See the interviews regarding this historic event. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuy4X5sihPM

The need for oportunities and positive images....

Listen to the Today programme here:

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Poet and story teller JANE GRILL reports:

  In August 2013 Dominica held its sixth annual literary festival - Litfest. One of the ways in which the festival honoured the memory of Martiniquan revolutionary poet, Aime Cesaire, was to offer a taster from his play, A Tempest, produced and directed by the artist and playwright Alwin Bully, organiser-in-chief of Litfest.

Act 1. Sc.2 takes an embittered, toil-worn Caliban and a patronisingly smug Prospero, locks them in fierce verbal and ideological combat and sparks fly.

Cesaire’s Caliban, to me, eloquently represents the archetypal tribesman – Maori, Maya, Inca, Hopi, Ibo, Asante… who shares survival strategies with the white intruder from a distant land only to be repaid with ingratitude, disdain, sometimes treachery, almost always with the inhumanity of racism.

Act 3. Sc. 2 sees two characters bumbling about the stage, French officers who have survived a shipwreck. They have somehow each managed to rescue a bottle of rum. They stumble into each other, scare the life out of each other and spend their time philosophising in between slugs of the potent alcohol.

Hysterically funny in parts, a bitter sweet production which leaves the audience to ruminate on things profound- justice and injustice, psyche and identity, powerlessness and power, enslavement and freedom. Ample reminder too that Shakespeare works in any place, any time and in any guise.

Jane Grill is the author of Praise Songs (2013)

Dec 2013