Cather­ine Copeland

Ash­ford Joseph, mu­si­cian, com­pos­er, au­thor and film­mak­er, has ac­com­plished all of this de­spite be­ing blind for over 30 years. Joseph, now 74, be­gan to no­tice the ef­fects of re­tini­tis pig­men­tosa at the age of 13. He be­gan to ex­pe­ri­ence loss of pe­riph­er­al and night vi­sion un­til he went com­plete­ly blind in his ear­ly 40s.

Joseph re­called that when he was around 10 years old his moth­er bought him a gui­tar. He said: "I used to lime with my el­der broth­er, who was a band­leader. I watched them play and through him I be­gan to play my gui­tar. When I would come home from school, I used to pre­tend that I was per­form­ing on the Aun­tie Kay show."

He said he want­ed to learn mu­sic very bad­ly, so he got as far as pass­ing the grade five lev­el ex­am. He start­ed his mu­sic school–the Sun­rise Mis­sion Foun­da­tion–in the ear­ly 1970s, teach­ing stu­dents to play var­i­ous in­stru­ments, such as the cu­a­tro and gui­tar. Joseph al­so in­volved him­self with var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties, such as Los Ba­jos, Quar­ry, Siparia and sur­round­ing ar­eas, in train­ing their church choirs or prepar­ing groups for Best Vil­lage. He start­ed com­pos­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly two years ago, as well as pro­duc­ing mu­sic and videos.

Al­though los­ing his sight did both­er him be­cause he loved to read, Joseph said: "I have come to terms with my loss of sight. It does not both­er me to the ex­tent of feel­ing sor­ry for my­self. I did Braille class­es and per­son­al psy­chol­o­gy.�I viewed that as a way to learn about my­self, in or­der to analyse oth­ers.�I al­so did cours­es in jour­nal­ism, as well as learn­ing to use JAWS (Job Ac­cess With Speech)."

Joseph said: "When some­one be­comes new­ly blind, it is ex­treme­ly dif­fi­cult to pick up and do what they used to. But if there is some­one or an or­gan­i­sa­tion who could help, it would be ide­al. Blind­ness is not the end but the be­gin­ning of a new life; I think it should be looked at that way." On May 8, Ash­ford Joseph gave the pub­lic a glimpse of his first nov­el, Shad­ow Be­fore Me, and a pre­view of his first film, The Jour­ney–as well as his new web site–at his new premis­es on Grell Street, Siparia. There were al­so some mu­si­cal and cameo per­for­mances by sev­er­al of his stu­dents.�

The com­plete launch of both book and film will be held at Na­pari­ma Bowl, San Fer­nan­do, on Au­gust 13, which is al­so Joseph's birth­day. Shad­ow Be­fore Me is based up­on an ex-con­vict and his re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion. The con­vict tries to re­cap­ture his life and what he had be­fore he was im­pris­oned.