Tag: Storytelling

Gypsy in the Moonlight by Caroline Gill

Posted on 22/11/201702/07/2019 by Commonwealth Foundation

I wish I had amnesia so I could forget Sally Burry. We were at school together, Sally and I, in Heart’s Pen, the coastal hamlet where we were born, on the Caribbean island of Perseverance. We were Poor White – the inbred aftermath of a long-forgotten British penal colony. Cromwell’s hangover.

Households numbering ten or twelve weighed in on the small to normal side of things in our village and this made Sally and me unique because we were from one-child families. Each of us had hair the color of overcooked pumpkin and neither of us had a father at home. But this did not make Sally and I chums. No one was chummy with her. She suffered a seeping eye condition. One pink-ringed eye cried nonstop globs of pus that left her with a faint, but persistent pong of sour milk.

One morning, as the bell rang and we formed two lines – one for boys and one for girls, Sally filed into place behind me. Her proximity and my belief in her unremitting infectiousness caused me to tread on the heels of the girl ahead.

As we settled at our desks, she approached and whispered, “Borrow me a black lead, please?”

I refused.

“Please? I would give it back after school. And, I would borrow you my radio.”

I plugged my nose and hissed, “You don’t have no radio.”

It was November 1957. Sally and I were twelve years old and half way through our second to last year in our one-room schoolhouse. On the third of that month, Russia sent a dog into space and the government of Perseverance had yet to build a bridge over a river that swelled to such proportions during raining season, that our village became cut off from the rest of the island.

The only way in or out of the Pen was by boat which meant most of us weren’t going anywhere. When the rain let up, children played rounders barefoot on the flat above the school. The bat or ball, or both, inevitably walloped Sally. I watched as she was tripped and shoved to the ground, as she wiped mineral-red earth from scraped knees and the wetness around her eye, as she hurried to smooth her dress and stand – but never in time to stop us seeing the strap marks on the backs of her legs. When someone had a new welt or bump, we would point it out and ask, “What happen?” The answer was always ‘Burry-sitis’.

At recess, when we had to play indoors, the girls formed a circle for a choral game with clapping and dancing called, Gypsy in the Moonlight. But none of us would clasp hands with Sally, so she swayed and sang along from outside the ring.

Walk in gypsy, walk in/Walk inside I say/Walk into my parlour and hear the banjo play/I don’t love nobody and nobody love me… Tra la lalala…

It was a pet prank for one of the boys to sneak up and crouch at the edge of the circle, pass gas and fan his bottom. Us girls inflated cheeks and waved hands until someone delivered the inevitable punch line, “Something smell stink like Sally Burry.”

Sally laughed off the teasing. She seemed unaware of the freckles of dried mucus stuck to her cheek. Every school day was the same; it had been like that all her life.

Through a different lens

Posted on 31/10/201702/07/2019 by Emma D'Costa

Despite extensive planning, when Commonwealth Writers start work on a creative project, we don’t always know the exact course it will take or what unexpected results it will achieve.

In 2012 we launched a capacity building scheme to give emerging writer-directors the opportunity to make a film on the theme of relationships. Five filmmakers – from Bahamas, Barbados, Canada, Kenya and New Zealand – made short films which highlighted issues affecting them and their communities.

The subject of one of these short films, Passage, by Bahamian filmmaker Kareem Mortimer, is now an award-winning feature film, Cargo, which won the Amnesty International Human Rights Award at the Trinidad+Tobago Film Festival recently. The Award recognises the importance of film as a vehicle for raising awareness about human rights issues and advancing inclusion and social justice. Films such as Passage and Cargo tell the personal story and human cost of illegal migration, putting dangers and suffering under the spotlight, and giving the viewers a different perspective.

‘Cargo examines the world’s refugee crisis from a very local perspective’

Kareem has described Cargo as the ‘feature version of (his) short film Passage’, feeling that ‘there was a great deal more to be said about human smuggling.’ Passage tells the story of a young Haitian woman and her brother fighting for survival while being smuggled into the United States on a dilapidated fishing boat. With over fifty screenings to date, including showings in New Zealand, Nigeria, Europe, the Caribbean and the US, Passage has also won a number of awards including the Best Diaspora Short Film at the Africa Movie Academy Awards 2014. It also made Kareem the first Bahamian filmmaker to show a film in Havana, Cuba, at the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema.

Inspired by true events, Cargo examines the world’s refugee crisis from a very local perspective. When his income, further eroded by his gambling addiction, proves insufficient to cover his son’s school fees, an American exile living in the Bahamas turns to human smuggling in order to raise desperately needed funds. He finds that he is good at this dangerous yet profitable enterprise —good enough to trust himself with smuggling his own girlfriend and her son to the US. But when faced with having to abandon refugees at sea far from Miami shores, he is suddenly forced to reassess his responsibilities.

The largest Bahamian film project to date, this latest feature from Mortimer is, as described by the Miami Film Festival where it premiered in March 2017, ‘a thrilling, vital call for empathy in troubled times.’ As Mortimer has said, he hopes the film ‘sparks conversations …. We live with this and have been living with this for the better part of 30 years. It’s time to address it. Bodies wash up on shore a couple of times a year.’ As well as portraying the human cost of illegal migration, the feature film shines a light on Bahamian culture, something rarely seen in films where the islands are more often simply an exotic backdrop.

‘The last scenes are gutting, yet your heart is left pounding for unexpected possibilities for survival and opportunity.’

One of the judges for the Amnesty Award, Trinidadian writer, activist and scholar Gabrielle Hosein, said that Cargo, ‘presents real life for many Caribbean people in layer after layer of devastating, intimate and disturbingly beautiful detail. The story-telling is deeply personal, yet feels global. You visually connect to the land and seascape of the Bahamas, where Mortimer’s film is based, but cannot help but think about such experiences cross-cutting our blue planet. The film follows multiple vulnerabilities and imperfections as experienced by Jamaican migrant workers, Haitians seeking a better life and middle-class deportees. It also explores the difficulties of family as they intersect love, sex and the global economy, and their complex inequities. While focus is on the disempowering effects of illegal migration, trafficking in persons, the drug trade, and domestic and retail sector workers’ low-status and informal labour, you are left gasping for breath … The last scenes are gutting, yet your heart is left pounding for unexpected possibilities for survival and opportunity.’

Four films from Commonwealth Writers’ latest film project, Commonwealth Shorts: Pacific Voices, are about to be premiered at the Hawaii International Film Festival on 10 and 11 November.

Six writer/directors from Tonga and Papua New Guinea attended script development workshops with local script editors before developing their own scripts and shooting their own films, with the assistance of BSAG Productions in New Zealand. Like the original Commonwealth Shorts, all the films highlight stories and issues which affect their communities, as well as shedding new light on Pacific culture and opening the world’s eyes to talented filmmakers.

Emma D’Costa is Senior Programme Officer for Commonwealth Writers, the cultural initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation.

Echolocation by Sarah Jackson

Posted on 24/10/201702/07/2019 by Commonwealth Foundation

Standing in the shade of a lime tree on a hot dusty afternoon, the boy waited for the bell to toll. He heard the bailiff cough and shuffle his papers through the open window across the market square.

Saint Étienne’s rang, sending out waves like the ripples from a dead-weight dropped in the middle of the quarry lake. After the sixth chime, Victor gave a small nod and then kicked a pebble into the gutter. It rattled through the grille and toppled down the drain, and he would surely have heard it clatter when it hit the bottom – it hadn’t rained for weeks – but it was eclipsed by another sound – one that reminded him of a stray dog kicked by a horse. And when he saw Serge strut around the corner with a strange whistle in his mouth, Victor knew that the men from the Conservatoire had arrived.

He sighed. He would have to go home to his father with the change from his errands and watch him slowly count out the coins. His father would shake his head again to say that there was no money for an instrument or lessons. Then he would pour himself a brandy and expect Victor to make a start on their supper, before heading out to play cards at La Caravelle.

Victor waited for Serge to duck into his father’s pharmacy, then stepped out of the shade. Above him, a pigeon nesting in Lucille’s window-box ruffled her feathers.

He turned right out of the square and began to climb the thick stone steps. The alley smelled of meat. He held his breath as he walked, his soles grinding a fine layer of sediment, making small slapping sounds. He looked down and saw that the stones were wet. Juliette was standing outside her father’s boucherie with a mop and a bucket of greasy water. As he passed, she stuck her tongue out at him. Just before the corner, he looked back. She winked. Then she slowly licked the top of the mop handle, her tongue a slice of pink ham.

Victor darted around the corner and sheltered in a doorway, sweat pricking under his arms and between his legs.

It wasn’t only the girls; the boys whispered too. Their voices were deep and grainy, and they boasted about where they had touched girls and how. His legs were still as smooth as eggs, each of his wrists as thin as his father’s pipe. A musician’s wrists, his sister had said, holding them up. Light as a maple key on the wind. Perfect for the violin.

Emmeline was a broad, white-fleshed girl whose deep-set eyes were dark like their mother’s. She had sung at Aux Folies at night to keep him in school. Her belly was already swelling beneath her dress by the time she had left last winter.

On the corner of Rue Bovary, the landlord was replenishing the men’s glasses with pastis. ‘Boy!’ one of them said as he passed. ‘Message for your father. Tell him we’re starting early.’

Victor raised his shoulders slightly and tilted his head, then turned down Rue du Bât-d’Argent. The street was still bright and lit up with the sun. A radio was playing through an open window. He stopped to listen. Behind the familiar Une Jeune Pucelle, he heard the crack and fizz of static. A baby wailed and somebody came to the window, closed the shutters and bolted them from the inside. Victor moved on, his school satchel flapping against his leg. Soon he would have no need for the bag or the books. His father said that once classes were over this summer, he’d have to pay his own way. ‘Blame your sister,’ he said.

His father repeated in a tired, flat voice that a scholarship at the Conservatoire was a foolish dream; he would have to learn a proper trade. For boys his age, that meant the quarry.

They lived half way up Rue Sainte-Anne, but instead of pushing open the door and making a start on the pot-au-feu, Victor paused and looked at the vase on the sill of the kitchen window. He’d glued it together but the cracks still showed, and there was a chip missing from the lip. It was an ugly piece, with an uneven glaze and five pale blue bats circling a peach tree. It was her lucky jar, Emmeline had insisted. The five bats promised a long life, wealth, health, virtue and a good death – whatever that might be.

Hot Pot by Jasmine Sealy

Posted on 25/09/201702/07/2019 by Commonwealth Foundation

And now they say you dead. That your body did wash up at Hot Pot in the middle of the night, and the old people – bow legged and curve-backed in bicycle shorts and shower caps – came down to the beach for them dawn baths and found your body.

The sea is hot where the run-off pipes from the power plant bury beneath the sand, and the current is capricious. You taught me that word – Capricious. You read it in Pride and Prejudice – your favourite book. I read it last year but I didn’t think it was nothing special. You said I too young to understand because the book is about grown people, and how they think and carry on. I think you just like the idea that a rude boy could turn soft for the right woman. But I never tell you so. You would have only stupse and walk way.

You is not the first body to wash up at Hot Pot, belly bloat and eyes black like cast iron. Anywhere them got water people going find a way to drown, Mummy always say. Though I doubt she going keep saying it. Water always killing body. Rotten, green pools in forgotten buckets breeding mosquitoes – the bad ones too, with the white and black striped legs, injecting you with diseases. It’s zika now but before that it was chikungunya and back when I was in primary school it was lepto.

You slap one against your thigh and it bursts with other people’s blood and you wipe it off and carry on because if you panic over every bite you would do nothing but panic all day.

Mummy make we put on shoes and we riot. We wore rubber sandals out the door and hide them in the bush, leather feet bare on the sun-soak tar. A boy in my form three class die after three weeks in the hospital. They thought it was lepto and blame he parents. The newsman curse our backwards ways. The road to the future cannot be walked barefoot, they say. But it turned out to be dengue that kill he, while we was busy laying blame.

It always water in the end that get you – one way or another.

They tell we to fear the ocean but we dive down for sand and bring it up in clenched fists. De sea ain’t got no back door, hear? Don’t swim after eating. Don’t swim on Easter. Don’t swim if the sargassum is thick in the swell. Don’t swim after four o’clock. But nobody can’t drive ten minutes on this island without hitting the coast and you never could learn to fear the wall of blue that kept you trap here.

They did tell we to fear god too but they never tell we to fear man, so man did passing through this house like trade winds since Daddy left. Some stay only one night; some stay near whole year. I could always tell when new man come to stay because Mummy wake up before even fowl-cock start hollering to cook stew beef and rice and peas and macaroni pie. Most of the men just ignore we or bring we KFC chicken and cheap plastic toy to play with. But that man was different. That man come ‘round while Mummy was at work, looking tall and strict in his starch uniform. That man bring you silver chain with heart pendant and tell you call he Daddy. That man go Miami and bring you American Eagle tee-shirt and Levi jeans. That man bring me chocolate and say, you ain’t no browning like you sister but you look sweet still for a dark ‘ting.

And now they say you dead. They saying it was an accident. In the Monday paper them got picture. You is just a blurry lump in the sand, a purple smudge on the glittering horizon. That’s the first thing that all wrong. That purple dress – you wasn’t wearing it when you tuck me in night before last, leaning in to shower me with kisses, smelling sweet like cherry brandy and body spray. The body spray is mine, a stocking-filler from our auntie in Miami. You got your own perfume, a real one, in a glass bottle, from one of the air-conditioned department stores in town. But you can’t wear it around Mummy in case she ask who buy it for you. Same man who buy the purple dress but Mummy can play fool when it suit she.

The dress was bought to wear to Queen’s Park on Christmas morning and is the fanciest bit of clothing you own. It cost more than the perfume. It cost so much, you wore it two Christmases in a row and wasn’t even shame because everybody done know how much it cost. That dress does always hang in the very back of our closet, on a wooden hanger with a big black garbage bag over it.

It was there in the closet last week. I waited until you had gone out and slipped inside it, the lace material the softest thing I ever feel on my skin. It was there night before last when you climbed out through our bedroom window, careful not to let the jalousie shutter slam and wake Mummy. Now that same dress wash up in the low tide, spreading out around your legs like man o’ war. I can’t see all that in the picture but I can imagine it. In my mind, you just a mermaid with seaweed knot in your hair and sand dollar over your eyes. Later, when I see you in the casket, you going look like a bloated barracuda. But for now it’s like you not really dead, just transform into a sea creature.

Yesterday, before them find your body, I sat at the kitchen table and eat bakes and listen to the morning call-in program with Mummy. You ain’t come home and Mummy was real vex. This was before police come knocking and before men from The Nation and The Advocate come with big camera to take picture of Mummy crying on our veranda in her nightie, hair in rollers still. Before all of that, Mummy was smashing pots and pans around the kitchen, frying flying fish and cussin’ stink because the Devil take she first born child. And she should have known the day you were born with them light eyes and that clear skin that you was going to be force-ripe. She hear from Cynthia who live down in Oistins that you does be at the fish fry every Friday smoking cigarettes and drinking rum with all kinds of men. Mummy say when you get home she going rain licks down on you like you is small child. No child of hers staying out all night and doing the Devil’s work. But you ain’t come home. And now Mummy crying for mercy from Jesus. Mummy want to know why God see fit to take her angel back to heaven.

Last night I dream that I did floating in the pool at the gymnasium. It’s interschool sports and the crowd cheering. But the pool empty except for me and you. My arm spread out wide at my side, and I can feel your hand beneath my back. Belly up, you say, use your leg and kick. Then next minute you floating next to me but we not in the pool no more; we at Brighton Beach at low tide and the rain is falling on my face and I love that feeling because the rain make the ocean feel warmer than it really is, and I don’t want to get out.

We in bed now and you making soft noises across the room and I think that you dying except you not – you giggling and the soft noises get drowned out by sheets and you laughing and dying and laughing and dying. When I peek out from underneath my blanket I don’t see you at all. You get swallow up by whale – big blue whale open his mouth and take you inside.

Special event: writing the literature of Indenture and its legacies

Posted on 30/08/201729/07/2019 by Commonwealth Foundation

To mark the centenary of the abolition of indenture in the British Empire, Commonwealth Writers is partnering with the School of Advanced Study, University of London, to host a high-level panel discussion with writers from across the indentured labour diaspora.

The panellists include the Award winning writers Ananda Devi (Mauritius), Gaiutra Bahadur (Guyana), Lakshmi Persaud (Trinidad), Mary Rokonadravu (Fiji) and Agnes Sam (South Africa).

The discussions will form a prelude to 2018, when Commonwealth Writers and the School of Advanced Study will jointly publish an anthology of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction which explores the legacy of the practice of indentured labour. They take place as apart of the Indenture Abolition Centenary Conference, jointly hosted by the University of Warwick and the University of London. To purchase tickets to the panel discussion, please visit the University of London Website.

Date
7 October 2017 – 18:15 – 21:00

Venue
The Beveridge Hall, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Luis by Jo-Anne Mason

Posted on 28/07/201702/07/2019 by Commonwealth Foundation

I was living on Long Island, New York when Hurricane Donna came through in 1960. I was a kid, how could I know that this same storm had just past over and pretty much devastated Anguilla, the Caribbean island I would one day call my home.

We lived on a peninsula, water on three sides and our whole neighbourhood flooded including our basement, garage and playroom. By that time Donna had lost most of her energy, just dumping the rest of her water on us. The storm destroyed most of my mother’s photographs stored in the basement but what I remember was my sister and I throwing bits of paper from the steps of the kitchen into the flooded playroom like little sailboats floating in the current.

In 1992, I packed up, sold everything I didn’t need and moved from the U.S. to Anguilla and purchased a house, a concrete house. After a lifetime of cold weather and grey days, this was a perfect choice, always warm, stunning blue sky, palm trees swaying and crystal clear water.

I stood on the balcony of my new house and wondered why there was so much land available on the sea coast, why didn’t Anguillians want this stunning view. You live you learn; I know why now.

Folks on Anguilla didn’t talk much about hurricanes. We have a hurricane season. It starts in June and ends in November. Everybody knows that, even little kids on Anguilla. There hadn’t been any since I arrived, in fact there hadn’t been any of note since the big one in 1960, Hurricane Donna. She took five lives and destroyed most of the houses on the island. Anguilla has a small population, everybody knew everybody, and it is still that way today. Five people is a lot of people to lose, family, friends, the ones you say good morning to every morning. So now most everyone has a concrete house and most of them have a concrete roof. You don’t have to tell an Anguillian more than once when it comes to a sensible thing to do.

It was Hurricane Donna that made that decision for them.

Anguilla never had much help from anybody so people learned to take care of their own problems. Independent? Absolutely. Bull headed? I would say more often than not. But sensible – yes they are. You have to be strong to live on a small piece of rock with very little rain and few natural resources.

By 1995, I had settled into island life, it was a steep learning curve but I was ready for adventure and I got plenty of that. Heading into the late summer months there was talk of ‘weather’. When island people say weather they mean hurricanes. Aside from the occasional storm, days in the Caribbean are mostly the same, hot, a little breeze, once in a while a bit of rain.

I was working as an artist on a mural for a popular West End seaside restaurant and my work was almost done. Back then we did not have intricate weather systems alerting us every minute like we have all over the internet today. We did not have the internet full stop. News channels and radio programmes broadcasting from the U.S. don’t care about hurricanes in the Caribbean until those storms threaten America. But we did have some reports, not always accurate, but good enough. When you know something is coming you start to prepare.

There was a report of a storm, they all said it would pass us by, maybe some rain, rain is good we always need rain. It came and went, no damage, no problem. So when the next report came in, everyone had sort of relaxed. ‘Probably go the same as the last one.’ ‘We’ll keep a watch but it’s a ways away.’

I remember two days out. We had a party at my neighbours, a ‘hurricane’ party. People laughed, said what an experience a hurricane is, we all made a toast. I was quiet, a little nervous but most were not. Someone talks about how great it would be to experience a storm has never been in a hurricane. I don’t laugh or argue with them anymore, I just wish that was one memory I didn’t have.

The day before Luis arrived, 4 September 1995, it was sunny with a light breeze, too light really and hot; it’s always hot. I stood on the Marl Road on the Sea Rocks, high up looking east past Scrub, marvelling at what a lovely day.

But on that lovely day all hell broke loose on Anguilla. The storm was coming. The storm was big. Get ready. Get ready now. Serious.

I did the best I could. Nailed sheets of ply over the big glass doors on the north side of the house. What did I know? I know better now. Sheets of ply, yeah right. First you don’t use nails, hurricane eat them up and spit them out like little bones in your fried snapper. Screws, big screws are the only things that stand a chance against any storm higher than a cat 2.

We now have hurricane shutters that close the house up tight, but you have to leave a window open for the pressure, because hurricanes have pressure that needs to be released (what did I know?). I cleared out most, but not all, of the main room furniture into a small bedroom, that was the smartest thing I did and then I simply ran out of time. The house is on the sea but high up on a ridge and when the breeze came back, you could feel the difference, it had returned with purpose. I got a call from my sister in Florida. She had friends who went through Andrew. I told her what I had done, prep’ work: water, clean up, best I could. She said, in a funny way, ‘But are you ready?’ I laughed, ‘Well I’ve done the best I can.’ I can still today hear her words exactly the way she said them. ‘You’re not ready.’ She was right, I was not.

The occasional hum of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize

Posted on 19/07/201729/07/2019 by Vijay Krishnarayan

ABOVE: Regional Winners in Singapore from left to right: Ingrid Persaud (for Caribbean region), Tracy Fells (for Canada and Europe region), Nat Newman (for Pacific region), Short Story Prize Judge Jacob Ross , Anushka Jasraj (for Asia region) and Akwaeke Emezi (for Africa region).

“And occasions being occasional, are a reason to hum…” It’s one of my favourite lines from this year’s group of regional Commonwealth Short Story Prize Winners and was crafted by Nat Newman in her short story “The Death of Margaret Roe,” which won the Pacific Prize. The line kept coming back to me as I watched people gather at The Arts House in Singapore to hear which of the five regional winners would be awarded the overall prize for 2017. There was definitely a hum in the air.

The Prize is a major feature of the Foundation’s work on creative expression and it’s delivered by our cultural initiative Commonwealth Writers, which inspires and connects writers and storytellers across the world. Well told stories can help us make sense of events, engage with others and take action to bring about change. The Prize itself was established in 2012 and built on the Foundation’s long tradition of awarding prizes for literature but offers something different to the array of other awards.

The Prize is awarded for the best peice of unpublished short fiction in English from the Commonwealth. As well as being open to entries translated into English from any language, it’s the only prize also open to entries in the original Bengali, Kiswahili, Portuguese and Samoan – to be joined by Chinese, Malay and Tamil in 2018. It’s free to enter and accessible to all writers – both published and unpublished. Speaking to winning writers in Singapore it’s clear that the key to the Prize’s growing popularity is that it provides an introduction to a global audience.

It’s judged by an international panel of respected writers, which represent each of the Commonwealth’s five regions (Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean and the Pacific). This also sets the Prize apart as it’s truly international rather than judged in a geo-political centre. This year the judging panel was chaired by the Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie. She captured the essence of the Prize when she said of this year’s process “The judges weren’t looking for particular themes or styles, but rather for stories that live and breathe.”

The Prize goes from strength to strength. In its first year we received 2,000 stories from 42 countries. This year there were 6,000 entries from 49 countries and the shortlist list reflected this diversity with 21 writers from 10 countries making the cut. The regional winners came through a large and competitve field and it was a privilege to get to meet and talk with them and see them interact with each other – the mutual respect is palpable.

I think that’s the reason for the hum in the hall. The knowlegeable audience realises that they are in the presence of some of the most talented new story tellers:

Africa: Akwaeke Emezi (Nigeria) for “Who is Like a God”
Asia: Anushka Jasraj (India) for “Drawing Lessons”
Canada and Europe: Tracy Fells (United Kingdom) for “The Naming of Moths”
Caribbean: Ingrid Persaud (Trinidad and Tobago) for “The Sweet Sop”
Pacific: Nat Newman (Australia) for “The Death of Magaret Roe”

It’s noted that all the winners are women. In introducing the overall winner Jacob Ross – a member of the judging panel – suggests this is because the short story provides an accessible format and perhaps this is a space that’s been overlooked or vacated by male writers. Catherine Lim, Singapore’s most prolific writer of English fiction, was our guest of honour. She opened the envelope and read out Ingrid Persaud’s name to loud applause. I’m delighted that a fellow Trinidadian wins. Her story evoked language and images that would resonate with any Trini but her main theme of the complexity of the relationship between father and child is universal. Afterwards all the writers gather around to offer warm and genuine congratulations – they’re joined by last year’s winner Parashar Kulkarni from India and you can feel the sense of community that the Prize engenders. I wonder how such a competitive prize can engender this kind of fellowship.

Vijay Krishnarayan and Overall Commonwealth Short Story Prize Winner 2017 Ingrid Persaud

As we pack away I reflect on the enormous amount of work that my colleagues have put into making the awards evening such a success. They’ve also benefited from the help of several partners. The Arts House in Singapore provided a wonderful venue and the Holiday Inn Express Clarke Quay accommodated the writers and our staff. The National University of Singapore’s Centre for the Arts provided excellent musicians and dancers who helped interpret the readings of excerpts from the five stories by the authors. The National Arts Council of Singapore gave good advice and guidance. These in-kind contributions are priceless but we also need financial sponsorship to keep running the Prize and continue to improve it. This year we benefitted from the contributions from the Jan Michalski Foundation. The search for sponsors is underway and the hum for the 2018 Prize has started to build…

Down the Mountain by Sunila Galappatti

Posted on 13/06/201729/07/2019 by Commonwealth Foundation

The first time I heard Jayanthi Kuru-Utumpala speak about climbing Mount Everest (Sagarmatha or Chomolungma), it was to a small room crowded with colleagues and friends, at the Women and Media Collective, where Jayanthi started her working life.

A fortnight after her return to Sri Lanka from Nepal, newly anointed the first Sri Lankan to summit Everest, Jayanthi was going to tell us about her climb. I had received an informal invitation to attend the small gathering and immediately asked if I could bring my husband, my mother and a friend. The reply was generous – of course that would be fine.

Jayanthi hugged and greeted everyone before she began her talk. She stood before us: her slight figure now wasted by the efforts of the climb, she seemed barely to be there at all. Full of smiles she said she would do her best to speak both in English and Sinhala (the two Sri Lankan languages she speaks, with differing levels of fluency) to address a mixed crowd.

We were also a crowd still more captivated by Jayanthi’s symbolic achievement than the rigour of her mountaineering — reading it first as a feather in the cap of our feminisms. For this unseasoned group, Jayanthi charted the stages of the climb. She spoke with an enthusiasm of discovery, as though she was herself standing with her novice audience, looking up at the challenges of Everest. It was the first time I had heard of the Khumbu Icefall or the Death Zone above 26,000 feet. Even as Jayanthi described the technicalities of the ascent, she took time to illustrate amusing details, like the ever-more rudimentary toilets at every level.

Several times, Jayanthi, animated, proceeded for minutes in one language before remembering to come back and translate herself as she led us to the final summit. By the end of the talk, we were still more awed by the feat Jayanthi had performed and also thrilled by her humility and charm in the way she shared the experience. The evening ended with a pot-luck meal of dishes brought by colleagues; Jayanthi moved among friends, ready to talk more or take a photograph with everyone who asked.

The next time I heard Jayanthi speak about the climb, with her climbing partner Johann, was six months later, at the Galle Literary Festival on Sri Lanka’s south coast. This time we waited for the Prime Minister to take his seat before the talk could begin. When Jayanthi and Johann appeared on stage in matching blazers, I remembered the spontaneous charm of the earlier event. We were seeing them now as they appeared in the media, meeting the President or their sponsors, or addressing conferences on leadership. The pair presented the Prime Minister and his wife with an illustrated book that detailed their climb and official photographs were taken. After formal introductions, the event began. Johann spoke first — that feminist feather wavered briefly — but throughout the talk he and Jayanthi passed the baton seamlessly between themselves, now a practised and polished double-act, accompanied by slides.

I ask Johann Peries where the story starts and he says it starts with his father’s adventurous spirit. Johann’s childhood holidays were all outdoors; camping, fishing, hunting. Later his father began climbing, alongside work that took him out of Colombo. Towards the end of Johann’s schooldays, he started to join his father on these expeditions, climbing whatever there was to climb in Sri Lanka.

With his father, and later other friends, Johann explored new routes of the Knuckles range, made his way from Belihul Oya to Horton Plains, ventured up hills in Hakgala and Nuwara Eliya. He rattles off the names of Sri Lanka’s higher peaks and ranges: Great Western, Piduruthalagala, Kirigalpoththa, Ritigala. Johann progressed to mountains on the Thai-Burmese border, to Borneo, to Kilimanjaro. In 2010, he joined a group trekking to Everest Base Camp. He remembers looking up at the scale of the mountain and wondering how people did it.

Two years later, Johann went back to the Everest region to climb Island Peak (or Imja Tse), this time with a group that included Jayanthi. Meeting for the first time, they became friends and Johann tells me Jayanthi was the first to raise the question: would he consider climbing Everest? Unlike Johann, Jayanthi had never been on the mountain before at all.

From the moment they decided to do it, there was work to be done. They had to start by working out how to prepare their sea-level bodies to survive a high altitude. Jayanthi was put in charge of research, Johann in charge of fundraising and the uphill challenge of convincing people that they weren’t crazy. At weekends, they would run up and down Piduruthalagala, Sri Lanka’s highest mountain, only a quarter the height of Everest. One day, on Horton Plains, Johann says he passed the same tour party several times as he ran back and forth. Finally the party’s guide stopped him and asked koheda mechchara duwanne?; ‘such a lot of running, to where?’ Johann told the man he was in training, but didn’t say for what.

Ophelia by Breanne Mc Ivor

Posted on 09/05/201729/07/2019 by Commonwealth Foundation

Ophelia’s words are sprinkling, tinkling in my ears. They smell like cut grass just washed with rain. I want to breathe her. Strip her. Peel her skin like sunlight strained through cinnamon and get to the heart of the woman that is buried under her layers of poise.

We are at rehearsal in the sprawling National Academy for the Performing Arts. The empty red seats roll back in waves before us. Ophelia is on her cell phone, making arrangements to go to the spa.

I wait until she hangs up. “Ophelia?”

“Yes?”

I want to lean forward and press my fingers on the hardness of her collarbone before pulling the plumpness of her bottom lip between my teeth. A kiss, I imagine, would start slow and rise in crescendos.

“Marcus?”

“Yes?”

“You called me?”

“Oh, yes.”

She sits on the stage, script spread out before her with all her lines meticulously highlighted in yellow. She is not wearing stage make-up but she already looks like the lead actress.

How could a woman named Ophelia not be an actress? I wish we were performing Hamlet. She would be herself, of course, peering out at me from the wings.

I can hear myself. To be or not to be– that is the question. My words are the choking smoke that heralds the start of a fire. Whether ’tis nobler in mind to suffer–

“Marcus?”

“Sorry.”

Ophelia’s forehead crumples. “I was wondering if you wanted to meet to brainstorm on Saturday? I still think we can work on our first scene together?”

Ophelia whips her phone out of her purse. Her fingers find her calendar. The light illuminates her face as she opens it. “What time on Saturday?”

“One?” I say, hoping. Hoping… Please God. Give me this. Give me this one thing. Give me an hour with this woman in a coffee shop. Give me her hair, twisted into ringlets that sink into one another. Give me the stomach-shudder when her shirt slips off her shoulder and I see her flesh crossed by a bra strap. Give me–

“Can you do one-thirty?”

I can do anything you want.

“Marcus?”

“Yes, of course – Jardin in the mall?” I try to say this as if I’m just flicking the words out of my mouth; as if I am the type who goes to Jardin des Tuileries instead of Tecla’s Vegetable Stand where I would haggle over the price of an avocado.

“Sure,” Ophelia says. “That sounds like a treat.”

Could she hear the vibrato in my voice? Would she taste my desperation if we kissed? That sour, morning-after taste that I can never brush out of my mouth? I won’t mess it up; I won’t think crazy thoughts in my head – all mixed metaphors and fantasies spilling from one part of me to another while I remain tongue-tied.

“Great,” I say. “I’m looking forward to it.”

Ophelia tucks her curls behind one pixie-pointed ear. Touching her would feel like the sun hitting my face first thing in the morning, like a piccolo playing notes that hum in my throat, like waking up after eight hours sleep.

Already my head-voices are telling me that this is madness. How could somebody like Ophelia – how could somebody like her – ever want anything to do with me? She probably rolled her eyes when she first saw my name on the cast list.

Ophelia smiles – more a lifting of the lips – before returning to her script. Already, her lines are consuming her. Our director wants us to spend ten hours simply reading the lines, and living the characters before we begin performing, but I can already see her weaving her character’s clothes over her own. Her pink dress – which only a moment before was elegantly gathered around her wasp-waist – seems to hang off her frame as if she has made herself thinner.

I return to my script and try to ignore her. I imagine my character as he is portrayed in Act One: young, grasping – a ghetto youth determined to claw his way out. Not such a hard thing for me to be. I even look the part – dark and scrawny like a weed springing up from a pavement crack.

Welcome to the Bay Area by Sowmiya Ashok

Posted on 24/03/201729/07/2019 by Commonwealth Foundation

Everyone has a letter and a number attached to them. The H-4 housewives wear canvas shoes and take brisk walks around the green at the heart of North Park Apartments; the B-2 grandparents push their American-born grandchildren on little tricycles; the H-1B techies play volleyball and the B-1 consultants stroll.

I am an F-1 OPT sitting next to a Chinese mom on a cement bench, watching all of this. All the picnic tables are occupied: an Indian man sits idly at one, six Indian women in sarees sit conversing in Tamil around another. As I sit facing the five-acre Moitozo park, I see three high-rise condominiums on each side, named after mighty trees native to central or northern Europe. Ahead of me, the sunlight is slowly fading behind the hills. Orange farms stretch nearly all the way to the next set of condos, built in less than six months, to meet the growing housing demands of the valley. A nip in the air prompts a young woman walking past to tie her dupatta around her head; her anklets crash noisily into her runners. The crowd, gathered around the park in printed kurtas and chiffon sarees, is linguistically divided. The Tamils and Telugus sit on park benches to the left; the Hindi speakers to the far right; the Bengalis and everyone else are transient.

I have just arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area, to spend a few weeks living with a techie couple from Tamil Nadu, India, one of whom I went to school with in Chennai. The North Park Apartment Village in North San Jose, at the heart of which I sit, is popular amongst the Indian techies, with its offer of one, two, three bedroom apartments and town houses with in-built gadgets and an “an array of resort-style amenities.”

Many of these men and women have come — in several waves — to Silicon Valley to work for American tech giants and spend their days building virtual platforms geared to bring down barriers between humans. So why are they isolating themselves hundreds of kilometres away from home in hi-tech ghettoes formed along ethnic networks?

They bring with them temples, pure vegetarian restaurants, a fanatic love for movie stars and a competitive spirit that has forced a reverse gentrification in Bay Area schools: the brown kids with their soaring grades are driving away the white kids. Nearly every second restaurant on El Camino Real, a highway that runs through the heart of the Bay Area, is an Indian one; the competition so fierce that specialising in a particular food item is the only way to survive. One offers the juiciest biryani, another the crispiest medu vada. There are numbers to match this change too. A 95 per cent white population in 1940s, has now come down to around 50 per cent in the Bay Area; the Asian quotient has steadily increased to about 33 percent. A Vietnamese-American Uber driver tells me that real estate wars in the area are now fought between the Indians and the Chinese: “It comes down to who has the hard cash to seal the deal.” The Chinese often win.