Reggae and the Obama moment

Bob Marley and Barack Obama are the absent heroes of the 8th annual Calabash literary festival in Jamaica: Marley, because his music and poetry incarnate the living “reggae aesthetic” (with the pan-African, Judaeo-Christian, sexual, political and celebratory overtones which the poet and Calabash co-founder Kwame Dawes expounds in conversation here). And Obama, because he seems to stand for a possibility that is artistic as well as political — for the idea that imagination can lead the way, that shocking transformations can develop before our eyes. I don’t know how many people I heard say things like: “I never thought that I would live to see the Berlin Wall fall down,” or more often: “I never thought I would see the day when Nelson Mandela walked free in South Africa. And I never thought I’d see a black man nominated for president in the United States.” So the suspense of the Obama moment in America touches this gathering of writers and readers in the West Indes. And for many of the writers I interviewed at Calabash, the Obama moment in America has implications that are artistic as well as political. The poet Yusef Komunyakaa made the literary link with Obama this way: “I think it has everything to do with possibility,” he said. “The writer is definitely a dreamer.”

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations on the Obama Moment at Calabash ‘08 (26 minutes, 12 mb mp3)

So I asked a number of the writers at Calabash to fill in the connection between the Barack Obama politics back in the States with the stories and poems and dreams being read out to a couple of thousand listeners on a beach in the Caribbean in this late spring of 2008.

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