At first, the sendoff texts and emails struck me as sweet. By the time I arrived in Jamaica, though, they’d taken on unnervingly fretful tones. “You okay?” “Safe?” “Hearing gunshots?” “Please be careful, hon!” A look at my Facebook page and one would think I was armed in combat.

I’d landed in Jamaica three days after the country declared a State of Emergency in response to the deadly violence brought on in West Kingston by the attempted extradition to the U.S. of alleged drug lord Christopher “Dudus” Coke. But I’d come, for Jah’s sake, not to the one little slice of concrete jungle that’s making headlines but to the sleepy country parish of St. Elizabeth—to attend a literary festival.

Not just any literary festival: the Calabash International Literary Festival, celebrating its 10th anniversary. Described in its press release as a “joyfest of readings” for which “passion will be the only price of entry,” Calabash is the sort of literary festival to whom the label “literary festival” applies only because there’s no neat phrase for “reggae-fied, rootsy-intellectual, interdisciplinary extravaganza for those who worship words, abhor pretension and believe that ‘smart’ and ‘fun’ need not be mutually exclusive.” The event was co-founded by writer Colin Channer, poet Kwame Dawes, and Justine Henzell, whose father Perry directed the “The Harder They Come,” a classic film about Jamaica, reggae, and outlaw dreams.

What began as a gathering of 300 people now annually attracts up to 3,000: a mostly Jamaican, all-ages crowd that’s thrilled to sit for hours on end, lapping up language with rapacity. Among the authors who’ve delighted attendees over the years are Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Amiri Baraka, Derek Walcott, Caryl Phillips and Michael Ondaatje. They get rock-star receptions, and at the makeshift bookstore, their titles sell the way some albums did in the 90s.

The Calabash stage sits feet from the sea; it’s decked out in coconuts, conch shells and a bamboo lectern. The whole thing takes place in a town, Treasure Beach, that’s home to farmers and fishermen, at an boutique resort, Jake’s, that’s not so much a hotel as a cluster of eccentrically handsome cottages perched whimsically on six rocky, beachfront acres.

In the end, an estimated 73 people or more were killed in West Kingston. Fewer guns were found than lives lost, and Coke remains on the run—a real-life Ivan from “The Harder They Come,” rumored to have been spotted everywhere from the Blue Mountains to Cuba to, yes, Calabash. And while a literary festival and a garrison community live for the most part at opposite ends of the Jamaican spectrum, they are also intimately connected.

“Calabash is essentially Jamaican, but it has the arrogance and brashness to be relevant internationally,” Dawes mused one night as the festival came to a close. “It’s not unlike the Jamaican male himself, who would have no qualms about the fact that given the opportunity, he could seduce the Queen of England herself. That sense that what I have has some credibility and value is part of the audacity of Calabash.”

It’s the same brashness and audacity, Dawes and I agreed—the glorious Jamaican ego—that’s produced all that’s larger-than-life and high-volume in Jamaica. From the music to the art to the dons and the violence, it’s all of a piece: the high to the low, Calabash to Coke, West Kingston to Treasure Beach and back again.

Baz Dreisinger is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and the author of “Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture.”

This year’s program featured readings from the likes of Russell Banks, Sharon Olds and Colson Whitehead. There was an hour-long conversation between the New York Public Library’s Paul Holdengraber and acclaimed writer Wole Soyinka, during which the Nigerian Nobel Prize-winner sipped a Red Stripe and chatted freely about everything from his years in solitary confinement (he dubbed the makeshift ink he concocted for writing on his cell floor “soyink”) to the revolutionary power of art (“slow poison in the body of the audience”). There were Caribbean film screenings, a Calabash Café Series featuring first-time authors discussing their journeys, fresh local food galore and, at night, music: a concert featuring two popular reggae singers, Etana and Freddie McGregor; a DJ session presided over by Jamaican poet and personality Mutabaruka.

Calabash is, in a nutshell, all that’s right about Jamaica. Yet as the past few weeks have made numbingly clear, what dominates many people’s image of the island nation is all that’s wrong about Jamaica.

“We have always felt that we are trying to introduce the world to a different perspective of Jamaica, which is just as real as the issues of poverty and violence, ” Calabash’s Dawes told me. This meant that despite the events in Kingston—no, because of those events—Calabash must go on: State of Emergency be damned. “People wanted a sense that this thing—‘Dudus’ and the issues surrounding him—wasn’t going to shut down every single thing,” Dawes said.

So the festival went on and the crowds flocked from Kingston and abroad, even as the violence unfolding some 85 miles away was invoked and lamented. Bahamian-Trinidadian poet Christian Campbell dedicated his poem “Moonshine Baby” to “all those in Tivoli not getting the burial they deserve.” Before his reading, Minister of Agriculture Christopher Tufton made a statement: “I want to say on behalf of myself and [Opposition Spokesman on National Security] Peter Bunting—the only other Parliamentarian brave enough to be here today—we promise to do better.” And when the festival closed with a live band playing songs from the 1980 Bob Marley album “Uprising,” the crowd listened closely to lyrics that were eerily relevant: “Me nah know how we and dem a go work it out,” Marley wrote in “Work,” a line that the people of West Kingston could well be uttering about security forces today.

Taken from: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/06/06/as-kingston-seethes-some-jamaicans-read/