Art visual np2

Photo courtesy Caribbean Beat/Wendell McShine FROM this month's Caribbean Beat . “Making art accessible is very important for me,” Wendell McShine explains. This is why he returned home to Trinidad in 2009 to run the Arts Project in the town of Point Fortin. At these workshops he taught the basics of film production, design, music therapy, animation, and mural-making. “The mission is to plant seeds of consciousness in our youths through art so that they can live their full potential and bring up their communities. These avenues didn’t exist when I was growing up in the islands. It’s my personal vision to give back to my people.”  So although Mexico remains McShine’s base (he is married to Mexican-American filmmaker Yadira Alberran and they have a son), the Caribbean is still on his mind, and in his heart. “In a world where change is upon us,” he wrote in his blog, “the only truth is the holograms of the imagination. My brothers in Haiti, hold on. Magic is your strength.” Wendell M...

Novelist Andrea Levy The latest issue of Caribbean Beat features an interview with British/Jamaican author Andrea Levy on her Booker Prize-longlisted The Long Song : "With Small Island , I was looking at my parent's generation and their immigration to Britain. And then I wanted to go further into this relationship between Britain and the Caribbean, and of course you come into slavery, and I didn't want to write a book on slavery, because I felt it would be a very difficult thing to do personally, and it's a difficult subject to write about. "But then, I was at a conference on the legacy of slavery, where a young black woman got up and asked how could she be proud of her ancestry when her family had been slaves. She seemed to be ashamed of this, and I thought what a great shame that was, and I wanted then to tell her a story that would change her mind. So it made me want to tell that story, as opposed to being quite nervous about it." According to the piece...