The advent of 2024 seems a good time to document one of the highlights for PREE in 2023. On the heels of staging a very successful mini litfest in Kingston in June 2022 which was livestreamed around the world, PREE received an invitation from the soon-to-be Director of the House of World Cultures or Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, founder of Savvy Contemporary Berlin, to bring a version of what had been staged, to Germany.
An institution founded in recognition of the multitude of immigrants who have settled in Germany HKW “is guided by the quest for strategies of how to live and better inhabit this world together. It is a house in which cultures of conviviality and hospitality are sown, nurtured to blossoming, and disseminated. It is a physical and affective space in which everyone has the possibility of breathing. To breathe and let breathe. A house in which respect for living and non-living beings is fundamental and shapes our understanding of cultures.”
As good as his word, after taking office as director of the prestigious institution in January 2023, Dr. Ndikung put HKW’S literary curators in touch with us. HKW’s new literary programming would include a series called Middle Ground, with PREE being the first literary organization invited to inaugurate the series by mounting a weekend of readings, seminars, panel discussions and performances in August 2023. Accordingly, Isis Semaj-Hall and myself arrived in Berlin with seven Caribbean writers: Josefina Báez (DR), Marlon James, Kei Miller, Ingrid Persaud (TnT), Vladimir Lucien (St Lucia), Ada M. Patterson (Barbados) and Lafleur Cockburn (St Vincent).
HKW’s website expanded on the concept of the series and what the PREE festival would entail:
Middle Ground is a yearly series that invites literature festivals from around the world to HKW to explore literary and oraliture practices and networks. The project takes its name from Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe’s contemplation of the ‘middle ground’ as a position that is ‘aware of a future to head into and a past to fall back on; it is the home of doubt and indecision, of suspension of disbelief, of make-believe, of playfulness, of the unpredictable, of irony.’
The 2023 guest festival for Middle Ground: Interactions, Transactions, Reciprocities is PREE: Caribbean Writing, a literary festival and online platform based in Jamaica. Founded in 2018 and curated by writer and editor Annie Paul, PREE explores Caribbean writing by engaging with and mapping the literary landscapes and praxis of different countries…PREE’s undertaking to amplify Caribbean writing and shape discourse by engaging with and publishing contemporary writing from the Caribbean by both established and new voices, makes them a crucial partner with whom to explore and extend geographies of knowing. Writers and thinkers published by PREE explore art and politics, race and gender, technology and power, and more. Within the framework of Middle Ground, authors selected by PREE take part in performances, readings, lectures, panels, and facilitate seminars for writers.
We invite you to join us, reflect upon, reimagine, and contemplate Caribbean literatures during Middle Ground: PREE. Caribbean Writing through the following interventions, among others. Annie Paul offers an entry point to the Caribbean through her keynote speech “Homespun” which examines the politics and poetics of writing and publishing Caribbean literature, followed by a conversation with Marlon James. The question of languages is crucial when exploring Caribbean literatures; in the panel The Only Way to Find Your Voice is to Use It, Ingrid Persaud and Lafleur Cockburn explore how multiplicities of languages, creoles, and vernaculars subvert language hierarchies and create unapologetic voices. Vladimir Lucien and Rhea Ramjohn meanwhile use poetry to explore the correlation between the rhythm of lived experiences and memory in The Rhythm of Remembrance. The relationship between history, power, politics, and historical legacies is examined by Jennifer Richard and Cristina Bendek in Reimagining Temporalities while Kei Miller and Ada M. Patterson consider the possibilities that arise when we let the body dictate its own rhythm and politics. Sharmaine Lovegrove in conversation with Annie Paul discuss models of inclusivity in publishing and navigating constantly evolving languages, creoles and oraliteratures, and Isis Semaj-Hall curates and guides an open mic night exploring the importance of orality and migration in shaping identities, where dub music is understood as orality and the literary soundtrack of the evening.
For us at PREE it was a signal honour to be given such prominent positioning in Bonaventure Ndikung’s ‘radical revamp’ of this venerable German institution. As Siddhartha Mitter put it in his New York Times article on the renowned curator and writer, A New Energy is Vibrating at This House:
It’s a different energy for a German public institution — not necessarily in sync with its counterparts — but Ndikung isn’t worried about that. “We want to build a different world,” he said. “We want to think of the world differently,” he added, “and every step matters. Every drop of water matters. And even if you’re coming with a teaspoon, that’s fine.”
In his welcome to PREE Ndikung said, “This is a very special moment for us. We came into the House this January. We’ve been trying to disrupt…and we cannot really disrupt without bringing people from the Caribbean.”
Marlon James, Vladimir Lucien and Isis Semaj-Hall at HKW’s pavilion
Returning to the theme of the festival, PREE emphatically occupies the middle ground Chinua Achebe invoked, that ground which is the present, not the past, not the future, but the present. The virtual space we offer is also a middle ground between the inner and outer Caribbean, the region, and its diasporas. We are a friendly waystation available to those embarking on the lonely, arduous journey to a writing life. Writing itself is a practice that renders an often hostile and bewildering present scrutable. Kei Miller recently observed that we live in a polarized world where it is harder and harder to find a middle ground in the tug of war between extremists on either side of the political spectrum. This is the ground good writing provides, a space in which to shelter from the harsh black and white palette otherwise on offer.
AI may soon be able to annex creativity but what it can never replace is skin-to-skin sensory experience. It was our pleasure and privilege therefore to bring the exuberance of Caribbean tongues and tales from our digital platform to the live stage of HKW in Berlin. Give thanks to the Director and curatorial staff of HKW for this invaluable opportunity.
The videos below contain excerpts from some of the activities at Middle Ground (a bee kept buzzing Marlon till he dashed away his red scarf) and the audio loop was part of a listening station mounted at the Pavilion allowing the voices of another 10 Caribbean writers to be heard even though they couldn’t be there in person.
Listening station audio pieces by Beatriz Llenín Figueroa (Puerto Rico); Tanicia Pratt (Bahamas): Richard Georges (US Virgin Islands); Shivanee Ramlochan (Trinidad and Tobago); Merle Collins (Grenada); Roland Watson-Grant (Jamaica); Jean D’Amerique (Haiti); Dingo (Jamaica);Christopher Cozier (Trinidad and Tobago)
