[Swprograms] BBC World Service Documentary: "Caribbean Voices"

["Alan Roe" <alan-roe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have just come across this series on the BBC World Service about the BBC
WS broadcasts called "Caribbean Voices" which began in the 1950's.   The
series is currently being repeated in "The Wednesday Documentary" slot -
part two this week.  Part one is still available on Listen Again at:
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p008grqf/>

or go to The Wednesday Documentary web pages where parts one and two can
both be downloaded on-demand, at:
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2009/07/090721_caribbean_voices_1.shtml>

(Alan Roe, Teddington, UK)

===========================================

The Wednesday Documentary: Caribbean Voices

What is the Caribbean voice? In the 1950s, the BBC World Service conjured it
up. Through its weekly programme, Caribbean voices were revealed to be
haunting and melodious, salty, pungent, sun-drenched, wry, amusing, earnest
and unique.

If a good newspaper acts as a nation talking to itself, then Caribbean
Voices distinguished itself as a sounding board for the British colonies in
Caribbean.

Poets, playwrights and prose writers (amateur and professional) sent forth
their contributions from the Antilles and those stories, selected, edited
and fastidiously recorded washed back over the airwaves as the BBC called
the Caribbean.

In this two-part series the radio producer and independent historian Colin
Grant, examines how Caribbean Voices served to kick start a literary
tradition in the Caribbean.

The door of the freelancers' room at the Langham Hotel, with its ochre walls
and pea-green dado, was always wide open and a host of soon-to-be famous
names walked through: Sam Selvon, Derek Walcott, Andrew Salkey, V.S. Naipaul
and many others.

The series will travel back to the anxious beginnings of these impoverished
fledgling writers who tapped out their stories, on the smooth non-rustle
paper, to the sound of their bellies knocking on their backbones.

In part one, Colin Grant talks to some of the original contributors,
including the Noble Laureate, Derek Walcott and George Lamming about the
remarkable beginnings of Caribbean Voices, drawing listeners back to the
1940s where in the midst of war an indomitable Jamaican, Una Marson caught
the attention of BBC bosses, and was given the job of reflecting life in
Britain to people in the Caribbean and vice-versa.

On one level this might simply be Caribbean servicemen and women stationed
in England reading letters home; later there would be meditations on the
nature of prejudice that the immigrants found on their arrival, and still
later Caribbean Voices became a show-case for burgeoning literary endeavour.

In part two, Colin asks writers who they think they are, who are their
readers and whether they strive for recognition at home or abroad.

He also looks at the impact the populist Jamaican poet, Louise Bennett had
on the country's most popular art form, pantomime and how the film 'The
Harder The Come', brought Jamaican patois and music to mainstream audiences.

He speaks to the organiser of the literary festival Calabash who feels that
present Caribbean authors are not being pigeon holed by history and writing
about slavery and colonialism but writing about everything and anything.

Colin also finds out why local bookshops are maybe to blame for the lack of
Caribbean literature in the region themselves.

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