama has been relatively vague compared to Hillary. We’ve known her for a very long time and she’s been more clear. People can read into Obama what they want, which is one of his appeals. At the same time, I think that we’ll have coffee with Obama at some point. The only question is when will we have coffee with Obama? The truth is that no human being can stand up to the expectations that the public has for Obama. At some point we will get disappointed. The question is how much and when.

Dan Ariely of Predictably Irrational, in conversation with Chris Lydon, June 9, 2008

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Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Russell Banks (47 minutes, 21 mb mp3)

Banks’s new book Dreaming Up America is something else again. It’s a conversation about the country — all context and history and angles of observation, no plot. The story is us, in the year we choose between McCain and Obama. It’s a form I love: the prophetic or at least deeply intuitive artist thinking out loud about whatever it is we are all going through. The Banks version of this presidential campaign year is that we are caught, as always, in the braid of American Dreams — the dreams of (1) moral freedom and virtue, (2) wealth and (3) reinvention; that is, the dreams of very different settlers of these shores: the Puritans’ dream of a City on a Hill; the Mid-Atlantic mercantilists’ dream of a City of Commerce; and Vasco da Gama’s dream of a Fountain of Youth… (or “starting over,” or maybe “Change You Can Believe In.”) Banks is inclined to believe all the dreams are illusions, maybe delusions, and that they’re all compromised now by the resurgence of a bullying imperial “get what you can grab” impulse that is “nothing new” in American history, going back to Manifest Destiny and our wars over Mexico, Cuba and the Philippines. There’s much to argue with in Dreaming Up America, but to my taste the style and form of the enterprise are thrilling. A French television producer had come to Banks (also to Jim Harrison) with the idea of a conversation explaining America. The conversation with Russell Banks ran to eleven hours of “my ranting and ruminating,” and when he’d polished the transcript just a little, he realized there was a book in it, and surely an example of other spoken meditations grounded only in lifetimes of study and reflection. Banks gave me a notion of others we should be conversing with about America in 2008 — William Vollman;, the Nigerian I met in Jamaica Chris Abani; the U.S. Poet Laureate, Belgrade-born Charles Simic. Who else, please, should be on our target list? Here’s a taste of my conversation with Banks. Think of this as a beginning:

On pop culture: I’m fascinated by this plethora of superhero movies. Movies that are about men, in almost every case, that are stronger than humanly imaginable, who have super powers - from Spiderman to Ironman, and so on - and the enormous popularity of those movies. What need are those movies meeting? I think they’re in response to a sense of powerlessness. There was a time when those were comic books that were read by pre-adolescent boys, primarily, who tend to feel really powerless.

I think that the audience for those movies is not just kids. There are vast numbers of people going to see those movies and getting a big thrill out of them - a big hit. I think that they tap into that growing sense of powerless, powerless in terms of the larger world - controlling events outside of our immediate bailiwicks, but also a sense of powerlessness with regard to our own lives the shape and form of our own lives. Those movies, I think, really tap into that. Movies are projections. The movies that in fact were not successful in the last couple of years were movies that purport to be quite serious movies about reality on the ground in Iraq and other parts of the world. They flopped, one after another. People didn’t want to go out there and see that ugly hard truth. That doesn’t mean it’s true, it just means it’s too painful to look at right now. And we’d rather see Spiderman, Ironman or the return of Superman. That’s kind of a drugging state.

On contemporary fiction: Our literature… tends to float in two directions - to the paranoic despair, something like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Don DeLillo’s work to simple domestic escapism and melodrama. There’s not a whole lot in the middle that is trying to investigate the world that ordinary people live in and see it from an angle that will give us historical perspective. One of the things that troubles me sometimes about contemporary American fiction is that much of it is written as if there no historical context for the characters - as if there was nothing else going on except for the immediate daily life of these characters, when in fact we all have historical context. I may be sitting here worrying about balancing my checkbook or my wife’s illness or this or that, but in the meantime there is a war going on and there is possibly the most important election in the last half century going on. So there is a context for everything that happens to me on a daily basis, and I think too much American fiction leaves that out, or if they do write about history, they use it as a gimmick, 9/11 for instance, has appeared periodically, but it’s basically a stage set.

On writers in power: I thinks it’s terrific [that Obama writes his own seriously searching prose]. I mean that’s a positive thing, very much so. The question for me is always what’s he going to be like after he’s been in the Senate for 10 years or after he’s been president and run for president for two years. These experiences change a person. For instance, I knew John Kerry slightly, way back when, in the beginning of Vietnam Veterans against the War and so forth, and spent a little time with him then. I thought then that he was an extraordinary man. After 16 years in the Senate, he turned into a bubblehead, basically, because he lived in a bubble, and that’s what happens. I think they exteriorize themselves, over time, until there is no there there - there is no interior left. And Obama certainly has an interior life, a rich and vibrant one as evidenced by his writings, and, I think, as evidenced by his actions up to recently. Now, can he preserve that interior life given the requirements of public office in America today? I’m not so sure. You know, actors go a little crazy, politicians go a little crazy, musicians go a little crazy because they lose their inner life. They are etherealized into the media - sucked up and packaged and sent out the other side, and there’s nothing left. In the past a politician could run for president and not really leave the front porch too much. You had a private interior life, you weren’t turned into a product the way we turn our politicians and our public figures into products. Writers have the same problem on a much diminished scale, artists and intellectuals too, because the media wants to make you a celebrity. The danger of that is that in the process you will lose your interior life, and it’s your interior life that you depend upon for your work.

Russell Banks of Dreaming Up America, in conversation with Chris Lydon, May 30, 2008

Bob Marley and Barack Obama are the absent heroes of the 8th annual Calabash literary festival in Jamaica: Marley, because his music and poetry incarnate the living “reggae aesthetic” (with the pan-African, Judaeo-Christian, sexual, political and celebratory overtones which the poet and Calabash co-founder Kwame Dawes expounds in conversation here). And Obama, because he seems to stand for a possibility that is artistic as well as political — for the idea that imagination can lead the way, that shocking transformations can develop before our eyes. I don’t know how many people I heard say things like: “I never thought that I would live to see the Berlin Wall fall down,” or more often: “I never thought I would see the day when Nelson Mandela walked free in South Africa. And I never thought I’d see a black man nominated for president in the United States.” So the suspense of the Obama moment in America touches this gathering of writers and readers in the West Indes. And for many of the writers I interviewed at Calabash, the Obama moment in America has implications that are artistic as well as political. The poet Yusef Komunyakaa made the literary link with Obama this way: “I think it has everything to do with possibility,” he said. “The writer is definitely a dreamer.”

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations on the Obama Moment at Calabash ‘08 (26 minutes, 12 mb mp3)

So I asked a number of the writers at Calabash to fill in the connection between the Barack Obama politics back in the States with the stories and poems and dreams being read out to a couple of thousand listeners on a beach in the Caribbean in this late spring of 2008. I begin with Lorna Goodison, a very popular novelist and poet in Jamaica who has taught since 1991 in Canada and at the University of Michigan.

I have students come to me and say, ‘I’m not coming to class, I’m gonna work for Barack.’ I’ve never ever seen that. It would be a real sin if that youthful enthusiasm and verve and engagement just went away… I’ve been teaching a West Indian literature course and it just turns into a course of poetry… Do you know John Agard’s “Palm Tree King”?

Because I come from the West Indies / certain people in England seem to think / I is a expert on palm trees

So not wanting to sever dis link / with me native roots (know what ah mean?) / or to disappoint dese culturer vulture / I does smile cool as seabreeze…

I sense in my students a need to be seen for who they are and my sense is this business of stereotyping people or putting people into categories is just something that the world seems to be really tired of, or they want to break out of, and I think that maybe that explains something about Barack, because Barack has defied a lot of these stereotypes. Although I think, as Derek [Walcott] said the other day, “The day when black man can be vilified for being elitist in the United States is a great day.” That is my reading of it.

Lorna Goodison of From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island, in conversation with Chris Lydon at Calabash ‘08, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2008

Thomas Glave is a Jamaica writer who teaches in the States, starting at MIT in the fall. He’s just edited an anthology of gay writing from the Caribbean:

The very idea of something unthinkable, which is that there could be a black man in the United States White House, is already, in itself, an enormous proposition, and that charges the imagination. It charges my imagination to begin thinking many other things, like, ‘what else might be possible in the United States?’ But it also, I think, stokes faith that actually people can change and people actually can be accountable to one another as human beings and that perhaps racism, and ethnocentrism, and bigotry are not always intransigent forces, and that gives me more faith in human beings.

Thomas Glave of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, in conversation with Chris Lydon at Calabash ‘08, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2008

The poet Kwame Dawes wrote the book, literally, on the reggae aesthetic. He likes being called “the busiest man in literature today,” and he’s all over the globe: born in Ghana, schooled in Jamaica, now a professor at the University of South Carolina, and not yet 50 years old. Kwame Dawes has been writing his own blog from Calabash. He spoke with me about the range of reggae meanings in his life on his way to defining this Obama moment for the United States and the world.

Colin Channer and I have a saying: always turn to reggae if you’re in a crisis to see what the answer is. You know, when people would say: ‘what would Jesus do?’ we say: ‘what would reggae do?’ Reggae music achieves a remarkable thing. It manages to be at once a deeply spiritual music, rooted in a Rastafarian belief system and a strong engagement with Judaeo-Christian ideas but turning them into an Afrocentric series of ideas. And at the same time it manages to articulate political sensibility and sensitivities, and in that sense it speaks to the present in connection with a larger understanding of the history of a people. On top of that it is fundamentally a sensual music of visceral passionate response. It is about dancing. It is about sex. It is about the body. It’s about all of these things. So in one reggae lyric you can get all of these elements. And it seemed to me discovering this as a young guy engaging Bob Marley’s music, I began to think if I could write poems that achieved that kind of breadth and complexity within the same line, then I’m beginning to find something I could call an effective aesthetic…

Barack Obama and his campaign. I think that’s the story. I think we like to be fair and balanced and pretend there’s another story happening, but that’s the story… A win by Barack Obama does not necessarily mean that all has changed… I think Americans would need to shift something in their minds to accept that their president is a Black man. I think Black, white and Hispanic Americans - something dramatic would have to shift in their minds…

Power won’t change. I don’t think that Barack Obama will not be an imperialist. I think he will be an imperialist, but we can look at models of imperialism and say maybe… Maybe he is Joseph in that biblical narrative, or is he Moses who gets out of Egypt. So they are paradigms that are called to question.

Kwame Dawes of Bob Marley, Lyrical Genius, in conversation with Chris Lydon at Calabash ‘08, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2008

The Caribbean literary festival known as Calabash breathes the wondrous tropical salt air of Bob Marley, Derek Walcott and C. L. R. James — an air of lyricism, multiplicity and resistance. It’s the air of a once neglected precinct of empire that has produced by now a powerfully diasporic people and consciousness. Chris Abani, the exiled Nigerian poet now teaching in Los Angeles, observed at the start of his remarks to Calabash ‘08 that “there would be no Nigeria without Jamaica. All the freedom movements in Africa,” he said, “began in the Caribbean.”

Calabash, in its 8th year, has made a name along the writers’ tour for edginess, freedom and outspoken talent. It is a monument to what the co-founders Colin Channer and Kwame Dawes honor as the “reggae aesthetic,” by which one learns that they mean a Marley-inspired mix of earthiness, spirituality, social urgency, sensuality, celebration and, of course, great music.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with authors at Calabash 08 (48 minutes, 22 mb mp3)

I came to Calabash ‘08 to hear perspectives from wildly articulate near neighbors on the United States, at an inflection point on matters like race, power, and globlalism. I brought with me the conceit that Caribbean writers and thinkers cast the intimate, critical backstage eye on America that Irish wits traditionally trained on imperial England. It’s a penetrating but not unloving gaze. One senses among the Calabash writers a rising confidence, maybe a second surge of post-colonial feeling. There’s a pervasive dismay about the American condition, and an inescapable excitement about the Obama possibility. Not all the Calabash crowd is Jamaican: one of the best-received readers is an Irishman who lives in the American Midwest, whose last novel is set in Maine. Among the Jamaicans, many teach in the States and all know us better, for sure, than we know them.

The last time I came to Jamaica, I stumbled on the possibility of local-global radio. This time I gathered a sort of composite conversation. This first section is a ramble on whatever it is we are all “going through.” The second, to follow, reflects on the Obama phenomenon.

Margaret Cezair-Thompson is a novelist, both popular and serious, who teaches creative writing at Wellesley College:

We have a unique perspective. I think it’s true of all the islands, it’s just many many different layers of race and culture and many different histories all mixed together… and it hasn’t caused a weakening in our perspective or any kind of dilution. I think we have very intense feelings about race, about politics, about tradition, cultures, but we have a way of having those things being expressed side by side without great problem. And that’s why these racial issues that have come up with the Obama campaign… for me as a Jamaican, it seems naïve to be so completely shocked or overly fascinated by the idea that he’s of mixed race… People in Jamaica have been thinking along those terms for centuries. Bob Marley has a white father and a black mother. For centuries African American have been dealing with the fact that they are of mixed ancestry, that they are a hybrid people. What I love about Obama is that he’s, in a sense, bringing this into the face of America where it hasn’t been dealt with before…

Margaret Cezair-Thompson, novelist of The Pirate’s Daughter in conversation with Chris Lydon at Calabash 08, Treasure Beach, Jamaica. May 23, 2008.

Gerard Donovan, the Galway-born novelist, picked up the Irish connection that Margaret Cezair Thompson had affirmed:

It’s a simple fact that Ireland did get the English language from the English, and then improved it and gave it back to them. And I have this feeling that Jamaica has an upsurge in music and poetry and song that is finding its own melody as they begin to gain in confidence. It’s all about a nation’s confidence… With it comes the art of being able to tell your story and the story of people who’ve gone before you. I do believe that artists do come from a particular country, they are not individuals. In the end, I think every writer comes from a place and ultimately writes about that place…

Gerard Donovan, novelist of Julius Winsome in conversation with Chris Lydon at Calabash 08, Treasure Beach, Jamaica. May 24, 2008.

Beverly East is a forensic graphologist — a handwriting expert — as well as best-selling novelist. She speaks the many accents of Jamaicans in England and the States and at home:

I like to think I’m tri-cultural. I was born in Jamaica, raised in England and now living in America, I see the world in three dimensions. I consider myself a Jamaican, but when I in America, I am very conscious that I am an immigrant. I am very conscious that I have this Green Card that Homeland Security can take away from me at any moment. I tip-toe gently when I’m in the states. I feel like I don’t even want to get a [traffic] ticket. I never felt that way until 9/11. I felt differently when the Patriot Act came in, and then the D.C. sniper with one of them being Jamaican. You know, you get a little nervous… I always think I’m viewed as the drug mule, the alternative person that would be bringing the weed or the drugs from Jamaica to the United States…

Beverly East, novelist of Reaper of Souls in conversation with Chris Lydon at Calabash 08, Treasure Beach, Jamaica. May 23, 2008.

Yusef Komunyakaa won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994. Born in Bogalusa, Louisiana in 1947, he is best known as a “jazz poet” and a poet of Vietnam. This was his first trip to Jamaica.

We have extremely
poor people completely divorced from the pursuit of happiness in America for the simple reason that they don’t have dreams. That is very devastating especially when this deficit in dreaming is passed on to young people. For some young people, the only thing they inherit is rage and that is deadly and unhealthy. [The Calabsh community] is almost like an extended family, isn’t it? Some of the same challenges some of the same thoughts. Not that there is an immense agreement, but it’s a community of ideas, and that is very important.

Yusef Komunyakaa, poet of “Love in a Time of War” in conversation with Chris Lydon at Calabash 08, Treasure Beach, Jamaica. May 23, 2008.

Chris Abani was imprisoned for his outspokenly political early poetry in Nigeria. He remembers the the music star Fela Kouti in the same lock-up, telling him “truth is a risky business.” He’s himself a very hot American literary star nowadays, based in Los Angeles, and still speaking truth to power.

I think the end of Bush moment, the frenzy in America, is a very disingenuous frenzy. I think Americans voted this man in. When he clearly cheated on this election, they did nothing to stop him. When he started a false war, they did nothing to impeach him. It’s now easy to join the bandwagon of people calling for the end of Bush or distancing themselves from him, but all of America, even those who protested the war, because that is not enough, rode on America’s empire, and this is what happens when empire fails – everyone tries to get off a sinking ship…

Chris Abani, poet and novelist of Graceland in conversation with Chris Lydon at Calabash 08, Treasure Beach, Jamaica. May 24, 2008.

“It’s going to be nasty,” Derek Walcott said, prefacing his war on V. S. Naipaul with a warning. “The Mongoose” was the last of Walcott’s new poems at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica last weekend. He’d wondered whether he ought to read it, Walcott said, “and then I figured if I don’t do it, I’ll say: what the hell, you should have done it… I think you’ll recognize Mr. Naipaul.”

Click to listen to Derek Walcott’s “Chatterbox” conversation and reading at Calabash 08 (42 minutes, 19 mb mp3)

Nasty it was. And beastly (”a rodent in old age”). It was smelly (”And off the page its biles exude the stench / Of envy, la pourriture in French”). Also sexual (”He doesn’t like black men, but he likes black cunt”). It was indiscreetly personal (”This is a common fact in his late fiction. / He told me once he thought sex was just friction”). And in its anti-racialism, it was racial (”To show its kindness it clutches a kitten / That looks as if it’s scared of being bitten / Right at the neck; it’s the Mongoose’s nature, It cannot help that it was born in Asia”). And it was crowd-pleasingly funny (”Cursed its first breath for being Trinidadian, / Then wrote the same piece for the English Guardian. / Once he liked humans, how long ago this was. / The Mongoose wrote: A House for Mister Biswas.“).

Naipaul, 75, started it, as kids say of sandbox fights, with a book-excerpt in the Guardian last summer that was taken as a dismissal of 78-year-old Walcott (”a man whose talent had been all but strangled by his colonial setting”) and yet another in a long series of insults to the black Caribbean (Walcott, said Naipaul, “sang the praises of the emptiness; he gave it a kind of intellectual substance. He gave their unhappiness a racial twist that made it more manageable.”) Walcott has jabbed before at “V. S. Nightfall.” But on Saturday came the full blitz — from the Caribbean’s first Nobel prize winner for literature (in 1992) against the second (2001).

The Mongoose

I have been bitten. I must avoid infection,

Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.

Read his last novels. You’ll see just what I mean:

A lethargy approaching the obscene.

The model is Maugham, more ho-hum than Dickens.

The essays have more bite. They scatter chickens,

Like critics. But each studied phrase is poison,

Since he has made that sneering style a prison.

Their plots are forced, the prose sedate and silly.

The anti-hero is a prick named Willy,

Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or Lawrence

And whines with his creator’s self-abhorrence…

Derek Walcott, reading from his new poems at Calabash 08, the international literary festival at Treasure Beach, Jamaica. Saturday, May 24, 2008

This wasn’t what I came to Calabash for, and it wasn’t the best poetry to be heard over the long weekend. But it was the “lede,” as we newspaper guys say, on Calabash 08. And it betokened both the high hilarity and the underlying seriousness of the scene. There is venom yet in the old antagonisms of colony and empire, class and caste, Africa and India even in the context of Trinidad, where Naipaul’s ancestors came to work the cane fields after black slavery was abolished in 1833. The Walcott version here was: “Imported from India and trained to ferret snakes and elude Africans, / The Mongoose takes its orders from the Raj.” Walcott, though a world figure himself, summons the resentment of race and region against the universalist Naipaul, who “climbed to club- and gate-house with good manners, / The squirearchy from the canefields of Chiguanas.”

I thought once all the Mongoose needed

for greatness was compassion, if it had heeded

The gaping wound from all the blades he hated;

And so his name was one I nominated

For the laurel branch. For five years he waited.

India and England were in his citation

Of gratitude, but not the Negroid nation

That nursed his gift…

Derek Walcott, reading from his new poems at Calabash 08, the international literary festival at Treasure Beach, Jamaica. Saturday, May 24, 2008

The mostly Jamaican audience hung on every word — 2000 or so celebrants from the avidly bookish “Calabash demographic,” as poet and organizer Kwame Dawes puts it. (The poet Valzhyna Mort from Bellaruss struck a chord when she remarked later that day: “You are by far the sexiest audience I’ve ever stood before!”) As Walcott hammered away at Naipaul, there were listeners who kept laughing at couplets of cleverness, and others who looked half-aghast at the fury on display. I had a sudden flash of Emile Griffiths, the welterweight champion, beating Benny Paret literally to death in Madison Square Garden in 1962 — a moment of gladiatorial excess that Norman Mailer gave literary immortality. Naipaul wasn’t in the ring with Walcott, but some referees would have jumped in to save Walcott from himself. I also wondered: has Derek Walcott — whose masterwork may be Omeros, a modern Caribbean telling of Homer’s Iliad — dwelt overlong on the rivalries of Achilles and Hector?

“The Mongoose” was not, in any event, Walcott’s only contribution. In conversation with the remarkable Ghanaian, Jamaican and now American poet and all-round all-star Kwame Dawes (of whom more later), Walcott spilled a lifetime’s learning about the lively, literary and visual arts with the relaxed air of a master practitioner and teacher.

On music: The cliché is that the Caribbean has a rhythm. It’s not a cliché, but it’s so true and so obvious that it’s a cliché. Whether it’s Latin America or the Caribbean or Central America, the basis and beat of all those art forms are basically rhythmic, very rhythmic. And the rhythm of course is African. I don’t want to do one of those, you know, waving flags, or race, and so on… And I think it relates very strongly to the fact that the music that we speak is a language. We have a language in the music we write. And we think simultaneously in both words and music. We don’t divide ourselves into, say, composer and lyricist. This instinct of crystallizing two forms into one is a very Caribbean thing.

On his own painting and contemporary art: My father was a very good watercolorist, and my mother understood what we wanted to do because her husband was a writer and painter. I was completely encouraged by Harold Simmons, a painter; we used to use his studio. There’s nothing better for a young writer or painter than to have someone who takes his or her work seriously. I had great teachers. My mother was a teacher. Part of the work I do is teaching, and I enjoy working with young poets a great deal. I’m a square in terms of painting. I hate Abstract Expressionism. I cannot stand it. Which is nonsense, because there are some great Abstract Expressionists, I think. I just think it’s very hard in art to do what is — to get what is there. I think there are a lot of artists who ignore the fact that we yearn for meaning, and who think (especially in America) that meaning is passé, you know; or syntax is passé; certainly rhyme is passé. You find a lot of that in America, because America’s dictum is: everything has to be new, and everything is based on psychology rather than aesthetics. So the natural direction of any actor is toward a nervous breakdown.

On the New American Empire in the arts: There’s a very dangerous thing that is happening in the Caribbean, and that is: we are dictated to, still, by what used to be the empire. The new American empire is the world empire, and whatever the tastes of the empire are, they’re inflicted on the colonies of that empire. So we are the intellectual colonies of America; so is a lot of the world. So if people say in America now — which they do — that painting is finished, and now what you have is installation or some other thing, then the young Caribbean artist feels that he’s out of it if he or she doesn’t do what the empire thinks if fashionable. And what fashionable, or unfashionable, is that you don’t tell stories, you don’t mold character, you don’t have a beginning, a middle, an end. That’s old fashioned. Well, it’s a great thing that the Caribbean art is old-fashioned, because you still tell stories, which is what the human heart craves. And you still have a culture that speaks directly to its people in terms of songs, and the lyrics of songs. There aren’t that many cultures that still do that. How many people in Germany sing a German folk song?

You see, there’s an urgency in America to make it new, to get famous. And you can get very famous in America, and make a lot of money. When Rent came out, I thought: Rent! Who wants to see a thing called Rent? Many years later the author is dead, and the composer is dead, but he’s a multi-millionaire. Now the danger here is to think in terms of being a multi-millionaire in any of the forms, including painting, because there are some terrible painters who make millions of dollars in the States because they’re so terrible… So we have a very very different life here in terms of a balance that is not too affected, not too provincial, not too rootsy or something. The individual has to choose where it’s going. And I think it’s a very healthy condition we’re in now.

To Kwame Dawes’ question about reinventing tradition, finding a new sense of possibility… Your generation of writers is very good. They’re not just belligerently Caribbean, not all-black or all-Indian. There’s a balance now being struck that I’m very happy to see…

The answer lies in melody. If your vocal melody is true to your own character, you’re okay. You don’t have to break out in dialect or nationality, if your melody is right. So it’s not a matter of one melody being better than the other. The rhythm that you speak is the rhythm that you write in. The rhythm you and I speak is a common rhythm, right? We may write differently but what we have as the basis of our — I don’t want to say ‘culture’ because I’m tired of the word ‘culture,’ especially now…

It’s very hard to be true — it takes you a long time, for any artist it takes your lifetime to write something, to write something that is your own melody, something that is not mixed up or influenced or corrupted by other things. A culture grows like that. I mean, American culture, according to Hemingway, didn’t really happen until Mark Twain wrote ‘American.’ The difference is that Mark Twain didn’t write bad grammar to be American, right? Huck Finn spoke a certain way. But I think the wrong thing is to feel that you have to fix up your own grammar, you have to mash up what was there before, and so on. You have to absorb all the cultures into one. Whereas what you should do is accomodate. What we have to be in the Caribbean is sponges. You have to absorb all the cultures into one, and not isolate one particular one… Yes, and I think Caribbean literature has just begun, really.

On his own life and work: I’m 78, right? I never thought I’d get here. I thought I was going to die at 30. I saw everything. I saw the gravestone, I saw the people coming to visit it. I saw the brackets and my name, “died at 25.” Oh, my God, fifty years later I’m still here… I’m going to be reading some stuff that — I say to myself: this is very simple, this is very ordinary. And I think I am delighting in that, not from any sense of resignation about anything. I just don’t like it now when any art makes a fuss. I don’t like any over-agitated poetry, because I know the technique, I know what people are doing. I know they’re going to be very bright. I don’t want to be bright. I don’t want to be intimidated when I read a poem, or challenged, or grabbed by the collar. I just want them to let me alone, please. Let me read the poem in peace, you know. And so I am coming to a point where even if it appears to be resignation and repetition, I don’t care as long as it’s clear, as long as what I am saying is at least honest emotionally.

I’m very irritated about style — style in painting, style in music. Style is a way of attracting attention to the creator of the thing, right? What we want is to be anonymous, and transparent, ultimately, I think. Now there can be a very high transparency, Dante’s transparency. You don’t look at Dante’s writing. You just have the poetry, and it’s like looking through glass. You look through the poem like stained glass, into the source of the poem. You don’t look at Dante’s psychology. That would be the last thing he’d want. But this is an age in which everything is based on character, so the more interesting you make your own character, the more interesting you can become. Nobody strives for anonymity. That’s almost a contradition, but that’s what art strives for. I would like to evaporate in front of the poem…

Derek Walcott in the “Chatterbox” session of the Calabash festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica. In conversation with Kwame Dawes, Saturday May 24,2008.

Derek Walcott had top billing before he got to Calabash, and “The Mongoose” was the talk of the festival to the end. My mission, however, was to catch the rhythm and melody of the Caribbean as a commentary on the Obama moment in the States, what feels like a challenge to the imagination of the whole wide world. So the conversations from Calabash 08 have just begun.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ben Haggarty & Company (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3)

Ben Haggarty picks up on the question “where do stories come from?” at roughly the point where David Amram left off on the mystery of where music comes from. David Amram said his music comes from what touched his heart in train whistles and the sounds of his father’s farm, later from the cadences of Jack Kerouac and flights of Dizzy Gillespie. Ben Haggarty’s folk tales come from as far back as the Stone Age. Many of the same stories, he says, turn up in Japan and in Ireland, in Greek mythology and the trenches of World War One. No, Ben says, it doesn’t turn out that there are six basic stories in the world. There are more nearly 6-billion stories, or more likely 6-billion times 6-billion becau