Be free
I was going to write about how Georgia and Jonathan and I kind of stormed the Miriam Makeba concert last night with Attillah's help, but I see Georgia got there first.
I spent much of this Emancipation Day at the office reading page proofs--such is the tyranny of magazine deadlines. In between, I've been thinking about something Attillah wrote in her Guardian column last Saturday, about what it really means to be free:
I tell my elders I am not interested in struggling. I want to win now.
I reason with bredrins about this struggle thing. Everything for a time and a season. I don't want to be 50 and saying the same things, fighting the same causes. I want to do the job right and once.
My bredrin says choose your battles wisely. But what are the battles that we choose? There will always be those who think something is impossible....
The time for struggling to get along with each other is coming to an end. I declare myself emancipated from the politics of resentment. I declare myself emancipated from the politics of paranoia.
I declare myself emancipated from any confusion between freedom and freeness.
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Who is Nicholas Laughlin?
I am a writer (read some of my reviews, essays, etc. at Choosing My Confessions), editor of The Caribbean Review of Books and Caribbean Beat, and programme director of the Bocas Lit Fest. Visit my home page for more details. I’m a bit more active on Twitter: @nplaughlin.
I’m a co-director of Alice Yard, an experimental creative space and network in Port of Spain.
I co-edit Town, a modest literary magazine published in two formats: broadsides posted in public locations around Port of Spain, and online.
See photos at my Flickr page.
See my collaboration with artist Christopher Cozier, Tropical Night.
Amours de voyage; or, notes from an occasional traveller.
Some poems.
Email me at:
nicholaslaughlin[at]gmail[dot]com
My second book of poems, Enemy Luck, was published in 2019 by Peepal Tree Press.
My first book of poems, The Strange Years of My Life, was published in 2015 by Peepal Tree Press.
I’m a co-director of Alice Yard, an experimental creative space and network in Port of Spain.
I co-edit Town, a modest literary magazine published in two formats: broadsides posted in public locations around Port of Spain, and online.
See photos at my Flickr page.
See my collaboration with artist Christopher Cozier, Tropical Night.
Amours de voyage; or, notes from an occasional traveller.
Some poems.
Email me at:
nicholaslaughlin[at]gmail[dot]com
Blogs I read oftenish
Caribbean magazines, journals, newspapers
Literary magazines, websites, and blogs around the world
Other people, places, things that interest me (in no particular order)
Blog Archive
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- Be freeI was going to write about how Georgia and ...
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1 comment:
She writes well. I like her style. Don't you really know how the Syrians/Lebanese feel? I don't know for sure about the Syrians/Lebanese in Jamaica, but I get the impression that they don't really care, that they have divorced themselves from what happens there.
Of course, I am basing my impressions on observation of the children of Syrian immigrants rather than on the immigrants themselves, as most of those who actually came to Jamaica from over there came in my father and my grandfather's time, not mine.
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