Michelle Loubon

Prof Fun­so Aiye­ji­na, Dean of the Fac­ul­ty of Hu­man­i­ties and Ed­u­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, says the Caribbean an­thol­o­gy–Mov­ing Right Along–was named af­ter one of the favourite ex­pres­sions of the late John Crop­per. The book was al­so com­piled in ho­n­our of Crop­per's late son Dev and ded­i­cat­ed to John Crop­per. Mov­ing Right Along was launched by the Crop­per Foun­da­tion in com­mem­o­ra­tion of its 10th An­niver­sary. The launch was twinned with a lec­ture on the En­vi­ron­ment: In­dige­nous Knowl­edge and Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment at the En­gi­neer­ing The­atre, UWI, St Au­gus­tine, on Wednes­day.

In the pref­ace, Aiye­ji­na, and fel­low UWI lec­tur­ers Mer­le Hodge and Dani Lyn­der­say craft­ed An Ap­pre­ci­a­tion. It is a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries by past par­tic­i­pants in the Crop­per Foun­da­tion Res­i­den­tial Writ­ers' Work­shop. At the launch, Rho­da Bharath and Bar­bara Jenk­ins read snatch­es of the work to the de­light of the au­di­ence. Ar­dent lis­ten­ers con­nect­ed with im­ages of the "red woman"–that mix­ture of Span­ish and Por­tugese and tra­versed the coun­try with place names like San Rafael. Mariel Brown, Jan­ice Rogers, Mo­hamed Yasin, Renu­ka Ma­haraj, Robert Clarke, June Am­ing, Kei Miller and Ju­dith Theodore have con­tributed to the an­thol­o­gy.

Gen­e­sis of Mov­ing Right Along

Ac­cord­ing to the pref­ace of the book, Mov­ing Right Along, he would chip along when­ev­er dis­cus­sion was stray­ing. Pre­ci­sion in plan­ning and ex­e­cu­tion was of para­mount im­por­tance to John. But, giv­en the dis­or­gan­ised tem­pera­ment of writ­ers, John nev­er lost his cool as he worked around writ­ers from one work­shop to the next." They re­mem­bered his love for his son Dev. "The en­thu­si­asm of John and An­gela for the Caribbean Writ­ers project, born out of their de­sire to cel­e­brate the mem­o­ry of their son, Dev, as well as their wish to give back to the so­ci­ety, res­onat­ed in all of us who have been run­ning the project."

He had come to us as peo­ple in the field to seek ad­vice on how best to ho­n­our the mem­o­ry of Dev through a struc­tured pro­gramme of help for Caribbean writ­ers." In its in­tro­duc­tion, Aiye­ji­na said the sto­ries raise aware­ness about self-aware­ness, fil­ial du­ties, priv­i­leges, abuse–spousal, psy­cho­log­i­cal, phys­i­cal and sex­u­al, class di­vi­sion and con­flicts.