Tanya Batson-Savage, Freelance Writer
Diana Abu-Jaber at Calabash 2005 - PHOTO BY CLAUDINE HOUSEN
IT IS Saturday, the first full day of the 2005 edition of the Calabash International Literary Festival. The sea has put on her best dress of turquoise shimmering to deep blue in the sunlight. The light blue sky mercifully dotted by fluffy clouds looks down. They along with the growing gathering under the white tents on the shores of Treasure Beach St. Elizabeth are awaiting the
'lifers'.
Diana Abu-Jaber, Yvonne Brewster, Manthia Diawara and Stephanie Stokes Oliver will deliver slivers of their lives in the reading dubbed 'Life Sentence'. Abu-Jaber, daughter of an Irish- Catholic mother and a Jordanian-Palestinian father is the first to serve her sentence.
YOUTH
She read from her memoir The Language of Baklava. "A lot of the book is about fighting with my father," she explained, saying she would read the segment that detailed the worst fight. "For as long as I'd known him my father's temper roared and threatened to incinerate him and everyone else in the room," she read.
As the book's name suggests, Abu-Jaber's memoir uses food to show how it can link you to a cultural identity. In the segment she read, her aunt guided her toward womanhood while teaching her to cook. "Ask yourself, do you want a baby or do you want to bake a cake," Abu-Jaber read of her aunt's advice.
The lessons in life and cooking were followed by a dramatic reading of a life in theatre as Yvonne Brewster served hilarious snippets of The Undertaker's Daughter.
Brewster took on the voices of the various characters who had peopled her life, including her mother who is the narrative voice.
It was a delightful reading that touched on her family history, as this life sentence took its start with her grandparents who were described as "a living example of the folly of thinking you can change someone by marrying them." She then followed through with pieces of her life as a student in England and a visit to the United States both of which highlighted the rampant nature of racism in both countries at the time.
ACCEPTANCE
Brewster's final segment which she revealed she had selected because of the screening of The Harder They Come on Friday night dealt with some of the incidents in creating the classic film.
Manthia Diawara read three letters from We Won't Budge. In a much tamer delivery than the two women who preceded him, Diawara painted an image of coming to understand his identity as an African through his experiences on foreign soil. It moved from the first letter which detailed his delight in western music to a thirst for knowledge about his pre-Muslim Mali heritage.
Stephanie Stokes Oliver ended the segment with an excursion into black awareness, reading from Songs for My Father. She read two pieces, the first which showed her coming to realise that her parents were a "minority in the minority" as they were black Republicans. The second segment detailed her arrival into her own political leanings and the discovery of the idea of black beauty through the words of first Stokely Carmichael and later Mohammed Ali.
