Alvarez crosses borders for `A Wedding in Haiti’

Jennifer Kay reviews Julia Alvarez’s new book for The Huffington Post.

“A Wedding in Haiti” (Algonquin Books), by Julia Alvarez: Wedding invitations are meant to be joyous proclamations, but Julia Alvarez received one in 2009 that she had hoped would never come. A casual promise to attend a young employee’s wedding was suddenly, firmly, expected to be fulfilled, but doing so required a trip to Haiti, a place the Dominican-American writer never intended to explore.

“A Wedding in Haiti” is Alvarez’s account of how she reluctantly visited the other side of her parents’ homeland and found family connections in spite of language and circumstance.

The Dominican Republic shares the Caribbean island of Hispanola with Haiti, but Alvarez, known for exploring her heritage in her writing, including her novel “How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents,” never crossed the border until Piti’s wedding.

Alvarez met the Haitian teen called “Piti” for his small size in 2001. He had come to the Dominican Republic to find work, and over the years he became like a son to Alvarez and her husband, who run a coffee farm in the country’s mountains.

In 2009, he invited Alvarez and her husband to his wedding in northwestern Haiti. The next year, Alvarez drove Piti and his wife back to their families to check in after a catastrophic earthquake leveled much of Haiti’s capital, throwing the small, vulnerable country into greater uncertainty.

“A Wedding in Haiti” is an open-eyed view of Haiti before and after the earthquake. Alvarez has no agenda for her visits, other than attending to people she considers family; she’s not a missionary, she’s not a journalist, she’s not there to save anyone or rail against foreign policy. Her small traveling group packed in her husband’s pickup truck lacks a security detail. “We’re just here to look,” Alvarez tells someone who inquires about what a white couple is doing in a Haitian bakery on their own.

Though Alvarez is naive about what it takes to survive in Haiti and navigate its border with the Dominican Republic, her lack of cynicism leaves her open to the small but not insignificant victories of ordinary life: the sweetness of fruit that seemed too scrawny in the basket, the tidy order of a dirt yard freshly swept in the morning, the box of spaghetti that had to be delivered by car, not on foot, because a homecoming is a kind of ceremony.

“A Wedding in Haiti” is Alvarez’s view into the rural Haitian family life that never makes the news.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20120425/us-book-review-a-wedding-in-haiti/

Cayman Carnival Fetes and Festivities

Get ready to jump up and let your spirits soar! Cayman’s carnival Batabano hits the street this spring, bringing with it an abundance of colour, vibrancy and upbeat tempos, which are bound to wash away the stresses of day-to-day life.

An intrinsic part of Caribbean culture, Cayman’s very own Carnival has grown to become one of the most eagerly awaited events on the yearly entertainment calendar and very much part of Cayman life.

An excuse to don some colourful and fun costumes and dance the night away, Batabano was first introduced by the Rotary Club of Grand Cayman in 1984. For the past 10 years the carnival has been organised by an independent committee of volunteers, and has grown into an action-packed, two-week affair, including a wide range of events.

“Batabano gives us an opportunity to express unity and for a period of time once a year to forget our stress and be as one regardless of religious, financial or social divide,” Donna Myrie-Stephen, event organizer and chairperson of the Batabano committee, says of Carnival’s main aim.

“Now set to celebrate its 27th year, Batabano is dedicated to preserving Cayman’s distinctive Caribbean heritage and culture,” she adds.

The name Batabano was chosen as a salute to Cayman’s turtling heritage. The name refers to the tracks left in the sand by turtles as they drag themselves onto Cayman’s beaches to nest. Finding turtle tracks on the beach was, and still is, reason to celebrate in Cayman, thus, the name Cayman Carnival Batabano.

Carnival is a true Caribbean tradition — a cultural kaleidoscope of music, dance and pageantry with roots mirroring the region’s diverse history of African and religious influences. The colourful costumes reflect Cayman’s vibrant landscapes and traditions, and the music is the very rhythm of life in the islands. From Trinidad and Tobago, to Jamaica and the Virgin Islands, carnival is the Caribbean’s cultural expression of the arts.

The heart and soul of any carnival are the Mas Bands, which take to the streets in a whirlwind of vibrancy and splendour. Working with costume designers, local corporations, government bodies, districts and groups of individuals all come together to put on a beautifully colourful and vibrant parade. Snaking its way down West Bay Road into the heart of George Town, the parade is undoubtedly the highlight of Batabano.

During the parade, many costume designers showcase Cayman’s diverse flora and fauna, from giant stingrays and turtles to Cayman’s unique blue iguana. Others use it as an opportune time to comment on a local or worldwide social issue. Each year the costumes and choreography become more elaborate as groups compete for prizes and this year will be no exception.

Thousands of spectators line the street to savour the sights of carnival and join in the festivities, with many coming out well in advance of the start of the parade to ensure the best vantage point. Wave rags and an abundance of colourful beads are thrown by the passing masqueraders, soca music booms from the colourfully decorated passing floats and everyone “jumps” to the contagious beat. Renowned bands from Trinidad lead the parade each year, ensuring the crowd gets into the carnival spirit.

Once the parade is finished, the Food Festival and Street Fete kicks off. Showcasing a lip-smacking array of Caribbean fare by local food vendors, the Food Festival offers the perfect opportunity for masqueraders and spectators to fulfil their every culinary desire, while satisfying their hunger too.

Street dances cap off the day during the Street Fete, with local DJs and international bands playing the hottest soca beats around until late into the night.

Kids’ Carnival
Junior Batabano, started in 2005, gives the youth of Cayman their very own carnival. The event has grown from a small parade to a full one-day carnival, featuring a wide range of activities to keep the entire family occupied.

Schools across the country come together to showcase their creativity in their very own street parade, giving the youngsters a dedicated opportunity to shine. Junior Batabano also serves as a unique educational tool to teach Cayman’s youth about the Caribbean’s culture and heritage, as well as the art of costume making to be passed down for generations to come.

“Junior Batabano offers a fantastic platform for the children’s artistic development as they get a chance to help design and create the colourful costumes they parade in,” Myrie-Stephen says.

The parade is held a week before the adult parade and is followed by a Family Fun Day, featuring a host of wholesome activities which can be enjoyed by all.

Source: caymanairwaysmagazine.com

Ernest Hemingway`s tender side in letters from Cuba

Ernest Hemingway shows a tenderness that wasn’t part of his usual macho persona in a dozen unpublished letters that became publicly available Wednesday in a collection of the author’s papers at the Kennedy presidential library.

In a letter to his friend Gianfranco Ivancich written in Cuba and dated February 1953, Hemingway wrote of euthanizing his cat “Uncle Willie” after it was hit by a car. “Certainly missed you. Miss Uncle Willie. Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for eleven years,” the author wrote. “Nor anyone that purred with two broken legs.”

The letters span from 1953 to 1960, a year before the prize-winning writer’s suicide. Whether typed or written in his curly script, some of the dispatches arrived on personalized, onionskin stationery from his Cuban villa Finca Vigia. The author also wrote from Europe, while on safari in Africa, and from his home in Idaho.

The two men met in a Venice hotel bar in 1949, bonding despite a two-decade age difference because they’d both suffered leg wounds in war. “I wish I could write you good letters the way you do,” Hemingway wrote in a January 1958 letter from Cuba. “Maybe it is because I write myself out in the other writing.” Experts say the letters demonstrate a side to Hemingway that wasn’t part of his persona as an author whose subjects included war, bullfighting, fishing and hunting. The Kennedy library foundation bought the letters from Ivancich in November, and Hemingway Collection curator Susan Wrynn met the now-elderly gentleman in Italy.
“He still writes every morning,” she said Wednesday. “Hemingway encouraged him to.”

The letters, as a whole, show the author had a gentle side, and was someone who made time to be fatherly and nurturing to a younger friend, said Susan Beegel, editor of scholarly journal The Hemingway Review. Hemingway’s letter about his cat’s death also showed the author’s struggle to separate his private and public lives. Hemingway told how a group of tourists arrived at his villa that day. “I still had the rifle and I explained to them they had come at a bad time and to please understand and go away,” he wrote.
But one wasn’t deterred, according to the letter, saying, “We have come at a most interesting time. Just in time to see the great Hemingway cry because he has to kill a cat.”

In multiple letters, Hemingway also asks about his friend’s sister Adriana Ivancich. The young Italian socialite became a muse for the writer after they met at a duck-shooting outing in Italy. The woman was the model for the female lead in Hemingway’s novel Across the River and into the Trees, Beegel said. Experts say Hemingway credited her visit to Cuba in 1950 with inspiring him as he crafted the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea. He wrote of the literary award in a June 1953 letter to his friend, saying, “The book is back on the Best Seller lists due to the ig-noble Prize,” a line Beegel sees as self-deprecating humor.

Hemingway went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature the next year.

Source: repeatingislands.com